Letters to the Editor, May 30, 2009

Previously, Eileen West of DeFuniak Springs wrote a letter to the editor calling for healthcare. In her letter, she recounted how she witnessed the inability of an elderly couple to afford medical aid due to a lack of health insurance.

Her solution to the couple's dilemma is a nationalized healthcare system, I disagree.

Now, do not miss understand me in saying I disagree, for I completely agree with West's call for improvement of healthcare. However, depriving citizens of the right to the free-market system currently structuring our healthcare system is not the answer.

By allowing government to interfere with the free-market system by overhauling our current healthcare system, citizens will lose their right to a personal choice in business and insurance agencies will become yet another branch of government.

As government increases its control over business, citizens' control of their freedoms begins to decrease. A democracy can only function when associated with the only democratic economic system ever created, that being the free-market system.

By allowing the government to overstep its boundaries in the area of health insurance, the door will be opened for government to overstep its boundaries in other areas of the free-market system as well (as we have already seen with the banking situation).

Now, the Obama administration has made it very clear that one of its objectives is indeed to increase the size of government as well as its control. Now, a government with complete control over the nation's economy is not and can never be a democratic government.

With the Obama administration slowly increasing the size of governmental control, the rights and freedoms of this nation's citizens will begin to decrease. The democracy we once knew will slowly cease to exist.

Beginning from the very formation of this great nation, many have fought to protect the rights of citizens by limiting the powers granted to our government, those citizens understood that government is not always the solution.

Other solutions can be found to resolve the issues we currently face when dealing with our healthcare system. Some of these solutions are already being put into place; such as the improvement of medical technologies with the structuring of online databases containing health records, insurance coverage information, and medical histories.

As a nation, we can fix our healthcare system without surrendering our rights. History has proven to us time and again that when an expansion of government takes place, problems only increase.

An example would be the government expansion as seen by Roosevelt in the Great Depression, causing the tough times to only worsen, resultantly lengthening the depression.

Government can be the solution to many issues; however, with the healthcare system being so intertwined with the free-market system, government has neither the right nor a reason to interfere, we do.

Jake Vermillion, Santa Rosa Beach