Is There a ‘Right’ to Health Care?

[Fran Hollar]

Is There a ‘Right’ to Health Care?
In Britain, its recognition has led to substandard care.
http://is.gd/22gft

By THEODORE DALRYMPLE

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.

The question of health care is not one of rights but of how best in practice to organize it. America is certainly not a perfect model in this regard. But neither is Britain, where a universal right to health care has been recognized longest in the Western world.

Not coincidentally, the U.K. is by far the most unpleasant country in which to be ill in the Western world. Even Greeks living in Britain return home for medical treatment if they are physically able to do so.

The government-run health-care system—which in the U.K. is believed to be the necessary institutional corollary to an inalienable right to health care—has pauperized the entire population. This is not to say that in every last case the treatment is bad: A pauper may be well or badly treated, according to the inclination, temperament and abilities of those providing the treatment. But a pauper must accept what he is given.

Universality is closely allied as an ideal, ideologically, to that of equality. But equality is not desirable in itself. To provide everyone with the same bad quality of care would satisfy the demand for equality. (Not coincidentally, British survival rates for cancer and heart disease are much below those of other European countries, where patients need to make at least some payment for their care.)

In any case, the universality of government health care in pursuance of the abstract right to it in Britain has not ensured equality. After 60 years of universal health care, free at the point of usage and funded by taxation, inequalities between the richest and poorest sections of the population have not been reduced. But Britain does have the dirtiest, most broken-down hospitals in Europe.

There is no right to health care—any more than there is a right to chicken Kiev every second Thursday of the month.

Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of Anthony Daniels, a British physician. He is a contributing editor to the City Journal.

[Fran Hollar]

The odd little truth about the health care rights issue is this: We all have access to it. We all have the right to quit a job that doesn't provide coverage and go get one that does. We all have the right pay for our health care from our own pockets, or to save up for the day that we need health care. We all have the right to deny ourselves the new cars, the costly trips, the cell phones, the satellite radios and TV's, in order to pay for health care coverage. The truth of the matter really is this: The American people have become a people absolved of the idea of personal responsibility. We truly believe that the government must take care of us and that we are not really responsible for our own welfare.

[Nobilis]

Actually, we don't.

My wife is disabled, with multiple expensive conditions. There's no way I could ever pay the tens of thousands of dollars that her treatment requires every year, not and feed, house, and clothe my family.

If it weren't for the fact that I work for a very large corporation that has the money to say to its insurance carrier that it MUST pay for pre-existing conditions, we'd be SOL. This also means that I can never go to work for a small company, because the cost of adding me to the insurance would be too high.

[Fran Hollar]

Actually, we don't you do. Each of your points are a choice that you made. I am not passing judgment on your choices but pointing out that they are choices that you are free to make.

Everything we do in life involves making choices. When we make choices we have to accept whatever consequences come with that choice. However, that does not change the reality that we are still free to make our own choices.

I wish you and your wife the best. I hope I will never have to make choices like you have described.

[Nobilis]

Right. I have the choice to divorce her, forcing her onto welfare and medicaid.

I have the choice to drop her off at her mother's house, so her mom can sell her house to pay for a few years of treatment.

So yes... I do have choices. You're correct in that regard.

But the cost of medical care for people who get truly sick is beyond the ability of a middle class income to save for. If you earn fifty thousand a year and bank a quarter of it (unheard of in our modern economy) and are lucky enough to earn for twenty years before you need to draw on it for medical expenses, you'll start your illness with roughly a quarter million in the bank.

At the rate my wife's medical bills come in, that would last about 12 years.

At the rate my friend Ann's medical bills come in, that would last about five years.

And that doesn't cover food, shelter, and clothing.

When that family that has saved and invested prudently finishes running through their savings, what do you say to them then? "Sorry, you should have saved more"?

[Fran Hollar]

I like the way you humanize your individual situation. I don't have the answer to your question.

What are your options under the status quo?

What would your ideal new status quo look like?

[Nobilis]

All I want, is for anonymous greedy people to stop making money off the suffering of others.

That's all.

