Is healthcare a right or a responsibility

Rights, what are they? How do we get them? Today we hear many people saying that universal access to health care is a right. Is that really true?

It would seem to me that whatever rights we have we are born with.  A gift from God, or just something that everyone naturally has. No person or government can bestow any right to anyone, they can only restrict the rights of people.

It also seems to me that whatever rights we do have must have existed for as long as mankind.  In other words, we didn’t suddenly gain some new right in 1912 or any other year in the past.  I state this just to be sure we do not try to claim we have new rights due to advances in technology. Our rights are set in stone and not changeable by men, governments or technology.

Now granted, people have had their natural rights restricted/removed and or restored at various times , usually by some government, king, ruler or revolution. Therefore the rights that one could exercise have changed over time but no new rights have been granted or created, either by god or nature.

In these United States of America our constitution says, we all , black, white ,brown, yellow, man, women, have the following specific individual rights.

• 1st  amendment:
  • Right to speak our mind, free speech
  • Right to worship the religion of our own choice
  • Right to publish (the press) our thoughts and distribute those thoughts to anyone who will listen.
  • Right to peaceably assemble with other citizens
  • Right to petition the government for redress of grievances
• 2nd Amendment:
  • Right to own and carry guns.
• 4th Amendment:
  • Right to be secure as a person and on own property and papers and effects.
• 5th Amendment:
  • Right to not testify against ourselves
  • Right to not be deprived of our life, liberty or property without due process of law.
  • Right to not have our property taken for public use without just compensation
• 13th Amendment:
  • Right to not be enslaved or forced into involuntary service, except as a punishment for a crime.
• 19th Amendment  :  Right to vote

I do not believe the constitution gave us those rights. It simply enumerated them in writing as to be sure no one would assume otherwise. It was a written statememt acknowledging their existence and insuring that the new government would not attempt to restrict them in any way.

In the declaration of independence the following statement appears.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men/women are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that amoung these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

This statement reaffirms, that as humans we have a right to our life, a right to our liberty and the right to pursue happiness. It makes no assumption of attaining happiness however.

All of our rights seem to have at least one thing in common. They do not require someone else to do anything other than leave us alone. They may require person to not do something, such as not preventing you from doing what you want, but they never require any person to actually do something. Lets say that again,  your rights never force anyone else to do any actions on your behalf, just to not do certain actions.  The basic tennet of a person’s rights are, just leave me alone and get out of my way.

If your rights required another person to actually do something, as opposed to not doing something, then that other person’s rights must by definition have been diminished. That is because your rights would have empowered you to control their life in someway. The most basic right of all is owning one’s own life.  If someone else has a right to force you to do something you are effectively a slave who does not own his or her life.

But you say, my boss or my spouse tells me what to do all the time. That may be true, but it is only a privilege you grant them for some service or thing of value you get from them in return.  You can always revoke that privilege, if you can’t then you must indeed be a slave.

This quote from Thomas Jefferson sums up individual rights very well.

“Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law,’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.”

That same quote described in my own words says, Liberty in it’s most generous terms means the right to do whatever your will demands you do, but your Liberty will always be constrained by the equal rights of others.

Getting back to the idea that any form health care is a human right. First we have to agree that health care, as a service, is the result of someones labor. Someone has to do something to provide you with this thing called good health care. A person’s labor is by definition his or her own property. In the simplest terms, if I have a right to health care I have a right to the labor of someone else. If by my right he or she is forced to do what I want, then he or she must be my slave.

But you say no no, the government will pay the person to provide me with good health care.  Therefore if the person is getting fair compensation isn’t that within the guidelines of our constitution.

That argument seems to ignore the following.

1. What if suddenly no one wanted to be a doctor or nurse, who gets to decide who must do that? Does the government get to decide? Is that liberty or socialism.  If no one volunteers how will you get your right satisfied?
2. How will the government get the money to pay. Do you force people to give money to the doctor for you? Income taxes do just that, they are involuntary contributions of another person’s property. Because it pays for something not associated with the payer there is no fair compensation.

It is clear to me that for one person to be provided health care as a right another person must placed into involuntary service to provide the labor or money needed. Clearly then it can not be a right. No matter how good it may make someone feel or how needy a person is. The only solution in a free country is voluntary charity, forcing one person to provide a service to another person is not liberty but slavery. Your rights can not override mine no matter how needy you are.

The truth is simply this. A person’s health care is the responsibility of that person. Just like obtaining food, clothing, housing, etc is each person’s responsibility. If someone is not capable of living up to that responsibility then they must rely on someone elses charity, not the force of government to obtain those things.

If we are a nation governed under our constitution with liberty and justice for all, then nothing can be a right that requires one person to be forced to work for another.

Paul Upson

This entry was posted on September 14, 2009 at 9:37 pm and is filed under Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.