June 25, 2009
Making the health care debate personal

Posted at 10:22 am, in: Health Care, Republican Party
Tags: Evan Bayh, Gunner Hawkins, Kristin Hawkins, Lisa Murkowski, Ronald Reagan, Rosa DeLauro

The health care debate gets personal:

At a health care forum in Connecticut, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) describes her battle with ovarian cancer. On Mother’s Day, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) recalls his mother’s death from breast cancer. And in an interview with POLITICO, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) says her recent skiing injury has given her a window into the medical world.

When it comes to the debate over health care reform, the personal medical narrative has become something like a key card: You can’t get in without one.

Advocates on both sides of the health care debate are stockpiling real-life stories from average citizens. But in the world wrought by talk-show confessionals and reality TV — and in a political environment where an admission of economic pain and suffering may score some points — members can be counted on to invoke their own medical sagas as well.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. It amounts to emotional manipulation for political gain. It’s effective, though, and we’re not going to win this argument on our terms. If the Dems want to make it personal, then we’ll just have to beat them at their own game.

Let me introduce the world to Gunner Hawkins. Born on January 30, 2009, less than two months later, on March 17, 2009, he was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis.

Gunner’s mother, a former colleague of mine, is the Executive Director of Students for Life of America. They have a whole website dedicated to how government rationed run health care will ruin their lives and shorten his.

Kristin Hawkins explains on the site, “While the financial costs of taking care of a CF child are high and dealing with the complexities and bureaucracy of the insurance industry is time consuming, it is worth it. We happily pay these costs to keep Gunner healthy, and we know that there are existing programs out there, public and private, that will help us when costs increase.”

This statement gets to the point of why so many Americans are opting for the government take over of health care: they are lazy. They don’t feel like dealing with the complexities and bureaucracy of the insurance industry, they want the government to do it for them. Apparently, they haven’t thought about how time consuming it’s going to be when the public has to deal with the complexities and bureaucracy of the federal government.

The federal government can’t even handle health care for the military (think Walter Reed headlines a couple of years back). Poll after poll shows that Americans distrust government and politicians, yet it is that same government, made up with those same politicians, that they want to entrust with our lives.

Health care might be broken and it may need to be fixed, but I don’t think we should be depending on the people who created the system that broke it, through their laws and regulations, to be the ones to fix it. Our Founding Father’s got this, Ronald Reagan got this, and the Republican Party used to get this: “Government is not a solution to our problem; Government is the problem.”