New declaration: Health care is an unalienable right
Our country’s most indelible document introduces its citizens to their “certain unalienable Rights,” which most Americans would quickly identify when pressed as being “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But what many of us likely do not remember, or perhaps never learned, is that our Declaration of Independence identifies those three rights as being “among” our unalienable rights, not encompassing them.
In their wisdom, our country’s founding generation understood that not only were there other unalienable rights, but that as the United States of America matured, others would be defined.
Thankfully, our country is
beginning to awaken to the realization that health care is one of those unalienable rights. Perhaps even more importantly, as is pointed out by the American scholar and Harvard professor Danielle Allen, there is more to the introductory sentence of our nation’s founding document that not only supports the groundswell for health care as a right in this country, but also provides a road map by which to achieve it:
“That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
The safety and happiness of most Americans is intimately entwined with their health or the health of their loved ones. The growing discussion around health care reform, with recent bills introduced in both the House and Senate, has brought health care once again to the main stage of American politics. And for good reason.
When the safety and happiness of our people are jeopardized, as they are by surprise out-of-pocket costs, ridiculously high private insurance deductibles, unaffordable pharmaceutical pricing and unexpected illness, all of which lead to crushing medical debt, the people of this country should turn back to our founding generation’s greatest gift — the understanding that “we the people” are able to form and effect our own safety and happiness.
Making health care fair is the essence of a Medicarefor-all universal health care platform; it is in principle an acknowledgement of the unalienable right to health in this country, and by proxy, health care. Each and every American at some point in his or her life will need the assistance provided by a robust, technologically advanced and universal health care system.
Therefore, if we are to truly recognize our rights as American citizens, we must insist that our governance provide a health care infrastructure that is universal, affordable and equitable. These characteristics will help provide a just and fair health care system.
We remain as the lone developed and technologically advanced society in the world without a guaranteed right to health care for all of its inhabitants, exposing a vast majority of Americans to insurmountable debt when illness strikes. Or even while they try to maintain their state of health with chronic diseases. Nearly 70% of Americans now believe that Medicare for all is the solution to our nation’s health care crisis, and is in effect a plan to bring all Americans one step closer to the safety and happiness our forefathers constructed for us.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness have been the roots from which our modern American rights have grown; the passage of time and maturation of our great nation have brought us women’s rights, civil rights and gay rights in the past 100 years.
As Independence Day approaches, we should continue to harken back to our founding generation’s greatest gift and push for the establishment of our health care rights and a universal health care system by supporting local and national leaders who understand our government derives its power from the consent, and wishes, of the governed.