« BACK | PRINT

RS

MEMBER DIARY

Is there a Right to Healthcare?

By: Beaglescout (Diary) | March 24th, 2010 at 06:37 PM |

RESIZE: AAA

According to long established tradition in the English common law, and as explained by the eminent Blackstone, the three rights in the Declaration of Independence are as follows.

Life is the right to live, intact with one’s limbs, eyes, and organs. Any physical damage that cripples or removes a limb, or eyes, or kills one violates this right. This definition was important because according to the common law people had the right to defend themselves with lethal force if they were under threat of losing life or limb.

Liberty is the right to move about freely. Any false imprisonment, clapping into slavery, or kidnapping violates this right. Once again, under the common law people had the right to defend themselves with lethal force if they are under threat of losing their liberty.

Property is the right to keep the fruits of one’s own labor, including items that are improved from their natural state, and to transfer the rights to this property to others as one wishes. If people become wealthy through their hard work, they can trade for the things they like, buy and sell items, and pass property on to charities or family as they wish. This is also known as the Right to the Pursuit of Happiness, because if happiness is brought nearer by a life without hardships, and hard work and the accumulation of property leads to a life without undue hardships, then they are one and the same. Certainly people cannot be happy if they are forced to constantly struggle in abject poverty for food, a bed, and a roof over their head.

Those with nothing to their name, newcomers and the bankrupt can always start building up wealth with their bare hands and their innate inventiveness. Anyone can. Nobody said it was easy to become wealthy, but with property rights it is possible. Without property rights it will never be possible for the poor to rise out of poverty. The best they can hope for without equal property rights is a few pennies thrown their way by their ‘betters’ in the elite classes to make their poverty slightly less miserable, and maybe free beer on holidays so they forget their misery as they also lose their drive to succeed. The question though is whether it is desirable for people to live in poverty and misery, even if it is alleviated by government charity. Shouldn’t they be allowed and encouraged to lift themselves out of poverty instead? Shouldn’t they have property rights allowing them to rise from poverty?

It is as plain as the nose on your face. If you punch your nose with your fist, you will have a nosebleed. It is your responsibility to stop the bleeding. It is your responsibility to clean up the blood after. By the fact of having punched your own nose, you are responsible for the fact of the results. And if you are responsible for an injury, whether to yourself or another, you are responsible for the remedy to it.

As even the most obstinate slaveholders learned in the War Between the States that ended the Peculiar Institution of Slavery, when rights conflict, for instance the right of a slaveholder to his property conflicting with the rights of a human to go where he wants and keep the fruits of his own labor, humans do not have rights to the life, liberty, or property of other humans.

This was never all that controversial. The controversial part was in defining who was human. Eventually all Americans came to the true conclusion that the differences between the different human races were cosmetic. Under the skin we all were, are, and forever will be members of the same human race.

If healthcare were a right, which it is not, what would that mean? First, if Able has a right to healthcare, Dr. Baker must supply his labor to Able (violates Property rights). Second, Dr. Baker cannot move about freely, because he is required to serve Able (violates Liberty rights). And Third, Dr. Baker’s property rights in his medical learning, his medical practice, and his office are seized for Able’s needs (more violations of Property rights). Dr. Baker serves Able, just as all doctors serve patients now, but Dr. Baker no longer has a choice of whether to serve Able. Now he is placed in involuntary service. Another phrase for involuntary service is involuntary servitude. And that is equal to bondage or slavery. Dr. Baker must be a slave if Able has a right to healthcare!

And that is why the right to healthcare is not a right. Because if it is a right then it places all the Dr. Bakers into slavery. No right can place another person into slavery. Such rights are illegitimate.

What is healthcare really? It is a responsibility that goes with being alive. If you are alive, you have the responsibility to stay healthy. There is no argument possible about it. You can exercise. Nobody else can exercise for you. You can eat right. Nobody else can eat for you. You can pay attention to wounds and diseases. Nobody else knows how you feel until you tell them. Nobody has any responsibility for your body other than you. You do.

And that is the underlying reason we are having this discussion. The Christianity-hating progressive movement could not reinvent society following reason alone without acknowledging God, has therefore abandoned reason entirely, and now denies that individuals have responsibility for their selves and their actions.

