Facticity

Health care is a moral issue.

It’s very difficult to live a high-quality life, to pursue happiness, if you or someone you love is beset by constant health problems. It’s even more difficult to live well if you are under constant stress because someone in your care is unable to find quality health care. Yet this is exactly the situation millions of US citizens find themselves in. It’s both a tragedy and a shame that our immense wealth and the American spirit of innovation has not resulted in a health care system that provides high quality health care to everyone in this nation. Instead, only the wealthy have access to the very best health care. The middle class generally have access to adequate health care, provided one of the family members works for a company that provides health insurance. The lower middle class and the poor make do with what they can find from charitable clinics and the emergency rooms of public hospitals.

The health insurance companies exist not to provide health care coverage but to generate the maximum possible profit from our universal need for health care. These companies are thriving at the expense of the vast majority of the nation’s people, while leaving millions of uninsured and under-insured people to either fend for themselves or fight their health insurance company to get the care they need.

This is not a theoretical issue. People in this country are dying because they received inadequate health care due to their inability to pay for what they needed.

As humanists, we understand that denying anyone lifesaving or even preventive health care harms or destroys their ability to live well. We must take an active stand for universal health care, for a system that will provide everyone with high quality preventive and corrective health care regardless of their ability to pay for it.