Tweet
Article 31: "Every citizen has the right to health care. The state takes care of public health and provide the means of prevention and treatment by building different types of hospitals and medical institutions."
That’s Article 31 of the Iraq Constitution. The state builds hospitals and medical institutions. Hmmmm? Who is paying for the Iraqis to have universal single payer health care?
Excerpts from the Iraqi Constitution
Dr. Saul Friedman over at PNHP back in 2005 wrote a great article on the decline and fall of employer based health insurance. He too refers to the Iraq Constitution, this time Article 30:
The Crumbling Obstacle to Our Health
Article 30, Paragraph 1 of the new Iraqi constitution, which the United States helped write, says, “The state guarantees social and health insurance, the basics for a free and honorable life for the individual and the family. . . .”
In Dr. Friedman’s article, he explains that our employer based system was set up during WWII when wages were frozen, but after WWII, the rest of the industrialized world bagged that idea and went instead for national health care plans. Our defeated enemies Germany and Japan built them into their new constitutions. And we not so gently guided those constitutions.
So we insist that our conquered nations have a health care program that is universal. We help them set it up with taxpayer money. But we don’t give our own American citizens the same rights?
Do the American people have to fight the government and be conquered in order to get decent health care? Seems a tad over wrought.
6 Comments
Does anybody know how many people work in the insurance industry? I get people say to me “How can we lay off all those employees?” I usually answer “So what makes them special? Did you shed a tear for the Maytag employees? What about the textile workers of North and South Carolina? What about the auto workers?”
If a laid off software engineer has to flip hamburgers, why not some insurance salesman?
Great point. Did all those others get laid off all on the same day?
Click Broker:
The part that is “uniquely American” about our healthcare system is the reliance on a system for-profit, employer-based insurance. And that is the portion of our system that the politicians, including Obama, are dedicated to preserving, when they say that we must have a “uniquely American” solution to the healthcare problem.
I am adding “uniquely American” to my list of Orwellian weasel phrases.
Anyone have any references or links to back up this idea? It makes libertarians livid.
I found one: Building children’s hospitals in Iraq
Excellent post, Miss Maven..)