The Truth is obvious to those who look. Don’t be afraid to see what you see and say so.

…

This post was inspired by A Well-Reasoned Perspective on the “Right” to Health Care, by Amy Miller and Ryan Kazmierczak. Read here for more on rights and duties.

Technorati Tags: Health, Rights, Responsibilities, Obamacare, Government, Constitution

Tags: Constitution, Government, Health, Obamacare, Redstate University, Responsibilities, Rights

COMMENTS

POSTING RULES | LOGIN TO COMMENT | REGISTER TODAY

http://slcliberty.blogivists.com randy streu

if you have to get it from somebody else, it IS NOT A RIGHT.

Great post,Beagle.

http://beaglescout.wordpress.com Beaglescout

Many people don’t seem to make the connection on their own. So I made it explicit.

Flagstaff

You’re in good company.

Walter Williams wrote a Townhall.com column recently that was along much the same lines. I thought he made the point that health care was a “good,” and therefore couldn’t be a right. As it happens, Ron Paul said that last July. And in the HillaryCare days,

What Williams did write was

To argue that people have a right that imposes obligations on another is an absurd concept. A better term for new-fangled rights to health care, decent housing and food is wishes. If we called them wishes, I would be in agreement with most other Americans for I, too, wish that everyone had adequate health care, decent housing and nutritious meals. However, if we called them human wishes, instead of human rights, there would be confusion and cognitive dissonance. The average American would cringe at the thought of government punishing one person because he refused to be pressed into making someone else’s wish come true.

And in the HillaryCare days, David Kelley, speaking for The Atlas Society, distinguished between liberty rights and welfare rights.

Let’s begin by defining our terms. A right is a principle that specifies something which an individual should be free to have or do. A right is an entitlement, something you possess free and clear, something you can exercise without asking anyone else’s permission. Because it is an entitlement, not a privilege or favor, we do not owe anyone else any gratitude for their recognition of our rights….

The purpose of liberty rights is to protect individual autonomy. They leave individuals responsible for their own lives, for meeting their own needs. But they provide us with the social conditions we need to carry out that responsibility: the freedom to act on the basis of our own judgment, in pursuit of our own ends; and the right to use and dispose of the material resources we have acquired by our efforts. These rights reflect the assumption that individuals are ends in themselves, who may not be used against their will for social purposes….

The so-called “right” to medical care is quite different. It is not merely the right to act?i.e., to seek medical care, and engage in exchanges with providers, free from third party interference. It is a right to a good: actual care, regardless of whether one can pay for it. The alleged right to medical care is one instance of a broader category known as welfare rights. Welfare rights in general are rights to goods: for example, a right to food, shelter, education, a job, etc. This is one basic way in which they are quite different from liberty rights, which are rights to freedom of action, but don’t guarantee that one will succeed in obtaining any particular good one may be seeking….

If I have such a right, some other person or group has the involuntary, unchosen obligation to provide it. I stress the word “involuntary.” A right is an entitlement.

He then summarized,

…a political system that tries to implement a right to health care will necessarily involve: forced transfers of wealth to pay for programs, loss of freedom for health care providers, higher prices and more restricted access by all consumers, a trend toward egalitarianism, and the collectivization of health care. These consequences are not accidental. They follow necessarily from the nature of the alleged right.

[my emphasis added in all above] Note the highlighted phrase, “free from third party interference.” The recently passed law does what? It interferes with our liberty rights of both “life” and “pursuit of happiness” by restricting or abrogating the ability of individuals to seek out the health care they want.

Finally, he clearly explained that

…any attempt to implement a “right” to health care necessarily sacrifices our genuine rights of liberty. We have to choose between liberty rights and welfare rights. They are logically incompatible. It is because I believe in the rights of liberty that I say there is no such thing as a right to health care. So I want to end by explaining why I think the rights of liberty are paramount, and by trying to anticipate some of the questions and objections you may have.

The rights of liberty are paramount because individuals are ends in themselves. We are not instruments of society, or possessions of society. And if we are ends in ourselves, we have the right to be ends for ourselves: to hold our own lives and happiness as our highest values, not to be sacrificed for anything else.

penguin2

Loved your example of Dr. Baker and the route to enslavement. This applies to every profession, job or service provider in some way. Being forced to give goods or services, not of our own free will, is slavery. The other side to that, is those who take or demand without payment or consequences, keep taking.

