This has mostly been settled by the Supreme Court's 2012 ruling about the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. But as the implementation date of the individual mandate approaches, I still hear a few murmurs and protests, mostly from House Republicans and their pundits, so I thought I should clear this up. The freedom to not have health care is not a freedom and it
is definitely not protected in the US Constitution. The right to receive basic
health care, including emergency care absolutely should be. Our country was
founded on preserving all of life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness for all of the people of the nation. That is why we flipped the bird to the motherland and
went our own way. Health is an essential element of life and also a significant
factor in pursuing happiness. Simply stated, healthier people are happier. So
making health care accessible to all the people in the country and making that
process more efficient is absolutely something the government should be
involved with.
Since America, unfortunately, has a health care system primarily
based around private health insurance, most commonly offered by employers, a
mandate for health care access for every individual requires the purchase of private health insurance until a
more thorough system overhaul can be implemented. But this requirement is not a
violation of an individual’s freedom.
As the great libertarian Milton Friedman famously wrote quoted (and
which I quote frequently) in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom “my freedom to move my fist must be limited by the
proximity of your chin.” Essentially, personal freedoms are fine until they
adversely affect someone else. That is the unfortunate price we have to pay for
living in a world not made up entirely of small individual islands each with a
population of one. So how does an individual's choice to not purchase health insurance
adversely affect others?
