OUR VIEW: Health care freedom opponents resort to fear (vote)
No, 63 wouldn't end physician licensing
In this uglier-than-usual election year, truth is barely a consideration. Opponents of candidates and ballot measures say almost anything, no matter how extreme or untrue, to frighten people into voting their way. Candidates are presented on TV as monsters and economic Armageddon will ensue if we vote for this or that. Lies, damn lies and hysteria are the name of the game in almost every campaign.
Even the common sense Amendment 63, which Attorney General John Suthers has said may play an essential role in protecting health care rights in Colorado, isn’t above outrageous fear mongering.
Amendment 63, endorsed by The Gazette’s editorial board, would protect the right to health care choice in Colorado. It says “no statute, regulation, resolution, or policy adopted or enforced by the state” may force a person to buy into any public or private health-insurance plan, or to “deny, restrict, or penalize the right or ability of any person to make or receive direct payments for lawful health care services.”
The Colorado Center on Law and Policy, a progressive Denver-based lobbying outfit that claims to advocate “access to adequate, affordable health care,” has tried to mislead voters about Amendment 63 by suggesting it could render us with unlicensed physicians. Scary. Imagine brain surgeons with GEDs, who perform lobotomies with Snap-on Tools.
Amendment 63 protects the right of Coloradans to make or receive direct payments for lawful health care services because in Canada, socialized medicine has prevented patients from buying their own health care. To pay for health care was considered an effort to skip ahead in long government waiting lines. For some it has been wait and die, or travel to the United States and pay.
But the Center on Law and Policy has decided to scare us by saying the protection of an individual’s right to make or receive direct payments for health care services might entitle people without medical licences to receive payments for health care services. After all, Amendment 63 speaks of “any person,” not “any doctor.”
(Vote in poll to the right in red type. Must vote to see results. Thanks!)
At least two Colorado newspapers, the Grand Junction Sentinel and the Denver Post, fell for the hysteria and repeated it. A Post editorial said: “There is concern among opponents that the measure’s wording would preclude the state’s ability to license and regulate health care, which seems at least a plausible legal interpretation of the proposed amendment.”
No, it does not. The Amendment would protect the right of persons to make or receive payments of “lawful” health care services. That means it would not protect making or receiving payments for “unlawful” services, which means the state would continue to forbid soda jerks from performing heart transplants.
“The inclusion of the word ‘lawful’ demonstrates that the Legislature, or a regulatory body created by the Legislature, retain their existing powers to determine which health care services are ‘lawful,’” said David Kopel, a Denver University adjunct professor of advanced constitutional law and research director of the Independence Institute, which initiated Amendment 63.
It’s common sense the word “lawful” excludes those who aren’t permitted by the state. It also seems apparent that opponents of the amendment don’t really want more access to adequate, affordable health care for all.
Friend editorial page editor Wayne Laugesen on Facebook
