Fifteen years ago, my family and I arrived in the United States, having fought for two decades to escape the dictatorship of the Soviet Union. We left behind a tyrannical system, determined to control every aspect of its subjects’ lives. Now, the same forces appear to be at the forefront of our national debate on health care.

At the heart of this debate lies a very simple question: will we preserve the freedom of every individual to determine his or her best interests, or will government seize for itself control over the health care of every American? Having experienced and finally escaped from the latter, it is not difficult to foresee its effects.

I saw hospitals devoid of basic supplies, anesthesia treated as a luxury item and hot water more difficult to obtain than attention from an orderly. A severe shortage of medications persisted, to the point where patients were refused hospitalization if they could not procure their own drugs.

It was commonplace for an elderly person to call an ambulance and be told that he was simply too old and no help would be coming. The state decided who lived and who died. This was real. This was government-run health care as I knew it.

There was another world I wasn’t privileged to see. In the true spirit of socialism, the Soviet State chose not to consign high-ranking party members, bureaucrats, military officers and other worthy individuals to the public system.

Instead, it created a separate world of plentiful doctors and first-rate hospitals, with such luxuries as uninterrupted electricity and modern x-ray machines to which entry for the rest of us was closed at gunpoint.

Misery is par for the course when government dictates winners and losers. It doesn’t stop at international borders – it is the product of tyranny, where the ability to make choices about something as intimate as health care is taken by the government and rationed in accordance to its whims. As the public option becomes reality and one day turns into a public obligation, the misery I encountered threatens a frightening déjà vu.

Ultimately, the fight comes down to a matter deeper than access to health care. This is a debate over what defines us as a country and as Americans. What possessed my parents to risk everything, to put in question their own and their children’s future, to be subjected to KGB surveillance and to write appeals to Gorbachev, was a set of principles that have defined this country for over two centuries.

These principles simply dictate that the purpose of government is to protect the people’s right to decide what is in their best interests and to live according to those decisions. They are fundamentally incompatible with government control. Should we abandon them, health care will become but a building block of a system where no decision is small enough to escape the grasp of government.

Churchill observed that, “the further back you can look, the further forward you are likely to see.”  We know how the siren song of government takeover ends. History has written it for us in plain form. Inevitably, no matter where it takes place in the world and no matter which century, it ends in dismal failure. I saw it.

My parents risked their lives and livelihood to let their children live in freedom’s only refuge in the world. Millions have done so before them. Perhaps it’s time all of us rise to the challenge and secure freedom for our posterity.

Written by IGOR BIRMAN

Igor Birman serves as Chief of Staff to my local Representative Tom McClintock (R-CA). He is also a friend of HOGUE NEWS and my radio work over the years in Sacramento, California.