Freedom Line Blog

Despairing over the passage of Obamacare? Beginning to fret that you sound like those liberals who are constanly promising to emigrate if a Republican wins the White House? Fear not, my friends, the health care bill contains an escape hatch for those of you who’d like to avoid the European Med-State to come. But you better be able to grow a beard.

As I’ve chronicled on Freedom Line before (here and here), the Amish and Old Order Mennonites have long pushed for an exemption from the individual mandate to purchase health insurance, as their religious beliefs forbid it. Well, they got it. And some are speculating that Muslims may be the next in line for an opt-out.

What would happen, one wonders, if millions of conservative Americans started declaring themselves Amish when the Obama Administration’s insurance company-underwritten collection agency came knocking?

Back in September, I chronicled the controversy that accompanied health care reform in the Amish community, where government assistance is usually refused as a matter of faith.

Now comes word that heavily Amish communities have lobbied to get themselves exempted from Obamacare’s insurance mandates, a set-aside that could extend to other, similarly situated groups such as Christian Scientists or Old Order Mennonites.

My hat is off to the religious groups that have been able to carve out an exemption. One wonders how far this trend will go. By the same standard, wouldn’t it be legitimate for Catholics to seek an out if they feel their faith is compromised by the abortion provisions in the new bill? What if Jehovah’s Witnesses are required to carry insurance with provisions for blood transfusions?

Of course, we don’t allow untrammeled discretion to religious beliefs.  If your religion sanctioned murder or theft, you wouldn’t get a pass from the state. Rather, the western tradition of liberty has always been strongly influenced by the concept of natural rights — that the aspects of individuals that constitute their inherent dignity as human beings should be immune from coercive influence by the state.

Health care is an area that overlaps with those rights so frequently that these early controversies will prove to be only the tip of the iceberg. Thus, health care reform doesn’t just represent government overreach — it involves a paradigm shift in the relationship between the government and the governed. If we were truly adhering to this nation’s natural rights tradition, every American would get the same right of refusal as the Amish.

That’s the headline President Obama will have to live with if he doesn’t wise up to the unintended consequences of health care reform.

A Pennsylvania physician called into Mark Levin’s radio show this afternoon to share with the nation that the Amish — who oppose any form of insurance as a matter of theology — will not comply with any individual mandate that is part of healthcare reform.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we stop caring about individual rights.