The Left, in order to further their agenda, promoted political correctness, equal outcome (affirmative action), and victimhood to bring us to this point. Once you have people believing in their victimhood, they rarely give it up. Encouraged dependency on the part of one, allows for power and control on the part of the other. Ironically, the victim, demanding rights they have not earned, does not see that they have become slaves themselves until it is too late. Thus, the Left has made the demand for freedom seem like a crime. Wonder how all of those who demand these things of others – without earning, paying or accepting the consequences of their behavior – will handle life when the well runs dry.

You write great essays.

http://beaglescout.wordpress.com Beaglescout

You are well on the way to an excellent essay of your own, Lady Penguin! Thanks for saying nice things about mine.
kyoufuu

I had a debate recently with a progressive acquaintance who claimed, basically, that free stuff is owed to the most underpriveleged of society (African Americans, though his belief was more keyed towards helping all the poor) by the rest of us because of the sordid history of our country. Being more or less a believer in “rational self-interest” myself, I argued that it is the duty of every man to provide for himself and to care for those closest (friends/family). His counter was, again, that history made this impossible and that it is our responsibility to help until “things are better.”

When I asked him if, using this philosophy, we’d still be following this course of action in 100 years, he could not answer. The worst part was that he didn’t think it would be a bad thing if this were the case.

I tried to make two basic arguments with him:
1) That we’ve been going down this path for a long time now, using ever expanding progressive policies, and things have not gotten better.
2) That promoting this mentality only serves to make slaves of the producers who must give what they earn, and it makes slaves of the beneficiaries by making them subservient to the whims of a very whimsical government.

His response was unwavering from his original argument.

I believe fully that the history of slavery in this country is tragic, but I also believe that what’s equally tragic is the notion that the only remedy was to swing in the oppostie direction.

What’s that old saying about giving a man a fish?

penguin2

with a person who was shortchanged in their education. It is a false premise about what is “owed” to others because of our history in this country or any other. Setting aside the tragedy of slavery in our history, man has enslaved others from the beginning of time. People who stay stuck in that mantra, will never be free; they are enslaved to their own victimhood.

Millions of us have immigrant ancestors that came to this country, after the Civil War; Ellis Island is a lovely, beautiful and soul stirring place to visit. They came poor with only the possessions they could carry; they were discriminated against, “no Irish need apply,” Countless examples exist, but the real Sin and crime that the Left and the Dems have visited on minorities, IMO, is the idea that they are victims, it fosters dependency and powerlessness. Assisting someone to move toward independence, as in your example of teaching someone to fish, instead of coming by for the daily ration…feeds them forevermore and is not dependent on the largess of the master, because that is exactly what the government has become – The Master.

The most noble and lovely gift this country has given to everyone who has come ashore and those that are born here, is the opportunity to be free. To trade that precious gift is to move onto the plantation, or in the old days, the feudal lord’s fiefdom. We must continue to educate and remind people about packing their bags and moving onto a piece of ground of their own.

kyoufuu

As was evident in his suggestion that to “truly understand” history I had to read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.”

I tried to bring up the point that my own anscestors from Ireland suffered discrimination at the hands of “the natives” (despite my handle, I am not japanese). He considered this a moot point, since their suffering had not been as long or as persistent as that of other people. It was amusing to me that suffering must be quantified to be meaningful.

penguin2

Thus the “debt” is never canceled or stamped “paid in full.” I’m beginning to think of it as chronic extortion, blackmail. The more we pay it, the greater and longer the demand for payment goes on.

I was thinking about the “free stuff” argument of your acquaintance. Next time, see what he says if you point out the difference between homes that are subsidized and rented vs real home ownership. Ask if he has ever seen the difference in the neighborhoods. Those that work for what they have, and earn the fruits of their own labor, appreciate it and take care of it more, whether it is a house or a television set in the living room. Are we not going to take better care of an item we worked hard to obtain, vs were given? The irony, the more people are “given”, the more they demand and one cannot satisfy them.

