Health Care and Your Private Affairs Are Personal

The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized society is so nervously anxious that person privacy should be respected.

Anton Chechov (1860-1904), The Lady  with the Dog

Every American knows health care and your private life are  personal matters.  

That is why most people want a personal physician, not necessarily a health care team; why many are wary about healthcare.gov, which asks for your personal data,  including your social security number; why they want their health care information kept confidential, between them and their doctor; why people are leery about the National Security Agency’s surveillance system collecting personal information from Google and Yahoo data streams; why people are upset that healthcare.gov asks for personal  information before allowing you to scan and compare health plans on the exchanges; why people are so upset that their personal health plans are being cancelled, when it was promised that they could keep their plans if they liked them; why governmental personal health  information gathering is regarded as an intrusion into personal freedom.

Suddenly It’s Not about Politics, It’s about Me

Suddenly,   it’s not the politics, it’s the intrusion into my personal affairs. my personal decision making,  and my personal right to choose. Suddenly, it is not a question of Democrats versus Republicans,  single payer versus market-driven care,  government compassion versus cold hearted business practices,  liberals versus conservatives, President Obama versus his critics. It’s about me.

It’s Personal and About Other Things

It’s personal. It’s about losing my health plan, which I like and which I chose.   It’s about the health security of myself and my children.  It’s about what I can afford..  It’s about spending hours and even days and weeks  plowing through a website that doesn’t work and  don’t understand and scratching my head over policies the government can’t seem to explain.  It’s about  misleading promises and deceptive  caveats. 

It’s about unexpectedly cancelled policies, disappearing doctors,  and rebooted promises.  It’s about a sick economy, absent jobs, and  doubling and tripling of government dependency programs. It’s about government policies, which federal officials understood  in 2010,  but did not explain, that might  cause 93 million Americans to lose their health plans.   It’s about the big glitch that failed .  It’s about cramming down government policies that crimp my freedom to choose.

It’s about personal expectations,  being able to see my doctor in a timely fashion,  to choose my own plan on my terms,  to have access to the latest treatments and procedures.

It’s about the unfairness of Congress and government officials being spared from Obamacare.  It’s about politics becoming personal, affecting me and my family in the concrete rather than the abstract.  It’s about what Abraham Lincoln said of politicians, “Politicians are a set of men  who have interests aside from the interests of the people, and who, to say the most of them, are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men. I sau  this with the greater freedom, because, being a politician myself, you can regard it as personal.”

When it comes to infringing upon your health care and your personal affairs, and to slow economic growth, lack of jobs, and cancelled health plans,  to paraphrase Lincoln, you may fool all of the people of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool  all of the people all of the time.  You can't infinitely delay the day of reckoning.

Tweet:    Your health and your private life are personal; government asking for your health data  and cancelling personal policies are off limits.

Sources

1;  Daniel Henninger, “Progressive Government Fails:Obama's Ideology Is the Politics of the Personal Cram down. Wall Street Journal, October 31, 2013

2. Avik Roy, Obama Official in 2010: 93 Million Americans, Will Be Unable to Keep Their Plans, Forbes, October 31, 2013