WHAT DOES HEALTHCARE HAVE TO DO WITH FREEDOM?
I was asked that question on one of my LI posts recently as part of a debate on the role of m-RNA vaccines. Here is the actual quote, with the declarative following it.
“And by the way, what does healthcare have to do with freedom? Healthcare has to protect the health of the population, therefore sometimes has to mandate isolation…”
The answer seems self-evident to me. But the fact that someone asked that question, and not in rhetorical fashion, robbed me of sleep lately.
The belief that these two concepts exist in opposition to each other is instructive. To presume a dichotomy with some degree of mutual exclusivity, gives us clues as to why we have such a deep divide regarding COVID policy.
One camp sees these two concepts as integrated into the whole of our humanity. The other, quite possibly, views “freedom” as a license to pillage & plunder, like a ravenous dog who will stop at nothing to eat any morsel it can find, regardless of how destructive it must be to obtain it.
Yet mandating isolation of the healthy and allowing a privileged class to make a living from home, while we “forced” those with least resources to keep our service lines operational, is exactly what was done in the name of the policy dogma we called science, and it had devastating consequences. That does not sound like good “healthcare” to me, nor good public policy.
Freedom, to the integrated human camp, means that every degree of freedom comes with equal amounts of responsibility & respect for other’s freedom; such that the burden of freedom grows proportionate to the amount we have. This view of freedom is the only way that individual sovereignty can flourish without it resulting in tyranny and oppression. It can be summed up by a maxim coined by my friend & author Jim Keena: “NEITHER COERCE NOR BE COERCED”
The bulk of our public policy responses to the pandemic betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of true freedom and the role of governance in our lives. Herein lies the origin of much of the pandemic-generated tribalism.
The article below published in American Institute for Economic Research – AIER unravels this dilemma with clarity. I enthusiastically recommend it for your reading.
We must move past “The Science” to create new and innovative models for disease mitigation keeping the whole human being in mind.
We must move past “The Science” to create new and innovative models for disease mitigation keeping the whole human being in mind.
As the world exits the chaos of the past two years, it is time to take that next step. It is time to rethink public health science as a tool that serves human beings.
Source: Transcending Covid Tribalism: Will the Best Science Please Stand Up? | AIER
Forum for Healthcare Freedom 