We have been weakened by over 40yrs. of the Great Society.
kyoufuu

http://www.thediscerningconservative.com discerningconservative

A beautifully written masterpiece. Recommended.
http://www.laborunionreport.comandhttp://www.laborunionreport.blogspot.com LaborUnionReport

The following is something I read years ago that stuck with me:

Most people who oppose socialized medicine do so on the grounds that it is moral and well-intentioned, but impractical; i.e., it is a noble idea?which just somehow does not work. I do not agree that socialized medicine is moral and well-intentioned, but impractical. Of course, it is impractical?it does not work?but I hold that it is impractical because it is immoral. This is not a case of noble in theory but a failure in practice; it is a case of vicious in theory and therefore a disaster in practice. I want to focus on the moral issue at stake. So long as people believe that socialized medicine is a noble plan, there is no way to fight it. You cannot stop a noble plan?not if it really is noble. The only way you can defeat it is to unmask it?to show that it is the very opposite of noble. Then at least you have a fighting chance.

The rest of the essay is here: http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?id=13873

Flagstaff

Very appropriate.
http://beaglescout.wordpress.com Beaglescout

I’ve read it and passed it on to a couple progressives and independents. My favorite section was this one:

“In medicine, above all, the mind must be left free. Medical treatment involves countless variables and options that must be taken into account, weighed, and summed up by the doctor’s mind and subconscious. Your life depends on the private, inner essence of the doctor’s function: it depends on the input that enters his brain, and on the processing such input receives from him. What is being thrust now into the equation? It is not only objective medical facts any longer. Today, in one form or another, the following also has to enter that brain: ‘The DRG administrator [in effect, the hospital or HMO man trying to control costs] will raise hell if I operate, but the malpractice attorney will have a field day if I don’t?and my rival down the street, who heads the local PRO [Peer Review Organization], favors a CAT scan in these cases, I can’t afford to antagonize him, but the CON boys disagree and they won’t authorize a CAT scanner for our hospital?and besides the FDA prohibits the drug I should be prescribing, even though it is widely used in Europe, and the IRS might not allow the patient a tax deduction for it, anyhow, and I can’t get a specialist’s advice because the latest Medicare rules prohibit a consultation with this diagnosis, and maybe I shouldn’t even take this patient, he’s so sick?after all, some doctors are manipulating their slate of patients, they accept only the healthiest ones, so their average costs are coming in lower than mine, and it looks bad for my staff privileges.’ Would you like your case to be treated this way?by a doctor who takes into account your objective medical needs and the contradictory, unintelligible demands of some ninety different state and Federal government agencies? If you were a doctor could you comply with all of it? Could you plan or work around or deal with the unknowable? But how could you not? Those agencies are real and they are rapidly gaining total power over you and your mind and your patients.

In this kind of nightmare world, if and when it takes hold fully, thought is helpless; no one can decide by rational means what to do. A doctor either obeys the loudest authority?or he tries to sneak by unnoticed, bootlegging some good health care occasionally or, as so many are doing now, he simply gives up and quits the field.” (The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, NAL Books, 1988, pp. 306-307)

Any mandatory and comprehensive plan will finish off quality medicine in this country?because it will finish off the medical profession. It will deliver doctors bound hands and feet to the mercies of the bureaucracy.

That is an perfect picture of what the Healthcare Highjack bill will do.

Menlo

And the Democrats just took it away, as they have been moving to do for decades now.

When health care is a right, you don’t take it away from people who already have access to it.

http://beaglescout.wordpress.com Beaglescout

And now you have a legal duty to pay a lot of money to the government for nothing, all because of a pack of lies.

Menlo

If health care is a right, then the government cannot take it away. Any attempt to redistribute it deprives some people of the right to health care.

Of course, I’m not sure I will be paying a lot of money to the government myself since I will not buy insurance or pay the “penalty.” I suspect there are all kinds of other new taxes though that may serve as indirect taxes.

http://beaglescout.wordpress.com Beaglescout

And the responsibility of staying healthy to the best of your ability, or not. The other right is your property right to the insurance plan you already had. That is what is being stolen from you by this horrible bill.

Menlo

Whatever right they claim to give is the very one they take away. Their hypocrisy on this issue is where my signature line came from.

gekster

where does it say the government shall make you healthy, wether you like it or not.

