Promote the General Welfare – Pass Universal Health Care

Denny Crane!

It’s quite telling that Rush Limbaugh would compare getting quality health care to the relative size of one’s housing.  It’s just another commodity to conservatives, just another business.  If you’re rich, then you get health care, if you’re poor, then you just do us all a favor and slink away and die.

But see, Rush, that’s exactly what doesn’t happen.  Viruses and bacteria don’t care how big your mansion is.  Eventually, sometime, you have to go out among the public, and it benefits you in the short-term and the long-term if that public isn’t sick and dying and spreading their germs and infections to the people you love.

The very first sentence of the document that defines this country, our Founders wrote:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

I’m educated enough to know that the Founders’ “Welfare” does not equal the modern notion of “welfare”, as in “government assistance payments for food or rent”.  But it does mean “health, happiness, or prosperity; well-being.”  And we willingly accept government regulation and support of myriad organizations that promote the “health, happiness, or prosperity” of the general public, from student loans to public fire departments to meat inspections to small business assistance.  If “general Welfare” of a nation doesn’t include its collective health, then the term is meaningless.

Rush is the cheerleader for the “I gots mine, you gets yours” amorality that infects the modern conservative movement he leads.  It’s a narcissistic myopia that allows them to believe that “no man is an island” is a falsehood, that somehow a taxpayer-funded program to protect the public health is a case of Marxist distribution of wealth, and that funding basic health care for less-fortunate Americans is tantamount to cutting checks to promote laziness.