Health Care a right?

In My Humble Opinion
21

In nature, there are no rights. So the discussion is not really about rights. There is no right to private property, but people band together, among other things, to create that “right”. There is no right to police, nor for the protection of an army. Not so many hundreds of years ago, if you wanted police protection, you paid a private person (or organization) for that protection. In England, Sir Robert Peel created the first general police forces (that why cops in England are called “bobbies”, after Sir Robert). During the mid 19th century, it was a burning issue in city after city in the US over whether the city should provide water and sewage. Previous to that, your sewage went onto the street and water was your own responsibility. When civic water and sewage were implemented and real-estate taxes instituted to pay for them, property owners screamed–wait for it–socialism. Of course, it is, so are police and armies. It is just a question of which services are socialized. In that sense, we are all socialists, even libertarians, or at least the one I knew once who argued that the only government services that should be provided were police and military. It is only a pragmatic question of what to socialize.

The point I want to make is that asking of this is a right is the wrong question. The right question is should it be made into a right, just like police protection, military protection, public schooling, roads, water, sewage,… To my way of thinking the justification of police to protect our bodies is no more basic than the provision for health care. Besides, the experience of Canada (where I have lived for more than half my 71 years) and many European countries demonstrates beyond a doubt that it is considerably cheaper to socialize medicine than to leave it private.

When I was growing up in the US, most hospitals were non-profit, often either religiously affiliated or publicly run. As I open the NYTimes Sunday magazine this morning, I see that page 15 is a full-page ad from a hospital, advertising for patients! Can this be? Obviously this hospital, which from its name I infer was once religiously affiliated, is making enough profit that it can afford full-page ads. I have seen many such ads recently, including in national magazines, though the clientele for a hospital can be only local. However, all this raised only pragmatic objections.

So my response to the OP is no, it is not a right in the US, but it ought to be. And it is in every other developed country and a lot of underdeveloped ones too.

22

No.

Health care is a personal choice. Buy it or don’t, but don’t ask me to pay for yours.

23

There’s no such thing.

24

So is eating.

25

So do you believe that the government should provide you with all the food you want for free?

26

Sure. Just like health care, people who cannot afford it should be provided with proper amounts of food that meet the nutritional minimums for health. No one said that they get to pick what they want, or that it would be all sorts of tasty and awesome. Same with health care. It should be adequate to ensure decent health, nothing more. That fact that you would rather see poor people starve, or die of disease, than pay a few dollars more in taxes says a lot about your character Scrooge.

27

Where did he say that?

28

He didn’t, and I apologize. I Got him confused with another poster upthread. Good catch, thanks.

29

But,but I’m now unemployed and my kid has an undiagnosed disease, and I have no health insurance anymore because I don’t have enough money. Please please I beg you can you help me out ?

30

If you have health insurance you are already paying for everyone else’s health care who buys insurance from your provider’s company. That’s what insurance is.

Is health care an absolute, fundamental right? No I don’t believe so. But there is a fundamental problem with leaving matters which are literally issues of life and death to a for-profit industry.

Could you imagine if the police operated as private, for-profit organizations, only seeking justice for those who can afford to purchase it? I do believe health care is one of those basic issues fundamental to the well-being of the people which should not be in the hands of for-profit companies.

31

Well, what those forefathers said was

In other words, as I interpret it, these rights are things that we have by virtue of existing (“endowed by their Creator”—which is whoever or whatever causes us to exist, be it God or nature). The state’s role is to secure those rights, i.e. to make sure they don’t get taken away from us. So, it doesn’t cost anything to have such rights, but it does cost to keep them.
While looking up the Declaration of Independence, I ran across this Wikipedia article on natural and legal rights. Which kind of right is the OP talking about? We have a legal right to something if the law says we do. Figuring out whether we have a natural or moral right to something is trickier, and some people deny that there are such things as natural rights.
If anyone claims that we do, in fact, have a right to heath care, I would ask them to be more specific. What health care do we have a right to? Does everyone have a right to the same health care, and if not, why not? Does everyone have a right to, say, a needed organ transplant, even if there are more organs needed than available? For that matter, what if I don’t absolutely need the transplant, but it would make me healthier to have it? If I drink my liver to death, do I have a right to a new one? If I chop off my hand, do I have the right to a new one? Does someone who refuses a vaccination have a right to treatment for the disease the vaccination would have prevented?

