Passing the buck

A new poll regarding public preferences for nationalized health care are disturbing — or, at least, they should be. Those who want tax-funded health care don’t want to pay the taxes needed to fund it.

The poll, conducted by Stanford University and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for The Associated Press, found that a majority of those polled don’t want to pay for their insurance; they want to pass the burden off on other taxpayers.

Only 19 percent of those polled supported the idea of having part of their income tax fund their health care. Majorities also opposed other options, including raising taxes on insurance companies or those that make drugs medical devices — costs that could be passed on to consumers.

Congress is considering all these options, as well as others.

A majority of those polled also rejected the idea of taxing insurance plans costing more than $8,000 a year for individuals or $21,000 for families, which is in the $850 billion health care bill that the Senate Finance Committee passed recently.

The only option that received majority support in the poll was that of imposing taxes only on Americans who make more than $250,000 a year. The House bill would impose a 5.4 percent tax on people who make more than $500,000 a year and households making more than $1 million.

It can’t be said that "wealthy" Americans would be paying their "fair share," since the rest of the taxpayers would be paying no share at all.

There’s something morally wrong with these responses. Frankly, we find it hard to believe that a majority of Americans — at least as indicated by the poll results — actually want to pass the cost of living their lives off on other people. That, in essence, is what letting other people pay for our health care entails.

This is also the problem with allowing control of more and more of our lives to be controlled by the government; we lose the idea of accountability, as well as control, over those areas of our lives.

We would assume that these same people, if polled, would say they want to keep their freedom. But our country’s Founders were careful to design a nation that made individual freedom the national priority.

Individual freedom, however, goes hand-in-hand with individual responsibility. If we wish to be able to make the decisions that affect our lives, then we must live with the consequences of our decisions. In other words, those who want government-run health care should understand that their decision should include paying their part to support it.

It only stands to reason that if a person wants something, he should be willing express his support financially. It’s only fair; it’s only moral.

To expect the government to use its power to extract money from unwilling citizens (after all, those who don’t pay taxes are subject to fines and imprisonment), is nothing short of the public sanction of thievery.

If something is worth having, it’s worth paying for.