Confusing health care with health insurance.

Tuesday letter-writer David Cruise, like so many other liberal-minded people, is confusing health insurance with health care.

His elastic interpretation of our founding document (Declaration of Independence) grants free health care to all, as, according to him, are we not guaranteed the “right to life, and what is life without health?” Surely, the Founders did not intend to guarantee each citizen’s good health. To the contrary, they ensured our right to pursue it — healthily or not. Cruise, like so many other revisionist thinkers, confuses guaranteed rights with guaranteed outcomes.

Cruise tells us that many Americans are deprived of the right to pursue good health. That presumption is flawed and dishonest. To be clear, he wants insurance for all, financed by those who pay taxes. His argument shows little concern for the resultant impact on the quality of care. Nor does he factor the expense of such a system in an unhealthy society like ours. He dismisses the unfairness of his proposition with the assumption that, in his words, not providing free health care to all “denies the very Creator the Founders enshrined.”

At times, my husband cares for a crew of homeless people in the woods around Casselberry. As I read Cruise’s interpretation of the Founders and God’s intentions, I ask myself: Are these people not entitled to food, clothing and shelter?

Who gets to decide that? Who picks the winners? Who picks the losers?

In Cruise’s America, he and the federal government do.

Linda Smith Casselberry