Menlo

It’s just like the right to property. People’s right to property doesn’t mean the government supplies it.
gekster

“If health care is a right, then the government cannot take it away.”

All I’m asking is who do you think made health care a right?
Or who will make it a right?
Menlo

Perhaps I could have worded it differently as in a right to freely contract for health care? Or similarly as Beaglescout said, the right to keep the health insurance one owns (by virtue of having paid for it).
gekster

Who did or will say health care is a right.
aesthete

The voluntary exchange of services between two consenting adults is a right (or rather, is the logical extension of the right to property), and would include the right to healthcare.

What Democrats are talking about when they say “a right to healthcare”, is a moral imperative to expropriate the property, labor, and resources of others (or whatever else it takes) to provide adequate (a nebulously-defined term which will always remain relative to advances in medical science) healthcare for those who don’t have access to said healthcare. And they accuse us of trying to legislate morality…
kyoufuu

It’s a perversion of the concept of “rights.” The left is attempting to conflate “right to” with “ability to seek.” Basically, if I am sick, I have the ability to seek health care. If I am stupid, I have to ability to seek knowledge (via the internet, if I so choose). But there is no right to health care or the internet.

There’s only a functional extension of our rights. Rights are concepts, and the function is how we put them into practice. I have a right to liberty and property, but not the “right” to a car to get me places. The car is the function by which I exercise those rights.

The list can go on and on of things the left couldl claim we have a right to. It doesn’t make them so.
aesthete
http://www.criterionchemical.com Chemical Sam

The operative words being VOLUNTARY (by choice), and EXCHANGE (a trade), which necessitates a CONSENUAL agreement, a contract, perhaps even a promise or a convenant.

Human rights don’t require Volunteering, Exchanges or Consent.

Brian Simpson

made by Birdmojo back in the old RS2.0 days.

A negative right is the right to be left alone despite doing X. So, for example, if you have the right to criticize a government without the government showing up at your house and beating you up, you have free speech.

If you have the right to hand out pamphlets explaining how the Rothchilds run everything without the government coming and beating you up, you have freedom of the press.

If you have the right to live in a house with a roommate without the government coming to your house and beating you up, you have freedom of assembly. And so on.

Positive Rights, however, are rights *TO* something that someone else ostenably owns. Like, say, a right to food. Hey, I grew this wheat. What gives you the right to it? I got this degree in medicine, what gives you the right to an hour of my time for free? I spent 200 million dollars developing this pill to allow increased bloodflow… what gives you the right to a free bottle?

So on and so forth.

Why yes, I did think it good enough to bookmark.

aesthete

You *are* an old-timer

And yes, that is a great explanation of the difference between the two.

JSobieski

nt

CincoSolas_del_Bronx

However, he and I continued an intermittent, private, friendly conversation for some time thereafter, centered on our theological differences.

I was just thinking of him today, actually, re a recent thread of EPU’s. One of birdmojo’s contributions was his presentation of an argument which the resident evangelicals could never crack–due to their having all but abandoned the ancient redemptive-historical hermeneutic and the covenantal theology it issues–namely, what determines the validity of appealing to particular aspects of Mosaic law for social policy. His arrival at natural law being the only solution, though as a semi-atheist he would not justify it in biblical terms, actually is nearly the identical conclusion that the reformational Christian arrives at biblically.

JSobieski

I would enjoy getting back in touch with him. Any suggestions on how I can do so?
CincoSolas_del_Bronx

I’ve contacted him and he would like to talk as well. I can send him your address if you’d like, but would rather not put mine up here as I have only a work address. If you want to temporarily embed yours in your profile, let me know and I will send it to him. Unless someone has a better idea.
JSobieski

I put my e-mail address in my profile. Please forward on the info to the bird-man.
CincoSolas_del_Bronx

http://beaglescout.wordpress.com Beaglescout

They seem designed to denigrate real rights and convince people that welfare rights are even better.

JSobieski

Freedom of speech doesn’t mean I get to demand my own radio show.

The right to bare arms doesn’t mean someone else pays for my gun.

If healthcare is somehow a right, it is simply that government can’t interfere in my pursuit of health care.

Any right vis a vis the government and me is a restraint/prohibition on government.

