WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Nearly 50 years ago, President John F. Kennedy said that civil rights was more than a legal matter. It was an ethical one.
"We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution," he said during a 1963 radio address. "The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated."
That, too, is the heart of the question on health care. It also is a moral issue.
The United States is the only industrialized nation that does not provide health coverage to all of its citizens. Quality health care should be a right guaranteed to all Americans, regardless of income.
A country willing to go trillions of dollars into debt to give tax cuts to the rich, fight an unnecessary war and bail out companies that played fast and loose should be willing — at whatever cost — to ensure that all of its citizens have access to health care.
The American Journal of Public Health recently released research showing that 45,000 people in the United States die each year because they don't have health insurance. That should be reason enough to motivate lawmakers to enact Medicare for All. Or, at the very least, they should enact the compromise — the so-called "public option."
Why don't they? One reason is their fear of being labeled socialists.
Socialism is our newest four-letter word, even though much of the country has been socialized for decades, even centuries.
Webster's New World College Dictionary defines socialism as "any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods."
Medicare and Social Security are socialist programs. As are our free public schools. The government pays for our schools and dictates what they teach our children. In Communist countries such as Cuba, we call it indoctrination. Here, we just call it public education.
I must have missed the protests demanding that government keep its filthy hands off the minds of our youth. Or off of our government-owned mass transit systems, airports, utilities, postal service and even sports arenas.
Taxpayers in Florida have paid $37.7 billion for the Iraq War since 2003, according to the National Priorities Project, a not-for-profit research organization in Massachusetts. For the same amount of money, we could have provided 13,298,900 people with health care for a year. Florida taxpayers also will pay $6.2 billion for tax cuts for the richest 10 percent this fiscal year. That could have provided health care for more than 2 million.
But what's health care for millions when we can support corrupt private contractors in Iraq and help keep money in the pockets of the rich?
During the Clinton administration, critics of national health insurance, so-called "socialized medicine," argued that keeping health care more of a free-market system would bring down costs and increase the availability of care.
The opposite happened instead.
If our politicians rise to the moral challenge, America could be like Norway, which has one of the highest standards of living in the world."The government runs a comprehensive, first-class social welfare program that includes socialized education, health care, pensions and workmen's' compensation," says Encyclopedia.com. "Norway has the best of both worlds — a thriving capitalist economy and a heavily socialized system to take care of the population. No other country in the world manages simultaneously to succeed at both so well."
I don't mind if my neighbors have nicer houses, drive fancier cars or take better vacations because they've got more money. I do mind if money keeps my neighbors from having health care.
Rhonda Swan is an editorial writer for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: rhonda(underscore)swan(at)pbpost.com.