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Amendment 63 protects your individual rights

A recent and virtually fact-free editorial in the Aurora Sentinel, which I assume was by editor Dave Perry, states:

The measure has been misleadingly tabbed the “Colorado Right to Health Care Choice Initiative.” It has nothing to do with rights and everything to do with legislative wrongs.

This is completely wrong. Amendment 63 has everything to with respecting individual rights and preventing legislative wrongs.

Amendment 63 would limit the Colorado government in two ways. First, it would forbid the Colorado government from forcing you to buy a politician-approved health plan. Second, if would protect your right to pay out-of-pocket for lawful medical care.   The article mentions neither of these.  Both aspects of Amendment 63 require the Colorado government to respect your fundamental right to make choices and voluntarily trade with others according to your own best judgment. As Ayn Rand wrote:

The concept of a “right” pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.

Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive—of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.

Amendment 63 prevents “legislative wrongs” because, as I have written before:

Health care needs real reform, but mandatory insurance does the opposite by entrenching the worst of current policies. It bans affordable insurance, increases costs, and further extends insurers’ government-granted privileges at patients’ expense.

Read that whole article: Colorado Amendment 63: refuting the “cost-shift” & other flawed opposition.

The editorial continues, saying the Amendment 63 is  “[d]estined for the state constitution, where health-care regulations have no business ….”  Excuse me?  Politicians have no business imposing health care “regulations,” that is, mandates and prohibitions, on how people can go about choosing or paying for their own or family’s medical care.

You can comment on this editorial at the Sentinel’s site here.

I suspect that Dave Perry wrote this because he wrote an article with similar tone and quality back in January. Linda Gorman and I responded to it with: Why we’re “crazy” about health care choice.

For more commentary on Amendment 63, see the Amendment 63 page at Patient Power.  Also check out the 30-second video about Colorado Amendment 63.