[greg cryns]

"anonymous greedy people" - funny!

[greg cryns]

You like the way he humanizes his situation? Does that mean that Nobilis helped you understand the plight of the American public? Individual situation? Well, by golly, are we not all individuals?

"What are your options under the status quo? What would your ideal new status quo look like?
"

Sometimes you put stuff out there that no one can understand.

Obfuscating?

[Causarius]

Our Founding Fathers were mostly lawyers, and everyone has the right to see a lawyer...what if our Founding Fathers had been doctors?

Fran, I agree with you more than anyone else, but think about who you're defending.

This whole "health insurance reform" issue is such a big deal for one primary reason...the cost of it.

Health insurance costs have risen at outrageous rates, so fast that a decent portion of people cannot keep up.
Even the people who make the right choices and do what they have got to do to make sure they have health insurance are still being denied the care that they've been paying ridiculous insurance premiums to get.

There are horror stories all over if you just look.
There are cases of babies who are denied coverage because they are underweight and because they are overweight.
There are cases of people who have had coverage for medications, and then out-of-the-blue denied coverage for those medications.
There are cases where people are denied the only treatment that can save their lives, even when multiple doctors testify for the patients.

You have to realize that the health insurance industry does not exist to keep people healthy or to take care of them when they get sick, those companies only exist to bring a profit to the shareholders, and the best way to do that is to minimize costs and liabilities...and the best way to do that is to deny care whenever possible.
And you better believe that these insurance companies have teams that exist solely to find any reason to deny coverage.

Insurance companies spend billions on advertising, on overhead...the multi-million dollar salaries of CEO's, the expense of private jets where said CEO's are served meals on gold-plated dishes...think of how many peoples premiums go to pay for just these costs alone.

The elitists running these companies don't care about you and they have proven that they are too greedy and irresponsible (if not criminal) to be left to their own devices.

Now, I do not advocate for government-run health care...but single-payer is not necessarily government-run, just government-financed, and a single-payer system is what I support because it is the most cost effective.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but everyone is not entitled to their own facts...and the facts are:
The World Health Organization, in 2000, ranked the U.S. health care system as the highest/ in cost, 37th in overall performance, and 72nd by overall level of health (among 191 member nations included in the study).

A 2008 report by the Commonwealth Fund ranked the United States last in the quality of health care among the 19 compared countries.

How can you defend a system that is the most expensive and not even in the top 30 in terms of performance and level of health of the people and last in quality?

Even if you are against a public option (which I am, because "public option" is code for "windfall insurance company profits", and that solves nothing) and even if you are against single-payer...if you are intellectually honest then you will admit that there is plenty of room for improvement on the system that we have.

It's time to stop shilling for the ultra-wealthy superclass that sits at the top while so many Americans are wallowing in abjection.

[greg cryns]

While I generally agree with the cost issue as you put it and totally agree with your last sentence, I think most people just don't think the current system is fair or even moral. I think providing healthcare to all citizens is a moral imperative. The cost issue is something the politicians put forward so they don't have to talk about what is right or wrong.

[Gregory Lynne]

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.

Not so. If you/ your mother die in childbirth: food, shelter, and clothing are moot concerns. Just ask any midwife.

The resources which collectively provide the cornucopia from which all health care is drawn, is always a composite of the wealth of any nation. The intellectual and scientific acumen acquired by research and through experimentation and study of human lives and disease -- is a major portion of those resources. No individual or individual class of society holds the pedigree to this wealth.

If a nation sees human beings as evolutionary protegees of Darwin's worms: We might-as-well hang-up our arguments here-and-now.

If, however, a nation recognizes Divine favor toward its weakest citizens -- however slight -- there is hope of sharing the cornucopia.

Our nation, however, which has allowed itself the luxury of committing genocide against 50-million-plus of its weakest citizens -- now has to face the void/vacuum/black hole created by the absence of this army of 50-million-plus brave-and-determined-to-survive and gifted-souls!

Is there a "right to health care?" Excuse me: "Is there a right-to-life?" [Who needs health care after being torn to shreds?]

gplmw