Astroturfing good deeds

And lest you may think I’m blind to other families who don’t have insurance, consider this: Haven’t we, as a country managed to find ways to provide healthcare for those who couldn’t pay for it? Even for people in other countries? We have ALWAYS done that. Our compassion for those less fortunate arises from our freedom of choice. We already have invented and implemented (both in the private and government sectors) good social programs that help millions of people. And the farther they are from government intervention, the better they run.

Government intervention IS the problem. But once we centralize healthcare through a government-administered master plan, one that will complicate and de-sensitize our compassion and sense of charity, our freedom of choice is gone. Our compassion and morality becomes legislated and soon we just won’t care about anybody else other than ourselves. Our liberty, charity, and sense of community are lost in a bureaucratic nightmare. Charities and other entities currently connecting needy people to health care will disappear or be sucked into the government plan, rendering them ineffective.

Charity. It’s an entirely relevant point and one which deserves addressing because we tend to look at the healthcare debate in terms of economics (how are we going to pay for this thing?) or from the vantage of loss of liberty and freedom (keep your politics off my body!) but what current healthcare reform also represents is a fundamental cultural shift in how we view our individual and collective responsibility to the less-fortunate.

As a percentage of GNP, we are the most privately charitable nation on the planet and it isn’t even close. The next closest are our Anglo-democratic cousins, if your keeping cultural-score at home.

This hasn’t happened by accident. Along with the individualism that we cherish as Americans comes also a private sense of community that is entirely voluntary in nature and is informed because we have the freedom to choose. A community that is enforced by our own personal convictions and not by structural or legislative fiat that it is our duty as citizens of this country to look after the less-fortunate.

We have personal knowledge of people that read, contribute and comment on this blog that have expended considerable time, talent and treasure to causes even if borne of situations which they did not concur because of a personal and entirely voluntary sense of obligation to do the right thing.

That’s the part of American exceptionalism that becomes threatened by the current version of healthcare reform. That sense of urgency, that sense of laying responsibility upon yourself to donate money, to volunteer time, to get on the phone or email to inform others of a dire situation that needs tending to gets blunted… gets diluted or muted in a culture where “everyone’s covered” and “everything’s going to be OK” when in reality it’s a damn lie.

Overreaction? Perhaps. It’s not like we are going to let people fall through the cracks when government-managed healthcare proves to be a complete failure, right? Well, maybe… because when charity starts becoming more of a black market enterprise or our collective will towards charitable action becomes disincentivized, all bets are off.