Her bones hurt. At 16, she checked into the local oncology clinic after school, awaiting the diagnosis. In the cruel aftermath, her family would receive several bills in the mail each month requesting they pay several thousand dollars for her leukemia medication, testing and chemotherapy. In the United States, she was not born into a privileged family with insurance. She lived through her healthcare provider’s charity and compassion, something her country could not provide her.
Her textbooks said her America was a land of opportunity. The Declaration of Independence said she had the right to life. As the costs surmounted each month, she felt her prosperity had been taken from her. In 2012, about one in six people in the United States live without any type of health insurance.
By natural law and guaranteeing everyone’s right to flourish, the United States should require all legal residents to maintain minimum essential coverage for health care, a key component of the Affordable Care Act.
Illness is an unpredictable facet of human nature. If the purchase of health insurance is optional, citizens without insurance would sink into healthcare funds when they became ill, taxing the system without paying the cost. Thus, an individual mandate requiring everyone maintain coverage would prevent people opportunistically sinking into insurance funds when they are sick and refusing to pay when they are healthy.
An effective healthcare system inherently requires the well to care for the sick using an element of cost sharing. When the sick are freed from disease, they pay into the system to guarantee the health of society at large, including the healthy when they become sick. It’s an equitable system that guarantees everyone’s right to flourish.
By distributing the cost of healthcare, we guarantee everyone’s right to live freely. Yet, opposition to the mandate claims it limits financial freedom. What about freedom from disease? If we must decide between the two, the United States should protect the right to life before the right to property. The latter could not exist without the former. Money is frivolous without a healthy person to wield it.
Even so, when it comes to purchasing health insurance, the mandate will not affect the vast majority of Americans. If the ACA were in place today, 94 percent of Americans would not face a requirement to newly purchase insurance or pay the penalty.
For many Americans, the idea of buying a mandatory health insurance plan is hard to reconcile with the libertarian ideals this country was founded in. However, the ACA seeks to expand coverage to all Americans without socializing medicine in a consumer-driven, but government regulated, insurance market. A similar model exists in Switzerland, a country that enforces equal access to healthcare, but still offers a generous market of 92 insurers. In fact, the Swiss Media hailed the Supreme Court’s upholding of the law as “a victory for common sense.”
The individual mandate clause in the ACA points to a clear philosophical conclusion about healthcare: it should be accessible and affordable to all Americans. By implementing a strategy of cost sharing we can protect everyone’s right to flourish. No one should be denied the right to live freely under the spell of disease; the human species can only progress if everyone has equal access to healthcare.
Tarif Haque is a sophomore majoring in computer science. His column runs on Tuesday.
