What is a Right to Healthcare, and How Can We Get More of That?

There is an awful lot of talk these days about rights. Every group claims to have “rights”—homosexuals, women, children—and we all claim to have rights to all sorts of things: clean air, quality childcare, and so on. But most of the time, the term “right” is a complete misnomer.

A “right,” as it is used in a political sense, means the freedom to do something without the government interfering in the exercise of that freedom. For example, the right of free speech means that one has the right to say what one wants, without fear of legal repercussion. Under the First Amendment to the Constitution, this right encompasses the right to voice any political opinion or even to burn a flag (strangely enough, since this is not, as I understand the term, “speech”). While the free speech right does have some limits, for the most part, the term “right” applies quite correctly.

But the other day I was talking to someone who expressed the opinion that everybody ought to have a “right” to medical care. Well, the right already exists; the government is not hindering anyone from obtaining medical care. But of course what they were really talking about was not a right at all, but an entitlement: “free” medical care. But medical care is patently not free; on the contrary, it is tremendously expensive.

Consequently, this loose use of the term “rights” is, in fact, destructive of real rights. By applying the term “rights” to what are entitlements, people are demanding all sorts of things that must come from somewhere. We are not talking about freedom at all. Instead, we are talking about an encroachment upon freedom: all of society must pay for these programs, thereby limiting the freedom we have to choose other ways to spend our money—privately or publicly. In the end, universal healthcare is the antithesis of a “right.”

And let’s take a look at the implications of this program even more closely. President-elect Obama wants a nationalized system in which everybody, regardless of resources, is entitled to adequate health care. Fine. Sounds dandy. But there are 305 million people in America. So where are we going to get this care, and how are we going to ensure its adequacy? According to the AMA, we can expect to have a shortfall of 85,000 to 200,000 health care providers by the year 2020. How do you provide everyone with something that there is not enough of?

This is the problem with nice-sounding pie-in-the-sky ideas that are spouted so glibly by politicians, and in particular by left-leaning politicians like Obama. Gosh, everyone should have a house; everyone should have plenty of food to eat; everyone should have a college education. Of course, nobody in politics has the huevos to say, outright, “Are you insane?” Because if you express any opposition to these programs, you are “insensitive” and “greedy.” Just because Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have a few billion dollars does not mean that, if they handed their wads over to scads of poor people, there would be enough of everything to go around.

Of course, the promise of universal health care is a message deliberately aimed at people who never think beyond the surface. Voters who favor these ideas would never vote for them if they ever seriously contemplated (or researched) what would be required to create such programs as a practical matter. How do you design a program intended to serve 305 million people who all have a different conception of what they want and need? How do you promise a limited resource to everyone, when American schools are not producing enough doctors and nurses, let alone individuals willing and able to empty a bedpan? And that’s just the tip of the iceberg; forget hospital beds and drugs. I am awestruck at confronting the bizarre reality that people who want free medical care for all hold a sincere and deluded belief that 535 members of Congress, only a handful of whom can even spell “MD,” will actually come up with a plan that even remotely fills every American’s medical care needs (not to mention, of course, all those illegal aliens whom our leftist brethren will not forsake). What is this judgment based on? Our government’s stellar record? Can American voters really be that willfully ignorant? What scares me is: apparently.

I oppose these grandiose programs because they are utterly unrealistic and simple-minded, and because, like every other government boondoggle, they are destined to be wasteful, inefficient, mired in bureaucracy, outrageously costly, ineffective, and destructive of our social fabric. I know that is a little redundant . . . have I left anything out? And what chaps me even more is: THIS HAS ALREADY BEEN TRIED BEFORE, AND IT HAS NEVER WORKED. Do people really think a 100% failure rate is just chance, or is that just because whoever tried it before didn’t do it right because they weren’t as smart as Americans are? The problem with socialist programs is not that they are ill-intentioned, it is that THEY DON’T WORK!

I sympathize with people who need medical care but cannot afford it. But how about taking a realistic assessment of what is going on in the current system, fixing what’s broken with the cost and delivery of services (like lawyers, malpractice insurance, and government paperwork), and finding a way to provide services to those who need them? How about just providing a lousy $10 billion in the federal budget to provide 1 million people with $10,000 worth of services per year? That ought to cover most of the problem. Because, if you get right down to it, it would be cheaper for all of us tax-paying Americans if we just up and paid the medical bills of those who cannot afford them, rather than hand over the whole shooting match to the federal government to screw up. How about it, anyone? Should I just start up a charitable organization that agrees to pay these bills? Okay, done. Problem solved.

By instituting a national one-size-fits-all system, we will encounter the same problems that every other country has encountered, only probably worse, because this is America, and we like to do things on a big scale, especially our failures. Because any time a privilege is free, it is abused, folded, spindled, and mutilated. Try this on for size: you exercise every day, keep your weight down, and eat your fruits and veggies. Your next door neighbor watches television all day, smokes, drinks, and eats junk food. Here’s a swell idea: why don’t you and he enter into a contract to share your medical costs, 50/50? Sounds fair, right? Uh huh. Welcome to socialized medicine.

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