Saying health care is a right is drives a wedge down the middle of the health care debate rather than pulling people together for a solution.
In our democracy rights are what we should all be absolutely entitled to do as part of being able to control our own life. Rights are absolute except to the extent our exercise of our rights impinges on the rights of some other person or persons. In that case the parties negotiate a compromise, or society sets up rules to govern how the competing rights balance.
Health care, by definition, is one person being helped by another person.
Forcing a person or persons to provide health care for someone else is - well - dictatorial. Smacks of slavery. It is a denial of the other person's rights to make their own choices about life.
That's not to say universal health care is not a laudable goal and an enlightened idea. But it is not a right, it is something we as a society chose to do because we perceive t benefits us all.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Is trial by jury a right? Fire and police protection? K-12 education? Each of those is also a service, where one set of people are paid to labor for the benefit of another set of people. As a society, we've established that providing each of these to every citizen is part of our social compact, in part because it is the ethical thing to do, and in part because it makes our society function better. That's how I, and many Americans, believe health care should be treated in America - not as a "privilege" that only those who can afford it should be able to access, but as a "right" available to all who need it.
I'd urge you particularly to rethink your comparison to slavery, which is frankly offensive, and not up to your usual standard of thought. Are firefighters slaves, because they don't pick-and-choose which houses to save?
In fact, every service, both public and private, operates under some set of regulations or code of ethics that prescribes who has access to those services. It's not dictatorial to tell a restaurant owner that they must serve people regardless of their race or creed. What's more, we already have laws that say hospitals must treat any patient with a life-threatening emergency, regardless of their ability to pay. So when we talk about the "right" to healthcare, in some sense we already guarantee that right - what's missing is a practical method to make sure everyone can afford to pay for the service. I'd venture that our hospitals and doctors would much prefer a system that allows them to operate sustainably, to a constant stream of desperate patients who can't pay their bills.
Post a Comment