We are born to be healthy and lead productive lives. Otherwise, the unalienable rights endowed by our Creator -- "among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" -- amount only to meaningless puffery. Without health, life cannot endure with sufficient quality as to allow either liberty or the pursuit of happiness.

Visit a nursing home or a shelter for disabled persons, and you will see that health is a necessary prerequisite for essential liberty and for any pursuit of happiness worthy of the phrase. In such iconic settings where illness is so obvious, you will also see liberties curtailed (among them, for example, freedom of movement and personal decision making) and happiness pursued not at all or only on the most limited terms.

The early evolution of our country's political principles underscores the fact that health is "among these" unalienable rights found in our Declaration of Independence. Those rights were first enumerated by the English writer John Locke, who wrote that "no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions." Additionally, the first article of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, adopted unanimously by the Virginia Convention of Delegates on June 12, 1776, guaranteed not just the pursuit of happiness but its obtainment, and by direct extension, the right to health: "That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."

Opponents of government-sponsored health care argue that health is something no government can guarantee for a given individual at a given time, or for any individual in perpetuity. They say government cannot magically cure all disease or open the spigot on the Fountain of Youth, even if the law were to mandate it. But this is smoke and mirrors, and a straw man argument against the right to health care.

Certainly, it is true that government cannot exceed the bounds of medicine and physics, nor can it extend more health or years to a person than he or she is given potential for at birth. Continuing life or bolstering health through extraordinary technical means is neither fiscally nor medically possible in many cases.

But there exists a realm of the practical and pragmatic, where fiscal and moral imperatives intersect. At this point in time and history, government can and should guarantee that all citizens have a right to quality, affordable health care. Here, now, in the realm of medicine that includes guaranteed access and treatment considered effective and medically advisable.

There are opponents of government-sponsored health care who say it would socialize medicine by transferring money from wealthier individuals to pay for the care of poorer individuals. The say the benefits of such a plan would accrue to irresponsible individuals while unfairly taxing more responsible citizens.

But this is an attack on the system of taxation itself, which government employs at all levels to fund projects and programs that benefit society as a whole. The common defense is funded this way, as is education, as are sanitation systems. Most of us pay an unequal portion to fund expensive bridges that are over-designed not for our personal vehicles but for the load-bearing capacity needed to support commercial trucks. In fact, everything about government is socialized, if by that, one means transferring wealth from certain individuals to benefit others.

Take it a step further and realize that America itself has been socialized since before its inception as a nation, for wealth has always been transferred through the market from the hands of the many to the hands of the few.

I will not recite the litany of complaints against our current system of privatized health care. Nor will I extoll in detail the comparatively low cost and highly praised government health programs already in place.

But I will remind opponents that more than 47 million of your neighbors and friends and relatives -- American citizens all -- are currently without health care; that millions more lack sufficient coverage to forestall death and impoverishment; and that if health care is not given its place as an unalienable human right, tomorrow these opponents and their posterity could be among the unexpectedly injured or ill who expend their last resources to no avail and find no solace in their pursuit of Happiness.