Continuing where I left off recently with regards to a Constitutional amendment prohibiting ignorance, it didn’t take long to convince me that it is necessary if we are to survive as a republic.

Oops. Forgot that trying to legislate morality is doomed to failure, though I’m not quite sure just how ignorance has any bearing on morality other than to understand than it exists and a meaning of it can be found in Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary just like any other word in the English language, including the notion of morality.

I happened to notice last week that health insurance premiums had been raised by the private health care insurance companies worried that their profits might be compromised. The latest rise in costs gave the members of the New Conservative Neanderthal Party (NCNP) a chance to howl that a move toward socialized medicine is at the core of the cost increases, even though the industry is mostly run by private firms intent on capitalizing on the fact that people get sick. 

This is where the term morality comes into play.

Is it moral, is it ethical, to earn profits at the expense of a person’s possible ill health?

Should ill health be traded on the New York Stock Exchange no differently than shares of Exxon Mobil or Google?

That anyone can lay blame on “the government” for the most expensive health care system in the world is ludicrous. The system has evolved or devolved over the years fully within the expanding universe of the free market. The profit motive has determined the direction of the present system and our combined ignorance and a culture that celebrates cheap processed food and a sedentary lifestyle will provide plenty of health care fodder for investors in the years to come.

It is ignorant and foolhardy to see another outcome when the reality is staring us all in the face.

I love to see just how the free marketeers and their lackeys in the NCNP crow about the inefficiencies of government programs when they ignore the first 15-20 percent of costs that go toward delivering services in a for-profit health care system. 

They love to wax nostalgic about competitiveness and innovation as if the belief in those notions, when left alone in a free market, will allow the problems of cost and delivery to solve themselves. There is a measure of faith in that notion not unlike the faith in a religious belief. 

Faith is one thing, ignorance is another. 

Faith is one thing, the free market is quite another.

Be watchful of mixing those two together.

The NCNP has claimed Obamacare to be flawed, a threat to job creation and fiscal sustainability.

Hell, yes.

Just not for the reasons the legions of the ignorant invent for the followers. 

The flaw is that the language of the law created way back in 2010 pandered to the NCNP in the hope that broader support could be found for health care reform. Once the law was sufficiently watered down and kept in private hands it passed without NCNP support. The law is flawed not for the reasons that the NCNP claim but is indeed flawed simply because it didn’t abandon the for-profit fiasco and create a single pay, universal coverage system that controls costs and profits and makes delivery of health care the first priority for all citizens rather than a good financial investment for shareholders and Wall Street.

As long as a healthy profit in the private sector can be made there is no such thing as fiscal sustainability or job creation for the larger public realm. Health care costs won’t come down and jobs won’t be created when profits are so good. Ask any overworked nurse if jobs have been created when the profits are so good. 

The time has come for a Constitutional amendment to prohibit ignorance.

The effort to stop runaway myopic thinking has the full support of the National Union of Friendly Americans (NUFA), the Society for the Prevention of Ignorance and your local chapter of the Involuntary Optimists of America.