Posted by
Playful Walrus on Thursday, October 09, 2008 10:29:32 PM
When did top-notch medical care on someone else's dime become a right?
Just about anywhere you turn these days, you hear the mantra that "health care is a right", thanks to Leftist politicians and supposedly conservative politicians who are either too cowardly or bumbling to counter them. Some of my contacts on social networking sites are even writing that "health care is a right" in their updates and thoughts the debates.
First of all, they usually mean health insurance is a right or some other way where costs for their health care is "shared" with others - whether those benefactors like it or not. Anyone in the U.S. can get health care by walking into an emergency room or calling 911 and often by simply announcing their not feeling well while they are in a public place or a private business. But not everyone has a health insurance plan.
Where do they get this notion that health insurance is a right? That there is some right to have other people share or outright cover the costs of their medical care?
It’s not enumerated in the Constitution, but the Constitution exists to tell government what it CAN do, and not to list all of our rights. Oh, but look. Our founding documents and the discussion surrounding their adoption indicate that we (that includes health care providers) have property rights, free enterprise rights, the right to associate – or not – with whomever we want. Those seem to me to be in conflict with the "right" to force other people to pay for your health insurance. To change this, it should take a Constitutional Amendment, one that would be out of character with the Constitution as it exists now. Through most of this nation’s existence, and through most of human history, nobody talked about health insurance being a right.
I think people have gotten this notion that "someone else" should be forced to pay all or any of the costs of their health insurance from politicians.
It brings me once again to the larger question of rights. What are rights and where do they come from? Not all freedoms and entitlements are rights. Quite often, laws that some people think give them rights are actually infringing on the rights of others. A "right" to own a slave in America violated the rights of the person enslaved against their will. Our founders maintained that rights come from God (or Nature, for those of you who get queasy at the thought of God), not the government. The government exists to protect our existing rights, and should be limited to as not to infringe on our rights. That was the thinking. It was the kind of thinking that looked as rights as something that never obligate others without their consent or without a crime being committed. But these days, it seems like things become "rights" simply because someone wants them to be.
We have the right to free speech because we were born with the ability to communicate. We only have the right to health care in so far as we can take care of ourselves or convince other people to voluntarily take care of us. It is nice that we ask doctors to respond to an emergency regardless of a patient’s finances. But that doesn’t mean health care, much less health insurance, is right.
I have an experiment I want to try and I encourage you to try it as well. The next time someone you are in communication with refers to the “right to health care” or “the right to health insurance”, try asking them one or more of the following questions:
"How did you decide health care is a right?"
"What makes something a right?"
"How do we know the difference between what is a right and what isn’t a right?"
"Do you think there are still undiscovered rights out there that we’ll be talking about in the future, the way we talk about health care now but people didn’t thirty years ago?"
"Does voting something into effect make it a right? If so, does that mean that if a subsequent vote that goes differently that there is no longer a right to that thing?"
"Does a court decision make something a right? If so, does a subsequent reversal by a court mean that the right no longer exists?"
(We can try this with other claims of "rights" in addition to health care.)
Clearly, when someone talks about a "right to health insurance", they reveal their understanding that rights exist independently of the law, whether they realize that or not. They are claiming there is a right to something, and that laws should be passed to reflect that. That is the obvious conclusion, because we don’t all have health insurance yet.
Now, over the years there were rights of individuals that were wrongly infringed upon as policy by the government, or the government’s failure to protect those individuals. Thankfully, those errors were corrected. But the rights were not new – we simply stopped the government from infringing upon or failing to protect the rights of those individuals – the same rights that others enjoyed unencumbered by government infringement.
So what makes something a right? Polls? Congressional vote? Or do rights come from something or someone transcendent, like God? It’s pretty sad if we think something is a right just because a campaigning politician has said so.
Our rights come from God. The best government protects those rights instead of infringing upon them, and the rights of one individual do not infringe upon those of another.
Previously:
Rights Are Not Handouts, and Handouts Are Not Rights
It is the Medical Professional, Not the Politician, Who Gives Health Care