Did Senator Kennedy deserve the Medal of Freedom? — VOICES for REASON

Prior to his death, Senator Edward M. Kennedy was selected by President Obama to receive America’s highest civilian honor, the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom. What qualified Senator Kennedy to be recognized as a champion of freedom? A White House press release said that he

has worked tirelessly to ensure that every American has access to quality and affordable health care, and has succeeded in doing so for countless children, seniors, and Americans with disabilities.  He has called health care reform the “cause of his life,” and has championed nearly every health care bill enacted by Congress over the course of the last five decades.

If his work on Congressional health care bills was the “cause of his life,” it’s relevant to ask whether any of those bills actually advanced freedom. In the sense that the Founding Fathers used the term, “freedom” means the American ideal of individual liberty to pursue health and happiness according to one’s own judgment, earning and spending one’s own money and entering freely into contracts without government coercion. Did Kennedy advance that ideal or retard it, in the field of health care?

Let’s start with Medicare and its sister program, Medicaid, both enacted in 1965 with Kennedy’s support. Together, those programs seize enormous quantities of private wealth (some $682 billion in FY 2008, representing 23 percent of the federal budget). This tax money is placed at the disposal of government administrators who dictate the prices that doctors and hospitals can charge Medicare and Medicaid patients for services. Thus, it is illegal for a doctor or hospital to voluntarily contract with a Medicare patient for a higher fee than Medicare allows; violators can be fined or jailed. (Although seniors are allowed to opt out of Medicare, they must forego cash Social Security benefits if they do, and that’s a strong disincentive.) As a result of these and other controls in the two programs, millions of Americans have less freedom than before to make their own decisions on what health care to purchase, and at what cost.

Fast forward to 2008, when Congress (with Kennedy’s support) made it illegal for health insurers and their clients to agree on different coverage for physical and mental illnesses. Says Kennedy’s website: “This means that co-pays, out of pocket expenses, and deductibles [for treatment of mental illness] cannot be treated differently than the way medical-surgical is treated.” During the intervening decades, Kennedy sponsored or voted for a long list of bills (detailed on his website) that restrain voluntary agreements (through threat of government-imposed penalties, fines, and jail sentences). For example, in 1976 he was the sole sponsor of the Medical Device Amendments Act, which made it illegal for companies to sell certain medical devices without prior government approval. In 1971 he was responsible for legislation that quadrupled the amount of tax money allocated to cancer research, thus ensuring that more researchers would require government approval and permission before undertaking research those scientists deemed promising. And before his death, Kennedy supported the so-called Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, which would make it illegal for citizens to buy a health insurance policy that excludes pre-existing conditions, or sets a lifetime limit on benefits.

The cumulative impact of five decades of Kennedy-supported legislation has surely been a significant loss of Americans’ freedom to make their own decisions on supplying and purchasing health care. This loss of freedom has affected doctors, hospitals, and patients alike. Whether or not one agrees that such government intervention is wrecking American health care, every citizen should be dismayed that President Obama glossed over the facts by bestowing a Presidential Medal of Freedom on a senator who devoted his career to attacking freedom in the health care industry.