Color me naïve, but I was hoping that by now, conservatives would have added something intelligent to the health care debate or capitulated altogether. The tactics of denigration proffered by conservatives against the congressional health care proposal has been of faulty origins at best. Instead of giving reasonable and intelligible debates founded in logic they seem only to be hindering the inevitable.
 
Instead of giving constructive criticism they rely heavily on platitudes and misinterpreted history to provide substance to their argument. The Jeffersonian argument is absurd. Any liberal, accustomed to frequent debates with conservative friends, should be familiar with the following quote: “I sincerely believe… that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale” in conjunction with the economic recession excuse and its supposed monetary infeasibility.

For the sake of argument let us temporarily reject the Obama promise that he would not sign a bill without assuring a way to pay for it, and renounce the idea that this will result in overall savings and instead mark a one trillion dollar expenditure. Even so, one must judge, based solely on their merits, what is the more egregious “swindle.”

Are we to let our posterity live without reformed health care (one of the reasons America is 50th in life expectancy according to the CIA’s own World Factbook) while health care is regulated by an insurance industry that stands to profit in the name of avoiding debt?

The “not now” argument is simply incorrect. The recession makes this mandatory for a country that has idiotically placed its citizens health in the hands of companies; they must step in when said companies are failing. The slippery slope argument is, at least to me, the most hilarious for I have never heard the words “Orwellian” and “socialist” dropped so unsparingly, so unthinkingly.

I have once had the “Hitler” bomb dropped when debating this issue—granted this was an internet conversation and one must consider Godwin’s Law. I am astonished that anyone could read 1984, read a history of Germany and think: “That was the problem; it was not torture, secret prisons, the thought police, reeducation, nor the destruction of the Jews. No, it was Health Care. That is what America really has to guard itself against.”

There are very few things that can be considered “slippery slopes,” health care is not one of these and, neither for that matter, is taxing the richest Americans to pay for it. Perhaps the strongest point for health care reforms against conservative ideologies is to mention the sheer hypocrisy of their argument. I believe Americans, no matter what political stripes they wear, would agree that, however small one might wish the government to become, it has an intrinsic duty to defend its citizens from both foreign and domestic terror at “whatever the cost propositions”—though many would dispute how to accomplish these goals.

One need only check the ever towering cost of the War on Terror to confirm this. I shall ask the naysayers this, a question I have posed to everyone and have yet to receive a satisfactory answer. What is the primary distinction between defending our citizenry against the threats of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and the threats of disease?

Admittedly, there are several, yet they assist the pro-government health care cause. One has a substantially greater risk of dying of the latter. Although 3,017 people died on September 11, 22,000 die annually because they do not have health insurance.

Doing nothing, amounts to letting an annual terrorist act take place that kills 22,000 people.
No one can, nor should they have to, imagine a world in which this would be acceptable. But we let it happen every year because the threats to our lives are not men but microorganisms. These are in some instances the same people who complain that those who do not pay taxes will be receiving benefits.

It seems by extension that they must renounce the military commitments that exist to protect these people as well. We know this not to be true, so why the clause of exception for health care? A proper attack on the idea of government health care and more stringent regulations should, at the forefront, make this distinction clear. Obama’s press conference was exceptionally strong yet he should have broached this point.

Is the bill perfect? Definitely not. Preventative medicine is conspicuously absent.
But what this does constitute is a critical step to saving 22,000 lives a year and there is nothing political about that.