Like it or not, in the end, it is one body. It is literally what carries you through life. There is a reason for the saying, If you have your health, you have everything, and it is true. Old age, disease - these are the great equalizers.

The Supreme Court has never ruled that Congress can use the Commerce Clause to require individuals to engage in an activity they have chosen to avoid. Yet that is precisely what Obamacare does: It forces Americans without health insurance to purchase coverage. Such a requirement is unprecedented and unconstitutional.

In other words we have marketed our way into this health crisis.

So I can not show you how, exactly, health care is a basic human right. But what I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.

If any country was a mine-shaft canary for the reintroduction of cholera, it was Haiti - and we knew it. And in retrospect, more should have been done to prepare for cholera... which can spread like wildfire in Haiti... This was a big rebuke to all of us working in public health and health care in Haiti.

You can not have public health without a public health system. We just do not want to be part of a mindless competition for resources. We want to build back capacity in the system.

When I ran for Congress I promised to help make health care affordable again.

My background is in health care.

I know the exploding cost of health care is at the root of our long-term fiscal challenges.

Prior to passage of Obamacare, Americans spoke out against the individual mandate they did not want to change the health care they had they did not want a 3,000-page bill that empowered 15 Washington bureaucrats to decide the future of the doctor-patient relationship.

Americans want and deserve a broad array of health insurance choices so they can identify those that best fit their own individual or family needs. These choices expand when we allow free enterprise to foster innovation, not smother it with taxes and one-size fits all ideology.

Under President Obama's new health care law, Medicaid will become a very different health coverage program than first envisioned.

Originally created to serve the poorest and sickest among us, the Medicaid program has grown dramatically but still Does not include the kind of flexibility that states need to provide better health care for the poor and disadvantaged.

The national debate on health care once centered on improving access to quality care, yet the effect of Obamacare will be the exact opposite, resulting in the shameful degradation of care for the neediest individuals.

Obamacare is a seriously flawed law that makes health care coverage less affordable, costs taxpayers more than advertised and fails to deliver on most of its other grand promises.

Giving governors more leeway in administering health care could represent a small, positive development in the ongoing saga of Obamacare. Unfortunately, instead of choosing flexibility, President Obama and his left-leaning advisers always default to rigid Washington knows best answers.

The real truth is that the Obama administration is professional at bullying, as we have witnessed with ACORN at work during the presidential campaign. It seems to me they are sending down their bullies to create fist fights among average American citizens who do not want a government-run health care plan forced upon them.

Money spent on carbon cuts is money we can not use for effective investments in food aid, micronutrients, HIV/AIDS prevention, health and education infrastructure, and clean water and sanitation.

We are losing our living systems, social systems, cultural systems, governing systems, stability, and our constitutional health, and we are surrendering it all at the same time.

I am actually in poor health due to chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndrome, and my ability to work is greatly diminished right now, so I have to get better before I can start another big project.