If there is a right to health care, someone has the duty to provide it. Inevitably, that “someone” is the government. Concrete benefits in pursuance of abstract rights, however, can be provided by the government only by constant coercion.
People sometimes argue in favor of a universal human right to health care by saying that health care is different from all other human goods or products. It is supposedly an important precondition of life itself. This is wrong: There are several other, much more important preconditions of human existence, such as food, shelter and clothing.
Everyone agrees that hunger is a bad thing (as is overeating), but few suppose there is a right to a healthy, balanced diet, or that if there was, the federal government would be the best at providing and distributing it to each and every American.
Where does the right to health care come from? Did it exist in, say, 250 B.C., or in A.D. 1750? If it did, how was it that our ancestors, who were no less intelligent than we, failed completely to notice it?
If, on the other hand, the right to health care did not exist in those benighted days, how did it come into existence, and how did we come to recognize it once it did?
When the supposed right to health care is widely recognized, as in the United Kingdom, it tends to reduce moral imagination. Whenever I deny the existence of a right to health care to a Briton who asserts it, he replies, “So you think it is all right for people to be left to die in the street?”
When I then ask my interlocutor whether he can think of any reason why people should not be left to die in the street, other than that they have a right to health care, he is generally reduced to silence. He cannot think of one.
Moreover, the right to grant is also the right to deny. And in times of economic stringency, when the first call on public expenditure is the payment of the salaries and pensions of health-care staff, we can rely with absolute confidence on the capacity of government sophists to find good reasons for doing bad things.
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My answer is “no”.
But I would really like to hear what the esteemed human rights geek, Ignatieff, has to say about it. It would be nice if someone, somewhere would ask this guy to justify why he thinks it is.
Whether or not healthcare should be considered a right is a pointless question in our developed nations because everyone here, including illegal immigrants, is already provided with some level of coverage. The real questions that need to be answered in all developed nations are: What levels of healthcare are sustainable enough to be an expected minimum? Should any person, upon illegally entering the US, be afforded the same level of care that say Ted Kennedy can afford? Should everyone with public insurance expect to be afforded the same level of care that Ted Kennedy can afford? Everyone in the US, including illegal immigrants, is already provided with free maternity and emergency care until such time as they can safely be discharged from the hospital. This is the same level of treatment that illegal immigrants can expect from public systems in Canada or the UK, so why, except for entirely political reasons, should illegal immigrants in the US expect more? The US system has problems, but those problems are being purposefully inflated to the point of useful crisis in a political power play by the left. To see how and why the healthcare problems in the US are not being addressed by the left, but rather used in a political way, we need to look at who exactly it is that supposedly has no coverage and how it could possibly effect them.
First, the US has over 12 million illegal immigrants. No secret here, the left would like to dangle a free healthcare cookie in front of them prior to making them legal US voters, so as to buy their loyalty, but won’t that just encourage many more illegal immigrants to arrive expecting such goodies in an unsustainable manner? Remember the illegal immigrant to Canada, Laibar Singh, who cost our healthcare system millions of dollars while claiming refugee status before being deported back to India? Just as an illegal immigrant currently would in the US, Singh received very expensive emergency treatment in Canada before being sent back home after his condition stabilized. Now back in India where he is making progress while receiving decent medical treatment, Singh is not being persecuted in any way shape or form and willingly admits that his refugee claim was bogus. Perhaps this is a problem for bleeding heart liberal types who, though too cheap to actually donate to charitable causes themselves, seem to believe that the taxpayers of western countries can cure all the ills of the world and are willing to create a bottomless pit of debt for all of our grandchildren to deal with just to prove it, but not a real problem with any existing healthcare system.
Second, the largest subset of those without healthcare coverage in the US, who are the poor and therefore already eligible for some level of government help through existing State or Federal programs, but who are nevertheless too stupid and/or lazy to sign themselves and their children up to receive it. Why aren’t groups like Acorn traveling around the country helping people to sign up for public health insurance coverage? Rhetorical question, why would the left waste a perfectly good conjured up crisis? Stupid and lazy people here in Canada are also expected to sign up for and renew their health cards every couple of years if they want healthcare coverage, but we shouldn’t consider them to be without coverage either, because just as would happen in the US, if such people get sick their emergency visits are free and if they develop a long term illness then all they have to do is sign up for coverage. Not a real problem with any existing system.
Third, we have those who, though they can afford it, have decided against buying insurance, at least for the time being. Most, like Ted Kennedy, are wealthy enough to manage without, and others do so because they are young and healthy and would rather spend the money on buying a home. Just as can happen in Canada and everywhere else, a tiny percentage of these people could potentially fall through the cracks when they unexpectedly develop a very serious illness, and therefore might later have to remortgage their homes so as to purchase the best healthcare money can buy. Lucky for the Americans caught in this situation that they live in a country where the best healthcare that money can buy is available locally, so they do not have to add travel costs to such expenses like the rest of the world currently must. Statistically speaking, as a group these people are still better off not purchasing healthcare and they know it, so why punish them for being good at math? This is only considered a real problem by those liberal types who believe that people cannot be trusted to make their own decisions.
Last we have the actual problem of those who lose their healthcare coverage when they lose their jobs, which reminds me, shouldn’t the Obama administration be doing something about the economy if they really want to help these people? This is the smallest subset of those without healthcare coverage because not all employee health plans are the same, and many companies already provide extended coverage to those they let go. I believe that John McCain had the right idea during his presidential campaign when he wanted to tax employer provided plans and use the money to extend employee coverage when employment ends, because the extra expense could then be treated like unemployment insurance, except for the purpose of extending healthcare coverage. So far, for entirely political reasons, Obama has resisted this and many other ideas that have come from the right, but these are not insurmountable problems requiring a ridiculously expensive and potentially destructive remake of the entire US healthcare system.
Keeping in mind that there are also state run clinics and federally run hospitals in every state that provide free medical services to those in need, if there remain smaller subsets of people who still need coverage, I would agree that their situations do need to be resolved as well. If Obama actually wants to resolve such problems then he can always change tack where Hillary Clinton and other such lefties would not, and try to foster a more bi-partisan effort. Taking ideas from the right would actually be preferable to letting a crisis situation build up, but it would not give the left the total control over peoples lives that it wants.