COMMENTING: Obamacare, Another Helmet Law

Someone in DC is trying to tell ME, an American, what to do!? String 'im up!

Okay. Fine. It's grand to be an American, to be a citizen of a nation built on freedom of speech, freedom of belief... probably the greatest degree of personal freedom in the world. We, in America, have the best chance of long, healthy life, the greatest personal liberty to do and be nearly anything we want, and happiness—material, consumer, entertainment joy--delivered non-stop, never mind having to pursue it. 

Our sense of entitlement to all these things is enormous. It's The American Way!

So, when someone tells us that we must buy health insurance, what an outcry is heard in the land!

But the fact is, it is not just about a personal freedom or choice. It is a community, not a personal matter. Every time an uninsured person uses an Emergency Room for their only health care, the community pays for it.

Every time someone who has not been able to afford regular health-care becomes so ill that hospitalization is the only option, the community pays for it.

We have to earn and pay for a driver's licence in every state; we pay business licence fees and taxes to run a business in most communities; we are answerable to the community to obey laws, whether they suit us or not. We are not absolutely free even in America, to do and be whatever we want, at the cost of community stability.

So, yes, this is another: a law, a tax, a mandate, right up there with helmet laws, an imposition on the individual right to risk their own health and life.

Sure, who does it hurt, to decline to wear a helmet while you hurtle down the highway at 80 mph? It's your brain, your pain. Right? My son and his friends, here in Colorado, see someone riding without protection, and sneer, “Organ-donors.” 

Okay, well, that's practically a service to the community, right?

But someone has to clean the brains off the street. Someone has to pay the cops and emergency responders, and the coroner. And someone, whoever was driving the other vehicle, has to live with the trauma of the involvement with causing a death. Maybe the 'victim' has no mother or father, no siblings who care, no friends to be devastated by the death, but there are people, real people who are affected by it, whose lives are altered.

You can choose to not care, you can impose your irresponsibility, you can just let someone else pay your bills. There are, sadly, those kinds of Americans, too.