A New Health Reform Rallying Cry: NOYB

Progressive commenters on blogs often raise the counter-charge in discussions of health care reform that Republicans have no ideas. Well, here's an idea: None of Your Business.

How's that work?

When asked how you — or millions of uninsured — are supposed to acquire affordable health care, here is the only sensible answer: None of Your Business. That is, whether I'm sick or well, insured or uninsured, able to afford health care or not is my problem and no one elses. Ditto every other individual and family in the United States.

But what about the argument that my (and your, and hers, and his, and that other guy's) illness "imposes costs on Society?"

In one sense, this is an unanswerable argument. Either proximately or remotely, everything one person does has some effect on everyone else. Those pesky people on eBay who keep bidding up the price of Glenn Miller records are eating into my health care budget. Welcome to the real world.

But there's another answer to that argument, one more directly relevant and one whose implication is the exact opposite of what the Progressive wants. It's true that Peter's illness can cost Paul. So, stop forcing Peter to pay for Paul's medical care, or anything else.

The costs that you are paying for the other guy is a form of theft. The Federal Government takes money from you to pay for Social Security, Medicare, and other health or insurance related programs. Most of us don't volunteer to fund those programs, yet the money is taken anyway. In a rights-respecting society — one that wasn't suffused with or misdirected by the language of political correctness — that would be called theft.

When Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: "Taxes are the price we pay for civilization," he was, in essence, arguing that government theft is the only way to have the benefits of an advanced society. You would think that a Supreme Court Justice, at least one serving 100 years ago, would know better. You would think he would know that freedom is practical, as well as the highest social good. But, as a man friendly to Progressivism, it was a truth he simply couldn't allow himself to recognize.

Likewise, today's Progressives can't allow themselves to acknowledge that freedom is the only solution to the alleged problem they pose. If any of those commenters mentioned above were truly interested in making health care more affordable in general they would be first on board to de-regulate the insurance sector.

That will never happen because that word, "de-regulate," is to a Progressive as garlic is to a vampire. And asking these blood suckers to give up draining your wallet — as an adjunct to draining your life in a hundred other ways — is about the same as asking vampires to "Just Say No."

So, instead of saying no, I propose saying "none." As in, None of Your Business.