Denying my family the choice of buying the public option is a moral, social, economic and national security travesty.
The best way to get public health care is to pose it as a national Defense or Homeland Security issue. Then fund it that way.
Here I sit under-insured in the bible belt of Nebraska while my neighbors complain loudly about the cost of the public option.
Good Christians are suddenly up in arms about the high cost of saving US lives via decent health care. These are the same people who never blink an eye about what it is costing the US to continue killing people in foreign countries. How do they reconcile this?
War is not pro-life. Public health care is.
Health care insurance should be treated like public education in that it's provided by the government to the public because it is seen as good for the public. Arguments on how well it is done, whether it works as intended, could be made better, etc., are irrelevant. Things can always be adjusted later.
But health care isn't just a moral issue, it's a physical and economic security issue as well.
The school lunch program was started after World War II because the military complained that too many young men were inadequately nourished when they got to draft-able age. So the US government decided children needed to be well fed to be able to feed the war machine. Good health care is necessary for the same reason.
Is this cynical? Of course! But the logic has been used successfully to pass social legislation in the past. Nobody today complains about the school lunch program being scary socialism. At least not yet.
The national economic advantage of having more Americans covered by health insurance are well known and easy to comprehend. The economic benefit of adequate, affordable health care to consumers is also well accepted. Don't we want a stable economy for national security reasons?
Since health care reform promotes national security physically and economically, we could arguably fund via the Defense or Homeland Security department budgets. And we all know that if we do this, the money argument goes away.