The same health care is not available to everyone. For one thing, some people lived before the medicine or procedure that would have cured them was invented—could we say that they had the right to those things? And if not, why do we have rights that they don’t, merely by the accident of when we were born? Or where we were born? Doe someone in a Third Wolrd country have the same right to health care as an American or a Swede?

32

“It was once said that the moral test of Government is how that Government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”
-Hubert Humphrey

Quite honestly, I find it sickening that so many who are against are abortion are also against government health care-as if they don’t seem to give a shit what happens to these infants after they’re born. Fact is, people are dying due to lack of simple AFFORDABLE care. And that’s obscene in my view.

33

I’m not sure in can be a right in the sense of life, liberty, and pursute of happiness because it doesn’t exist in the natural state. All people, when born, have the first two and the ability to do the third unless they are actively interfered with.

However, I do think health care is a social obligation for those societies with the resources to provide it. It is not a first-tire obligation, like food or rule of law, but it is an obligation. I think even the bum on the street should be able to get some kind of care. To me people dieing from lack of basic health care, in a society advanced as ours, is almost as bad as people starving to death in the same society.

34

For me, it comes down to " . . . that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life . . ."

Basic health care is an inalienable right, but it isn’t one that is acknowledged as such by my government.

My government (whether I like it or not, and I don’t) panicks at the thought of terminating a non-viable embryo, but, at best, ignores the right of post-birth humans to continue living.

Allowing a full-fledged human to die because he or she can’t pay for the diagnosis, much less treatment, is a crime against all that is decent and good.

35

Enough to not starve. Food stamps and such came about after the networks found people starving, in Appalachia among other places. We’re not talking lobster and ribeyes here, just not starving.

Do you think it is less moral for the government to “steal” a few pennies more from you than for people to starve?

36

If you really want everyone to have basic health care, I actually think it could be counterproductive to think of it as a right. If it’s a right, it’s something people have naturally, unless some oppressor has come along and taken it away. So, if someone’s being denied their “right” to basic health care, it puts us in adversarial mode, so that we spend our energies trying to find and fight the bad guys who are depriving people of that right, rather than focusing on the social and economic problems of how we see that people’s needs are met.

37

I guess a better way to phrase it is… “Should anyone get filthy rich off of health care?” I’d say: No.

Unlike food, another neccesity for living, an unlucky person can go bankrupt from healthcare costs. It makes sense that we should all pool our money together to eliminate that risk for any one individual. It’s no different in principle than the Police (A sort of “crime insurance”) or the Fire Department (“Anti-Fire Insurance”).

For any one person to have to shoulder the burden of healthcare seems as ludicrous to me as a crime victim having to fork over money to the cops to investigate their case or to pay the fire department for their services. It could all happen to any of us, and having money shouldn’t factor into whether you receive this service.

38

Though I’m inclined to agree with you, I’m going to play devil’s advocate and ask: what if pooling all our money together just means that the whole society goes bankrupt?

Unlike food, it’s a lot harder to define what is meant by adequate health care, or enough to keep people from “starving.” It’s theoretically possible for everyone to have enough food, but how much health care is “enough”? That’s one of the reasons why I think making it so that no one goes without adequate health care is a trickier problem than making it so that no one goes hungry.

39

If we’re going with the old ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ maxim, then yes it is, in some cases, because lack of health care can rob a person of those three things.

Personally, I see it as a right because putting the burden on the individual is blatantly unfair–it isn’t something that a person can control very well, if at all. Many other facets of life are under more direct control of the individual involved, and while many people make bad decisions, those decisions are often their own fault. But anyone can get hit by a car, or develop cancer, or catch any of a million different viruses, and there isn’t a damn thing they can do about it. It’s also a situation where the solution to the problem involves little choice–as someone said in another thread, you can get from point A to point B equally well in a 15-year-old beater or a brand new Mercedes, but if you need a heart transplant an Asprin won’t do. You either get the care you need, or you don’t.

Frankly, I’ve always seen the idea that people can be denied care because of finances as utterly barbaric.

40

I agree. Furthermore, a need for medical services is almost guaranteed, sooner or later. There are many lucky people who never need police services directly. There are probably more who never need to call the fire department. Very, very few people live and die without ever needing medical care. So if we’re willing to pay for millions of people’s access to police and fire services which we will probably never use, why not medical care which we almost surely will?