Resolved: Health Care Is a Right
“What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is on the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the mind of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor of metaphysics.”
So said Edmund Burke in 1790. It is not a new debate. As the most influential philosopher of our American Revolution, his counsel should be heeded.
Our Declaration of Independence assures each of us the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It may seem indisputable that health care is a “right” in that it may affect life or its loss. But there is a problem assigning a right to the public which entails servitude on the part of those entrusted to dispense it. The question was academic until the last 75 or so years, before which time medicine had little to offer the afflicted or dying. Now practitioners of the healing arts fix ill and broken patients every day, because they can and should. But that is done by contract, and whenever possible the practitioner deserves payment. Our social systems have evolved in the direction of a safety net for all, and few would argue otherwise. But to our political class a “right” to medical care means total takeover by the tax collectors of both the means of care and its payment. The contract is no longer between patient and caregiver. Already much care is mediated by insurance companies and there is continual conflict of interest among patients, employers, government and them.
Education may also be considered a “right” rather than a privilege, and generations ago we turned most of it over to the public sector but the product turned out by our schools has become a national scandal. Politicians rarely send their kids to public schools, just as they have no intention of forgoing their excellent health plan if they accomplish their intended takeover of our present health care system.
Please remember when you need a highly trained physician with rare skills, a trauma surgeon, oncologist, neurosurgeon or ICU doctor that he or she went into practice after a dozen or more years of training, probably in a great deal of debt, possibly with a family, and that you do not have a right to demand the services he or she offers, but in our great country you will get the care you need and more than likely the doctor will be paid, usually far less than deserved.
Do you think $1000 is too much for an MRI or CT scan? Is $5000 too much for an eye operation or cancer surgery? I’ve had them all and knowing the best and brightest were on the other side of the curtain was priceless. I hope our future generations have the same.