Lunchtime lessons for the health care debate

LIMA, Peru – Objectively speaking, Peruvian society has a lot of rules.

Policemen – who are rarely women – wear military gear and scour communal areas for behavioral infractions. They glance extra suspiciously at foreigners, issuing stern reminders not to lean against fences or loiter too long in front of a colonial-era fountain.  
From the perspective of an American university student, being subjected to unfamiliar procedures can feel quite repressive. When entering a computer lab, for example, I’d prefer to find my own seat rather than have a lab technician assign me a machine that might or might not work reliably.

Recently, when a security officer reprimanded me for attempting to eat my lunch under some conveniently located trees and shooed me to the less comfortable expanse of grass across the sidewalk, a single word popped into my head: “authoritarianism.”

Sitting without the spinal support the forbidden trees had promised, I had what I’ve come to refer to as a ‘disenchanted foreigner’ moment. To no one other than myself, I muttered under my breath, listing everything frustrating about the often overbearing rules.

Provoked by the arbitrary directives of the security official who denied me my chosen lunch spot, I raved against the injustice of government intervention in private decision-making.

It was then that my own words began to scare me. I realized exactly whom I sounded like: the anti-health-care-reform activists. Rhetoric that I had recently derided as sensational was now coming out of my own mouth.

In language that is only comical because it is hyperbolic, protestors during the 9-12 Tea Party March on Washington attempted to link President Barack Obama to ideologies as diverse as fascism, communism and socialism claiming, “they’re all intertwined.”  What the marchers were presumably trying to articulate when they alleged that fascism, communism and socialism are indistinguishable (which, at least from a policy perspective, is quite untrue) was their fear of an authoritarian government.
 
The great irony, of course, is that these self-appointed fiscal responsibility vigilantes did not take to the streets when the Bush administration added more than $4 trillion to the national debt. Nor did they protest the atrociously anti-civil-libertarian “extraordinary rendition” program, which became an easy way to outsource torture.

Self-defeating contradictions and ignorance make it easy to dismiss these protesters as reactionary extremists. Perhaps too easy, in fact.

My own frustrating, albeit small, taste of lunchtime tyranny reminds me of the importance of preserving liberties that allow individuals ample room to make choices about their lives.

In that spirit, it’s probably worthwhile to revisit the issue of health care and examine how proposed changes would affect civil liberties.

No one is seriously proposing that the government should limit any citizens’ access to medical attention. Quite the opposite, a government program that successfully reforms the insurance market promises to provide more Americans with more access to health care.

If that’s not in keeping with promoting the individual “choice” touted by so many opposing the bill, I don’t know what is.