A New Way - Life as A Constitutional Right

This is the second of a series of articles exploring the creation of

The Independence Party.

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Roe vs. Wade, decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1973, provided for the legalization of abortion across the United States. That decision is debated across our land to this day, not simply as a moral consideration, but also as as a political issue which seems further from resolution with each passing election year. There was a certain irony in the prohibition of capital punishment for the first time in our nation's history in that same era that abortion was approved. Conservatives gained association with casting their fate against abortion, and yet for executions, and Liberals the reverse. Some thirty years later, that dichotomy persists. What is clear is that the United States Declaration of Independence sets forth "Life" as an essential Human right.

Without addressing either extreme, ... abortion, or execution, the right to life for all Americans has been eroded, or at the very least, subjugated to other interests, whether they are corporate, governmental, legal, or institutional.

If we think of employment as a contract between an employer and en employee, on the surface it appears to have many of the usual features of any contractual relationship. One party, for consideration, performs or provides a service or product to the other party. The mutuality of a contract arises from the willingness of the parties, who enter into it without coercion, and do so with their eyes openo all consequences which may arise. Employment, in my estimation, never quite rises to that level of mutuality, despite the legal decisions to the contrary.

Employment agreements typically assure a number of things, ... pay for services, sharing of important business information, and other things. Training may be provided by the employer. Profit sharing, if there is to be any, may be assured to the employee by the employer based upon a certain level of performance. Often, there are confidentiality agreements required of the employee, and Agreements not to Compete if the employee leaves the employment situation. But many states in the US operate with an understanding of "Employment at Will". In those states, an employee may be terminated for cause, or without cause altogether, and has virtually no recourse whatsoever to question the firing, nor to recover promised bonuses, performance incentives, and other perquisites of the "agreement" to do work. On the other hand, the employee, should he leave for other opportunity, or due to unmet implied or explicit promises by the employer, may be required to forego working for a competing employer for a specified period after terminating his or employment. That is, the employer has a right, under "non-compete" agreement provisions, to ask the court to deny a former employee work at their established profession or trade, after they have quit their job.

Some argue that this is fair, saying that an employer offers trade secrets, training, literature, and support to an employee during their tenure. In exchange that employer gets six months, even a year, of "protection" after the employee leaves employment.

If we look at the situation more closely, we often see that employees leave because employers have not met the commitments made to employees. For many companies, the income stream created by the employees continues long after the employee leaves. Customers reorder based upon a pattern of use, and the good will developed by employees can sustain itself by sheer force of habit.

What of the employee? Often she or he must take interim work until the "blue line" period has passed. Employers can malign and criticize the employee to former customers during that entire period when the customer is legally prohibited from contact with the customers! In the end, the employer has a distinctive legal advantage that is integral to the laws in many states, over the rights of the individual. What has this to do with Life? Meeting our basic needs through work and earning is of lower importance in the eyes of the law while the employer's right to preserve its business advantage is higher.

But the right to life for those of us already walking the earth does not end in the workplace, fortunately. The right to life includes the right to share our space and ideas with others, to love and live with those we choose. We have the right to write, and think, and pray, and speak our minds. I will address that concern in another essay.

We also have the right to a "healthy life". What does that mean? I believe it means that we have the right to expect the medical knowledge of our age will be brought to bear upon our conditions, as they occur, and we will all benefit from the cumulative knowledge that medicine has gathered about our "cumulative ailments", as we Humans have incurred them. It was once the standard of medical care in America that Physicians were revered, and responsibly paid. Hospitals were run as charitable institutions, and beds were donated by estates "in perpetuity" to the charitable care of patients. What did that mean? Did it mean that the beds would be available to charitable patients until the money ran out? Who checked to be certain that there was no money left for the care of other needy patients? Who sold the charitable rights to the profit-making company that bought out the non-profit hospital? Why didn't the community reinherit the rights to the failed investment? These were, after all, gifts to the communities in which these hospitals reside. These were sites of care and comfort which have been replaced by clinics and hospices at the expense of the community and providers, and were, at their essence, an irrevocable gift to the communities in which they are located. They should, in every case, revert to the community they serve, for the perpetual care of the members of that community. These are not, and never have been, legitimate "Corporate" assets! They arose on land in local communities, often as gifts from residents, and entrepreneurs, to assure the medical care of their fellow citizens, "in perpetuity". The disconnection between our forebears' gifts to us, ... hospital, parks, museums, and open land, ... can be reversed. These community assets should never have been deeded along with the businesses which stood on those lands.

What does this have to do with "Life", as it is assured in the Constitution? Everything, as it turns out, since the business of healthcare arguably arose in the United States at the hands of Benjamin Franklin, ... in the founding of the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. I suspect this best of businesspersons never imagined that healthcare should become the source of great personal wealth. Certainly the care of the dying should never fill the coffers of the living!

In the end, if that is where we find ourselves now, the assurance of "Life" under the Constitution has little practical effect or value. Hospitals dump their indigent patients under bridges to avoid the expense of their continued care and concern.

There must be a new way to rethink what we do with the insane, ... and the sick, rather than Ronald Reagan's approach of loosing the gates of the asylums, and hospitals, and declaring the patients "sane" and "healthy".