Letters to the Editor
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insuring children/public education
What I don't understand is why healthcare for ALL citizen children is not covered, regardless of the parents' income status. (for now, I'm not going to open the can of worms that is immigrant children.)
Every U.S. citizen child is given the opportunity of at least 12 years of education regardless of his parents' income. No, it is not "free" in the sense that it is paid for by the taxpayers, no, it is not always of uniform quality, and no, no parent HAS to send their children to a gov't school--they can homeschool or send them to a private school. But society has a vested interest in seeing that every child, regardless of how much money his parents make, gets to go to school. Children do grow up, and it's far easier and less costly to society at large to prevent illiteracy by teaching a child to read at seven than to combat it with adult education courses when the adult is twenty-five.
Children are comparatively cheap to insure. They for the most part don't smoke, don't drink, don't drive, don't get cancer. What they do is come down with things like strep (cheaper to treat in a doctor's office than in an emergency room, which is where you go when you have no insurance), ear infections (which when left untreated can severely damage hearing), need immunizations, need eyeglasses (try learning to read when you get headaches from looking at blurry letters).
Any third-world missionary will tell you that a given child's chances for future success are more than anything based on whether he or she is able to attend school regularly. Sick/nearsighted/hearing-impaired children don't show up as often for obvious reasons. Get them treatment, and they start coming to school.
I know there will always be some libertarians who say that a "welfare state" isn't what the founding fathers intended etc. I remind them of the preamble to the Constitution: "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, PROMOTE THE GENERAL WELFARE, and ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." (Thank you, taxpayer-funded education, that I can do that from memory.)
If pooling our resources to see that every child gets an education and decent healthcare isn't a valid way to "promote the general welfare," I don't know what is.