Beauchamp and Childress summarize moral arguments for the need for the United States to adopt a national health care policy and recognize health care as a right. Proponents of national health care argue that a “decent minimum” should be provided to give individuals basic medical care they need to prevent and treat illnesses. The benefits of this would provide collective social protection for the country and give individuals a fair opportunity for health outcomes. A national health policy has yet to be adopted in the US, though, with opponents arguing that healthcare should be something people need to work for and purchase themselves instead of relying on the government to provide it for them. This is an example of a libertarian argument that emphasizes the need for individual choice and autonomy. In the case of developing a national health policy, it contrasts with the utilitarian approach that strives to offer the most benefit to the most people with the cost-sharing approach of a single-payer socialized medicine system. With such a system, people are not left out from receiving care because they cannot individually pay. These contrasting views make it very difficult for health policy in the US to change.

Possible middle ground to contrasting viewpoints could be to offer free medical care to children. It provides the two benefits of national health care that Beauchamp and Childress give: collective social protection and fair opportunity. Children’s health care majorly involves vaccination protection and treatment from illness. This provides collective social protection because it helps to eliminate communicable diseases from the population, a serious public health concern. It also benefits others by preventing them from catching children’s viral illnesses that may otherwise go untreated. Children are a vulnerable population that easily spread illnesses through their close contact with other children and staff members in schools. Investing in children’s health not only protects individual children, but also the rest of the population.

Free health care for children provides them with a fair opportunity in life. Unlike adults, children have no control of their life circumstances. Providing them with life-saving vaccines and minimum care as children allows them to face less disadvantages as an adult. Both of the benefits of free health care for children follow the moral principle of beneficence and nonmaleficence because it aims to help those in need and prevent harm from occurring. The same moral principles could be applied to free health care for all people, though, so this is not where the distinction of free care for children comes through.

Free health care for children is uniquely interesting because it has less of a violation of autonomy. Libertarians argue for the need for people to be responsible for themselves and make their own choices, but few would extend this argument to children. Children are unique in that they often have no choices and if they do they are under the constraint of their parents. They also have not made poor choices affecting their health outcomes such as smoking and excessive drinking. Some would argue that being unable to afford healthcare is a result of individuals’ poor decisions and that it is their individual responsibility to provide themselves with adequate care, not the government’s. No logical person would argue, however, that it is a child’s responsibility to provide his own medical care. Providing free medical care to children provides them with a fair opportunity at medical outcomes, irrespective of their parents’ decisions. An extreme libertarian approach could argue further that children should not be entitled to free care because they are individual parents’ responsibility, not the responsibility of the government. However, not providing children with free care has serious consequences to disease prevention and opportunity fairness. Government provided care for children fulfills moral obligations of beneficence and nonmaleficence with limited threat to individual autonomy.