Healthcare: Force vs. Encouragement

As you darlings all know, the issue of Health Care is quite an important one to Pretty Lady. In fact, she has sent her personal proposal, that for government-subsidized health savings accounts, in to dear Mr. Obama; he hasn't gotten back to her yet, but she understands that the gentleman has more pressing issues on his mind at present.

However, she would like to point out once again that a seemingly subtle, semantic difference between the attitudes of the two leading Democratic Presidential contenders on this issue is, nevertheless, starkly significant. Mrs. Clinton wishes to legislate that all American citizens be forced to purchase a Health Insurance Plan, whether they feel that they personally need it or not. Mr. Obama feels that American citizens can be trusted to make such vital economic decisions on their own; he merely wishes to assist the poorest of us with our payments.

Pretty Lady can attest, from personal experience, that being legally required to spend 10% of her nonexistent income on a health insurance plan, during certain long periods of her youth, when she was so bursting with health and animal optimism as to be a stranger to even the hint of a doctor's office, would have been literally crippling. It would have been barefaced totalitarian robbery. Pretty Lady believes, furthermore, that the two halves of Freedom are: Freedom to manage one's own resources, and Freedom to screw up.

Freedom to watch one's child die in an overcrowded county emergency room, of a treatable illness, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, not so much.