The Right to Health Care?

This country was founded on the concept of God-given, unalienable, individual rights. In recent generations, however, at least since the Great Depression, the issue of rights seems a bit clouded.

I'm always hearing people claim a right to health care, a right to a home, a right to whatever else they want. While thinking about this in terms of health care, I discovered the source of the faulty logic of these claims.

When someone says he has a right to health care, he means someone else is obligated to care for him. If he has a right to a house, then others are obligated to build it for him, and still others are obligated to lend him the money to obtain it.

If we have a right to the work of medical professionals or insurance agents, then they essentially have no right to refuse to work. It means they have no choice of what to do with their lives. That makes them our slaves, because we sacrifice their right to liberty for our right to what we want or think we need.

Rights are supposed to be a guarantee of what you can do and what others cannot do to you. Now we are trying to make them into what others cannot do for themselves or what they must do for you.

The government pushes this concept of rights because it gives them more power. That is the opposite of individual rights, but the politicians can sell it because public amenities seem like door prizes to the people unable or unwilling to look beyond the immediate goodies. As long as the government isn't interfering with their personal lives, it can do what it wants with others.

How would you feel if the government demanded you to make less money than you currently do? That's what we're doing to the health insurance companies right now.

There's a lot of rhetoric out there about the companies taking advantage of people, refusing this or that, and so on and so forth. They make too much profit, they don't cover certain things, etc. That's why the government needs to step in and fix things.

Firstly, insurance companies don't force anyone to buy coverage. They're providing a service, not twisting arms. Only the government deals by force. Secondly, if we feel their service is inadequate, then we have a right to take our business elsewhere. We can even try to compete with them. However, we don't have the right to force them to business differently.

Insurance companies are already restricted by mandates and regulations. Now we're asking not only for more mandates and restrictions, but also for the government to spend a trillion or so dollars to compete with them.

In other words, we want to tie their hands and bring in an opponent with deeper pockets.

I can see why this doesn't disturb people who don't work in the industry. Who cares about their freedom, right? As long as we get what we want and the government's not taking our freedom, it's fine.

We think we're serving our "right" to health care, but we're merely continuing the tradition of feeding the crocodile. We can be happy because we're not the food. This time.