Rand Paul: If You Believe In A Right To Health Care, ?You Believe In Slavery?
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on May 12th, 2011 4:32 am by HL
Rand Paul: If You Believe In A Right To Health Care, ?You Believe In Slavery?
Conservatives have slung all kinds of hyperbolic, outlandish, and phony attacks on attempts to provide health care to all Americans over the years, but tea party darling Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) may have taken the cake today when he equated universal health care with slavery. Speaking at a Senate Health, Education, and Labor Committee hearing, Paul argued that if you believe people should have a right to health care, you believe in enslaving doctors, nurses, and hospital janitors:
PAUL: With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.
Basically, once you imply a belief in a right to someone’s services — do you have a right to plumbing? Do you have a right to water? Do you have right to food? — you’re basically saying you believe in slavery.
I’m a physician in your community and you say you have a right to health care. You have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you? That’s ultimately what the right to free health care would be.
Watch it:
Setting aside Paul’s healthy police state fever dream, by Paul’s logic, the Pope supports slavery. In November, the pontiff called health care one of the “inalienable rights” of man and said, “Justice in health care should be a priority of governments and international institutions.”
Paul is himself a (dubiously accredited) doctor, as he mentions. But while he bitterly condemns government spending, he’s also complained about the government cutting payments to doctors like him. Perhaps that’s a form of slavery too.
Haley Barbour To Flood-Stricken Mississippians: You?re On Your Own
In the past week, the Mississippi Delta has been hit hard by flooding in the Mississippi River. The rising water wiped out crops, forced families out of their homes, and caused river-front casinos to shut down, costing the government up to $13 million a month. The Associated Press reported that the damage in Memphis was estimated at $320 million, but that “the worst is yet to come, with the crest expected over the next few days.”
Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS) –- instead of pledging to do everything possible to help the people of his state deal with the flood -– called for the federal government to declare a flooding disaster, moved his furniture out of his lake house, and told flood-stricken families to rely on their friends to get to higher ground because the state wouldn’t help:
As the water rose, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour moved furniture out of his lake house outside Vicksburg on family land that was inundated during the 1927 flood. A week ago, he urged residents to flee low-lying areas, saying that the state wouldn’t assist the evacuations and that people should help one another secure their property and get out.
With Barbour’s staunch opposition to efforts to reduce climate pollution — which is driving the extreme flooding — it’s probably a good thing for America that he took his hat out of the ring for the presidency late last month.
Cross-posted on the Wonk Room.
