This post is written by guest author Edward Mahee. Mr. Mahee has an extensive legal background, and is an emerging conservative thinker. This is his seventh posting for the site.

During the recent debate over whether and how to reform America’s health care system, Americans have been asked to consider why the President’s proposed overhaul is warranted.  We are told that the health care system needs to be reformed to cover the uninsured, while at the same time we are told reform is necessary in order to control spiraling costs.  We are left to contemplate how we can expand the health care system through the federal government, while at the same time controlling costs. 

We’ve been told to shun experience and common sense, since either will tell us that any plan to reform health care through government control will neither improve coverage or control costs.  We will continue to be admonished by the media to allow Congress and the Obama Administration to govern by emotion, as we hear endless stories of the health care system gone awry.  This, of course is not to be hard-hearted, as errors do happen and people do suffer as a result. We just shouldn’t expect Congress, the Obama Administration, or the media to tell us similar stories of those suffering as they wait for treatment on government waiting lists, hoping their number is called when a bureaucrat says “Next!”

But the health care debate is part of a larger discourse regarding the relationship between the government and the citizens of the United States.  What is the proper role of government in the United States?  This country was founded on the idea that all men are created equal and have inalienable rights, and that governments are created to protect and sustain those rights. The key notion is that each individual is personally endowed with rights that other persons, and especially the government, are duty bound to respect and protect. 

This means that America was founded on the principal that each man or woman, individually, was free to make of his or her life what he or she chose.  That also meant we relied on voluntary associations to assist with community building.  People helped each other, invested in each other, supported each other and cared for each other.  America became prosperous through the effort of free individuals able to keep the fruit of their labor, with the support of friends, family, voluntary organizations, churches, and other institutions created and sustained by individuals choosing to do so.  The government was there to ensure that courts were open, criminal laws were enforced, contracts were honored, and the borders kept secure.

Fast forward to the 1910’s.  Since the inception of the Progressive Movement and its successors in modern liberalism, political elites have tried to overhaul this system.  We are told that the system of free government and free enterprise is alternatively heartless and cruel, or individualistic and isolating.  We are told further that the only way to have just and good society is to have everyone pull on the same rope, forming a true community, backed by the power of the federal government.  Our self-appointed elites will guide us into making a better world. 

The key observation, however, is that in this world view the rights of the individual are not central.  Instead, what is central and essential is the guiding hand of the elite. Individual rights, in order for society to be remade, must subordinate to the needs of the community as determined by those in power.  And to enforce their dream of remaking society according to their own designs, they take away individual freedom through coercion and taxation – all for “our own good.”

Fast forward again to today’s health care debate.  We hear very little from proponents of the Obama Plan about the rights of individuals.  In a free society, patients, nurses, physicians, and hospitals are free to contract with each other for treatment under whatever terms are mutually agreeable. However, over the past 70 years, both the state and federal government have colluded with insurance companies to increase their power over health care decisions.  As each effort by the government to make things better has come to pass (by increasing its own power, of course), the state of health care has worsened, and government claims the need for increased intervention. 

Finally, we come to the ultimate effort, putting the whole system under the control of the federal government. The results are predictable if Congress and the Obama Administration succeed—those in power will have more power to direct and control society.  And as they play the part of Leviathan, ordinary, once free people will be reduced to the hope that their name is called next on the bureaucrats’ list.

-Edward Mahee for TruPolitics.net