FROM THE FOUNDATION

All Over the Map

Newly updated to include breast cancer, prostate cancer, and spine procedures, this CHCF-sponsored research shows that practice patterns vary dramatically from place to place.

Medi-Cal Transforms

Medi-Cal is the main source of health insurance for one in five Californians. An updated report gives an overview of the program's key features, describes how the program is evolving, and examines the challenges ahead.

Obama Care in the Second Term

CHCF is a long-time sponsor of the UC Irvine Forecast Conference. A webcast of this year's conference on health policy in President Obama's second term is now available.

Health Care Reform

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Columnist Rejects Reform Law, Civil Rights Comparison

Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker writes that President Obama's suggestion that the federal health reform law is like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "has been perpetuated by countless talk-show hosts and their guests." She argues, "Civil rights activists who were beaten, bloodied and killed in the struggle to have a voice were nothing like the bureaucrats and politicians who insist that the [overhaul] is a comparable victory," adding, "The Civil Rights Act was a monument to freedom and human dignity. Health care reform is ... something else."

Reader Comments:
  • 3
  • 03/28/2012
  • Tim Colling

Assertions made by the UN aren't always correct. In fact, often they're not. And who decided that our government should have the right to take money from us by force,for purposes other than defense, and use those funds for purposes that some other individual gets to decide is more worthy than the choices that would have been made by the one whose money was taken?

  • 2
  • 03/28/2012
  • Vashti Winterburg

Any writer who states about U.S. health care: "let's work toward making an exceptionally good system better...", has been spending way too much time hermetically sealed off from reality. Apparently those 45-85,000 people who died last year because they didn't have health insurance shouldn't have regarded their lives as worthy of the description, "civil rights". And maybe that part of the UN Charter that the U.S. signed describing health care as a human right shouldn't count either. Maybe if more Americans saw health care as a civil right we wouldn't have such an expensive, ineffective and immoral health care non-system.

  • 1
  • 03/28/2012
  • Tim Colling

Kathleen Parker is right. It is an insult to the heroes of the civil rights movement to compare the healthcare takeover act to the civil rights movement.
- Tim



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