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Allow me to give a hypothetical situation (it's a situation that actually happened, but since it could happen again we'll say "hypothetical" for the purposes of this article) regarding a child's health care. A child has parents who work middle class jobs but are deeply in debt. Because the parents are so deeply indebted they do not take the child to the dentist or the doctor even though they have insurance through their work places, the copay is the price of dinner for their family for two nights. What do the parents choose: preventative care, regular physicals and dental check-ups for their kid or do they feed their family for a couple of nights? The parents choose to feed their family. The child gets sick (as children often do), incurs a chronic condition or two (head lice, measles, etc.), or the child goes through a serious emotional trauma that requires counseling but the parents still up to their neck in bills can't afford to take the child to the doctor even for these major incidents. They use some folk remedies that only work 40% of the time, and tells him/her to just "get over" the emotional trauma and the child winds up having several cavities, scars from measles, an anti-social personality, a constant cough and an iron inefficiency by the time the child has grown to adulthood. Any insurance company screening him/her may deny any claim made by him/her later or make his/her premiums too high to pay because of what the agencies refer to as a "prudent person pre-existing condition" which means that if a normally prudent person would have gone to the doctor for the symptoms suffered by the person making the claim, but that person didn't it still counts as a pre-existing condition. The grown-up child is also reluctant to go to the doctor or dentist because he/she fears what may be found.

Personally I do not like the idea of expanding government AT ALL. I don't like anyone in government telling anyone how to live their lives nor how to spend their money. It always feels like a bad scene from 1984 when the government expands their control (which over the last 20 years has been more than I'd care for). With that in mind one also has to think about how helpless a child is and how inadequate health care can interfere with their adult life, which would eventually lead to more expansion of government (i.e. the grown child is less likely to know what to do for themselves and thus gives up his/her decision making power to someone they feel may know "best"). I think that this minor expansion of governmental involvement is worthwhile in that the health and well being of a child creates a balanced adult. After all, one would hope that the parents of the hypothetical child described above would have taken him/ her to a doctor had that child been fully covered by insurance.

Learn more about this author, Amanda Horst.
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