Healthcare Bondage? The Uninsured as Chattel Slaves

You know the debate over universal healthcare has gotten pretty polarized when hardline netroots blogs start agitating for a new war of secession. That's right. Check out Glenn Smith at Firedoglake, "Slavery and the Health Care Crisis":

The gravity of America's health care crisis is the moral equivalent of the 19th Century's bloody conflict over slavery. This is not hyperbole, though the truth of it is often lost in abstract talk of insurance company profits, treatment costs, and other cold, inhuman analyses.

Today's health system condemns 50 million Americans to ill health and death while guaranteeing health care to the economic privileged. It cannot stand.

About 18,000 Americans die each year because they lack health insurance. That's more than a third the number of lives lost in battle during each year of the four-year Civil War.

Members of Congress without the moral clarity to recognize this equivalence will be condemned by history. Their spinelessness and lack of will when confronted with the power of the insurance industry is just as morally bankrupt as the American congressmen who bowed to Southern slave-owners.

The morally compromising efforts to pass health care reform that insurance companies might like is as insane as the compromises over slavery. Those compromises -- the First and Second Missouri Compromises of 1820, their repeal by the Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854, and the notorious Dred Scott decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857 led to the War Between the States.

War is what happens when morality is sacrificed to political expediency. The stupid compromises over slavery ducked the fundamental moral question at hand. The compromises were doomed to fail, as all such moral cowardice ultimately fails. That's no original thought. It's a central message of authentic Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. In fact, those traditions only bought blood and trouble for themselves when they forgot this fundamental teaching about moral courage ...

Condemning Americans to premature death and ill health so some can earn profits is the moral equivalent of slavery.

Boy, that's a doozy! Read the rest here (via Memeorandum).

I guess if cooked polling data isn't enough (health reform may be dead this year), leftists can always raise the specter of a March to the Sea to crush the hegemonic private-insurance oppressor class!

Image Credit: Michelle Malkin.