Bill Moyers: Universal Health Care is "Representative of a Deeply Moral Society"

Bill Moyers appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher Friday night. When asked about health care reform, he made some statements which should make those against Universal Health Care and Health Care Reform embarrassed, or even ashamed of themselves.

• I find it hard, Bill, to understand why this country has not embraced the notion of health care as a common human need to which everyone should have access regardless of their economic resources.

• They (the Republicans) are totally against health care reform. Why shouldn't they be? They don't want to give Barack Obama the greatest progressive breakthrough in domestic policy since Lyndon Johnson and Medicare. It's to their interest as a party (i.e., it's not about anything for the GOP but politics) not to let Obama get an advantage that will help re-elect him in 2012.

• We are the only Western democracy that has not embraced Universal Health Care as a means of social justice. Our health care system is run by the drug industry, the health insurance industry, and Wall Street. Which means, a relative handful of unaccountable executives and anonymous investors, whose primary interest is in increasing the value of the company share, and raising profits. That's their interest. Now that's a good business model, because it's made a lot of money for the people who runs thos industries, Wall Street, drugs, and health insurance, but it's not the way we should decide who lives and who dies, and who suffers and who gets well; that's just not the way.

• We're all in the same boat. That would be a metaphor. And that's the moral, that's the moral ... The moral message that America would send by adopting care as a human need to which everybody should have access, the moral message would be that we we are in this together, that we care about each other. All of us who have means will give up something in order to make sure everybody has health care. I don't want to live in a country where I am on a hospital floor getting an operation that costs $25,000, and two floors above me someone is being denied that same surgery because he or she has no money. What kind of a civilization is that? What kind of moral order is that? It's not.

• Some things do not have a price tag on it; they have a value system attached to it. And health care for everyone, Universal Health Care for every citizen, irrespective of your resources, is representative of a deeply moral society. What do I mean by moral? A society that cares for the other. That's what makes us moral.

• [...] we need this because we're a decent country.

Those on the right against health care for all should answer this question: if you are against abortion because it kills unborn fetuses, and call it "right to life," what about the 20,000 people that statistics say die every year because they are denied health care? What about their right to life?

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