Medicaid for All?

Expanding free health care to allegedly poor people (known as Medicaid) is alluring to those who think that “free money” is really free.

That “free” money will be stolen from those who pay taxes and given to those who don’t. Claiming that a majority vote legitimizes the theft doesn’t change the fact that force will be used to provide free health care to able-bodied people earning 138 percent of the poverty level.

Tyranny is the illegitimate abuse of people’s rights. It doesn’t matter if the tyranny is imposed from within or without, by a monolithic dictator or by a majority of voters.

Forcing people to provide free health care to those who choose not to obtain it themselves is an abuse of liberty of monumental proportions. This nation was founded upon liberty.

Liberty is the freedom to make choices; good or bad ones. And forcing some people to pay for other people’s bad choices is tyranny of the worst kind.

Those Democrats, liberals and weak-willed Republicans that succumb to the “siren-song” of “free money” are deluding themselves into believing that an ephemeral feeling of sanctimonious self-righteousness is superior to economic, political, and health-care slavery.

We have a number of state legislators who say they oppose Medicaid expansion on the basis that they don’t trust the federal government to make good on the promise to pay for the full cost of the expansion for three years and 90 percent of the cost after that. The governor’s favored bill calls for a reversion to the current coverage if that were to take place.

Opponents say we won’t be able to do that – presumably because it will become too popular to reverse. May I remind them that there are plenty of families that have had to do just that – drop their insurance if they could no longer afford it.

Yes, it would be difficult to cast that vote, but that’s their job to do what is truly right and necessary.

Now, what’s the likelihood that that might happen? I say, pretty darn slim, unless those who feel that the expansion is unnecessary and undeserved get control of our national government.

Admittedly, there are those who are pushing that agenda: slashing spending, sloughing Medicaid costs off onto state governments and “starving the beast.”

Those who have health insurance tend to have better work records, live longer, and finish their years at less medical expense to the rest of us than those who don’t.

Think it through.