I watched most of the health care summit that was held in Washington last week. A lot of it was just aggravating, with so much political grandstanding that I couldn’t imagine any of those gasbags actually solving real problems. But the discussion reignited some thinking that I had a couple years ago, so I thought I’d share it here.

A large part of the health care debate comes down to what each of us believes the role of government should be. Some say that health care is a privilege, and doesn’t fall within the government’s purview. Others believe that health care is a right, but as with other rights, the government’s responsibility is simply to not infringe upon it, leaving each person to attend to his own needs without interference. Still others believe that, as an individual right, health care is something that should be provided by the government. I understand all three of those viewpoints and I’d like to explore this idea a little further to reveal why I believe one of them is more in line with our national identity.

The United States of America was born out of a carefully constructed document called the Declaration of Independence. The famous preamble says that, among the “unalienable Rights” of all men are “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that governments are “instituted among Men” in order “to secure these rights.”

That is, the role of government is, at the very least, to secure citizens’ natural rights, and one of those is the right to live. This is exemplified by the widely accepted view that government is responsible for things like law enforcement, sanitation, emergency response and national defense, all to prevent us from losing our lives to causes beyond our control.

On this point, I think it’s useful to focus on our military. We have armed forces to protect our government institutions, private property, the Constitution and our interests abroad. But the primary mission of our military is to protect American lives. When the nation has been attacked, we’re always talking about how many lives were lost, and we rightfully get angry at our government if we think they are failing to protect us. So, at least when it comes to foreign threats, protecting our lives is part of government’s role. To that end, our tax dollars are used to support a government-run institution that we call the Department of Defense.

The question then becomes: If it’s alright for the government to spend money protecting American citizens from foreign attackers, why is it not the government’s responsibility to protect Americans when the attacker is a virus, or a hereditary ailment, or cancer, or an accidental fall?

This issue comes even more sharply into focus when you look at the real threats to our lives. The following chart shows the biggest killers of Americans over an eight-year period.

The number of Americans killed by foreign powers during the same period, including by terrorism, is so miniscule that it’s difficult to show. The green box below symbolizes all American deaths for the timeframe, with the small white dot in the upper left corner representing the proportion of casualties from foreign aggression.

source: CDC

I’m not a big fan of government spending. In fact, I think the government over-taxes and wastes a huge amount of resources. But there are some big projects that benefit every citizen; projects that fall directly within the government’s mandate and which cannot be as equitably accomplished by the free market. Pooling tax dollars to protect all American lives is one of those endeavors, and there doesn’t seem to be a fundamental difference between doing that through the military and doing it through a national health care plan — other than the fact that health problems are a much greater threat to Americans than anything the military is protecting us from.

What our current policy says to people is: “If you happen to be attacked or threatened by a person, domestic or foreign, we will protect you. But if your attacker is a foreign body, such as a virus, bacterium, falling object, cancer, etc.; sorry, you’re on your own.” That makes no sense to me, and it makes no sense to the citizens of every other modern, industrialized nation.

Those nations have already had this debate, and they’ve come to the conclusion that some type of national health care system is the right way to go. Here’s a great Frontline episode examining five such systems. In every one of those countries, the citizens pay significantly less for health care (either through taxes or regulated insurance) than Americans do, and get better overall results. We deserve better.

Not that I think it does any good (beyond making me feel a little better), but I sent this email to the White House a few days ago:

The goal should be NON-partisan, not bipartisan.

I’m getting really tired of the White House touting all of their “bipartisan” efforts. Why should partisanship have anything to do with good policy? I understand that there are political realities in getting legislation passed, but if you’re appointing a commission to study an issue and offer solutions, it should be nonpartisan, not bipartisan.

The persistent idea that all policy issues come down to a conflict between two predetermined sides is akin to saying there are two kinds of music, country and western, and we’re going to appoint a commission whose members are fans of each to determine which style we’ll play in our nation. Just as there are dozens of popular music styles, there are many good policy ideas which don’t currently fall under the Republican or Democratic banners. Why limit ourselves to only the ones that do?

The Washington political cyclone seems to have blotted out the reality that roughly one third of voters do not identify themselves as either Republican or Democrat, so it’s no wonder they feel the government doesn’t represent them. Please open up the process.

There I go, tilting at windmills again.

On one of the blogs I read, a user named “The Professor” recently posted a comment titled “No one seems to remember the Enlightenment.”

It struck me as both funny and profoundly true. Far from remembering it, I wonder how many people even know what the Enlightenment was.

The Enlightenment, also sometimes referred to as the Age of Reason, was a period in Western history where philosophers, predominantly in France but also in other countries, cast aside old notions of superstition and governance, and promoted instead concepts of reason, natural rights, democracy, freedom and equality. The ideas caught on and the result was a blooming of reason and scientific thought the likes of which the world had never experienced. It also gave birth to many new republics, the first of which was the United States of America, whose founders were greatly influenced by Enlightenment philosophy.

The topic is not something I was taught much about in school, so I imagine that many Americans, who owe their country to Enlightenment philosophies and ideals, don’t know much about it either. The way I was taught, the American Revolution was entirely homegrown, and other nations followed by the colonies’ example. But that’s not how it went. The discussions and writings in Europe at the time strongly influenced the founders. Prior to this period, the mere notion of a nation governed democratically, with the power vested in the people instead of the church or monarchy, was unimaginable.

It would do us some good to look back a few hundred years and remember where we came from.