The Anonymous Liberal has a good point, I think:

As disgusted as I am to learn that the Bush administration has unilaterally imposed rules intended to limit the number of American children who have access to affordable health care, I can only imagine how this must look to someone raised in another country. The fact that millions of American kids lack access to health care must seem downright medieval to the rest of the industrialized world. I mean, we’re talking about children here.

I imagine that the average person in Germany or France or Japan would react to this news much the same way we would react to a report that the German, French, or Japanese governments had repealed laws against child sweatshop labor or child pornography. We’d be aghast. And rightly so. But when the President takes steps intended to cut off health care access for children, we simply chalk it up to a policy dispute.

Well I’m sick of it. There is no excuse for a country as wealthy as ours allowing innocent children to go without access to basic health care. And if policymakers take steps that result in a net increase in the number of children without access to care, they have a moral duty to find a way to fix that problem immediately. As far as I’m concerned, the Bush administration is morally responsible for what happens to the children who lose access to health care as a result of these new rules. If any of them die or suffer permanent harm from a condition that could have been prevented with routine care (and it’s bound to happen), the Bush administration bears the blame.

While I think they are terribly misguided about the realities of health care policy, I understand that there are people out there who, for principled reasons, believe that it is important to limit the role the government plays in providing health care to its citizens. And I understand that these folks believe in their hearts that if the market were simply left to work its magic, we’d soon find ourselves in a health care utopia where every child had top notch care. I know they don’t mean any harm. But people like this need to realize that this isn’t some grand experiment. We’re not dealing with hypotheticals here. When policies like this are put in place, real children–ones with real hopes and dreams and fears–are made to suffer. Some even die. And that is unconscionable.

Opponents of government-funded health care often argue that most of the uninsured in this country are so by choice. Putting aside the merits of that (very weak) argument, it is undeniable that children do not choose to go without health insurance. They have no say in the matter. It is therefore unacceptable to treat children as pawns in a struggle over policy principles. If the administration is worried that the government’s role in providing health insurance is becoming too large, it needs to pursue policies that ensure that those children who are purged from the public rolls are covered by private insurance (through the use of mandates or some other mechanism). That’s just a basic moral responsibility.

Only in America would a politician have the temerity to implement a policy guaranteed to increase the number of children forced to go without basic health care. We’ve got a lot to be proud of as a country, but when it comes to health care, we can be downright medieval.