The only affirmative rights we have is government protecting us from other countries and other citizens. All rights with respect to the relationship between government and an individual citizen are negative rights, or rights comprising of restrictions on government.
Flagstaff

academic terms. I’ve seen it somewhere else just today. The “negative” connotation is partly why Kelley (above) used the terms liberty rights and welfare rights.

You are born with liberty rights. Nobody gives them to you. They include the rights that the Bill of Rights enumerates for the purpose of clearly forbidding the government from touching them. The “free press” is the only enumerated right that protects an industry, but what it really does is specifically note that the individual right of free speech includes written public speech. Note that amendment 10 mentions the “powers” of the governments, not the rights of governments.

You acquire welfare rights as a result of laws being passed. The government gives them to you. Also known as “entitlements.”

belcatar

You might think this is common sense. I made a similar argument in a letter to my congressman a while back. My argument was that if health care is a right, the government will have to use force on someone. Either that force will be used on the doctor to treat patients, or the force will be used on the people to extract the money to pay the doctor.

It looks like Mr. Michaud chose the latter course.

I had a similar argument with a co-worker last year, but it was about education. She contended that people have a right to education. I said no. People have a right to pursue education, but no one is obligated to provide it for them. What we have with public education, once again, is the latter course, with taxes forcibly extracted from the people to pay educators, who have a captive audience thanks to mandated school attendance.

And we all know how well THAT has worked out.

http://beaglescout.wordpress.com Beaglescout

Home education, tutors, or a small town that gets together and hires a single school teacher for a one-room school will work. Once the school is large enough to have a professional administrator the parents are no longer responsible for their children’s education. That’s where it goes wrong.

Cheetah772

If one is in an accident, he cannot be denied medical care even if he has no insurance at all. That is what emergency rooms are all about. No one may be refused healthcare if one is seriously in need of it. All of this was before Obamacare.

HOWEVER, obtaining health insurance is a privilege, not a right, because it is a commodity provided by private sector. It is something that cannot and shouldn’t be guaranteed or provided by government. Any form of insurance requires sufficient capital and consumers paying monthly preniums, not having enough of that will mean the prices must go up. If government institutes price controls like Obamacare does, then the price of medical care will only go up.

Furthermore, expanding insurance coverage to 30 million new consumers will also mean a shortage of doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals. Therefore, the price will also go up. We all have the right to healthcare, but we cannot expect to obtain that for free, and it is something government cannot provide.

JSobieski

But the federal government does not guarantee there will an an ER within a reasonable distance from your house.

Nor does the government guarantee that you will receive competent treatment, or that no expense will be spared in treating you.

The “right” to healthcare is VERY limited.

Cheetah772

But nowadays, it seems that people are confused on the definition of health care. From the media, it sounds like people are turned away from any type of health care in large numbers, and that no poor person or family gets any type of health care, which is simply not true.

There is a plethora of organizations out there that provide health care to poor families who are uninsured and below the poverty lines. However, it is up to the individual needing health care to seek out and receive that service. Government cannot do that for everybody, and let’s face it, neither it should be Mr. Nanny State. If individuals are unwilling to seek out such type of heath care, then the blame belongs to them, not other taxpayers or government.

http://beaglescout.wordpress.com Beaglescout

In the technical terms of Natural Law, what you have described is legislation that no hospital may turn away a patient for lack of ability to pay. It is not a Right. It is License to access, whether or not you can pay for it, granted to you by means of legislation.

http://slcliberty.blogivists.com randy streu

not to EXPECT it.

johnminehan

However, under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, state constitutions could recognize such a right and groups of people could come together contractually to avail themselves of such a right.

Additionally, governments (at all levels) have some duty to ensure the public health.

I think the consensus in Health Economics is this is best done not through direct government intervention (as in Great Britain, Canada and Australia) but through a system of laws and (REASONABLE!) regulations. The current (pre-HCR) US system was probably optimal in that regard, although there was too much government intervention, especially with the influence of the Medicare Fee Schedule.,

RS

MEMBER DIARY

Is there a Right to Healthcare?

COMMENTS

ALL

COMMENTS

POPULAR

#RSRH

PICK YOUR STATE & GET LOCAL