Television as a right?

Why should the US government fund the purchase of television converter boxes?

This has been bothering me since I first heard about the coupon program.

There are people who cannot financially afford the converter box, who do not have cable or digital televisions and who rely on the television for news and public information. This is the angle from which the vouchers were first explained to me, and I can kind of understand it from this perspective.

However, it seems like the vast majority of the people who are getting these vouchers are not in this category.

These coupons were not intended to covert every single analog television in this country to digital.

The bigger issue to me is why is television considered a right and public safety issue (for the reasons mentioned above) when health insurance is not?

Our priorities as a nation are screwed up.