The first step in my health care reform plan is simply this: recognizing that health care is not a right.
How can I be so cruel as to say that? How can anyone be so cruel as to say otherwise?
To say that health care is a right means that you have a right to someone else’s labour. Do others have a right to your labour, or is your labour your own, to use it as you see fit?
Communism is a system that holds that some have the right to the labour of others. Communism co-founder, Karl Marx, stated in 1875: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.“
I understand the well-meaning intentions of those who say that health care is, and should be, a right. However, a right is an entitlement. How can you be entitled to the work of a doctor, a nurse, or any other health professional, as a matter of birth?
If health care truly was a right, then that was quite the oversight by the Founding Fathers of the United States, in not including it in the Bill of Rights in 1789. But it wasn’t an oversight. They recognized that it wasn’t a right.
The consequence of recognizing that health care is not a right, I believe, is to put the focus back where it properly belongs, as to who is ultimately responsible for their own health — the individual. There are those who are unable to properly care for themselves, as there has been since the dawn of time. Those people should be appropriately cared for, as matter of public interest, not as a matter of right, as well as all others. But just because it’s in the public interest to take care of all individuals, doesn’t make it a right, nor necessitate the method of care.
These days, health care is often taken to mean expensive diagnostic equipment, treatment with expensive drugs, expensive private health care plans with high overhead, and unsustainable government health plans, such as Medicare, which, as I previously documented, cost 744% more by 1990 than previously estimated at its inception, in 1965.
Modern health care has regressed from the basic principles of the father of modern medicine, Hippocrates, who stated: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.“
Instead of a proactive, preventative approach to health by the individual, the focus has regressed to a reactive, expensive third-party approach, and this must change.
[...] November 21, 2009, I wrote the article, The first step in health care reform: recognizing that health care is not a right, wherein I [...]
[...] and Prisonplanet.com, or if he/she read any of these articles: “The first step in health care reform: recognizing that health care is not a right,” or “President Bill Clinton in 1996: [...]
The Right to Life does not entail that all citizens must be protected from any NON HUMAN threats, such as disease or maladies, not caused by human interaction. It only protects your life from human interaction that would endanger it.
I don’t think anyone wants to see somebody else do without essential health care that they need, but to imply that it is everyone’s obligation to provide that is sheer socialism and government tyranny.
So does mandatory health coverage mean that MY RIGHTS should be curtailed or obligated to pay for the diseases that other people have? NO.
More comments at http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/a6ytx/the_first_step_in_health_care_reform_recognizing/
Ninth Amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
Addresses rights of the people that aren’t in the constitution.
Likewise, one can infer from the most famous of passage of the Declaration of Independence that the fathers of this country did intend for Health Care to be a right:
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
Life: Health
Liberty: freedom from the burden of disease
Pursuit of Happiness: Healthy people are happy people.
Health as an individual right, yes. Health care, depending on others, I’d say no.