Did Senator Kennedy deserve the Medal of Freedom?
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?
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