Is There a ‘Right’ to Health Care?
Is there a right to health care? Theodore Dalrymple says no. He questions (but doesn’t answer) where such a “right” might come from. He does say there is no basis in history for such a right. And furthermore, when the right is recognized, as in Britain, the result, in respect to the quality of the health care provided, is a disaster. Even the Greeks, he says, living in Britain, return to Greece to see the doctor.
He says there is no right, but he doesn’t have an argument. The best he can do is, “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?”
I too question whether there is a right to health care. I don’t think there is one, anymore than there is a right to anything. Rights were not there to begin with. We make them up, we don’t discover them. They are not like Newton’s laws or Darwin’s evolutionary principles.
People decide while living together, as we have in the Western world over centuries, that so-called “natural rights,” are only ways of our living together that are important to us, such as freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and assembly etc., and that we ought as much as possible respect and preserve these sorts of things (or rights).
But how does one get from a “natural right” like this, from the right to free speech, to what I would call a “reasoned” right to health care? One doesn’t, I don’t think. There is no road between the two.
President Franklin Roosevelt’s so-called Second Bill or Rights, which includes rights to food, shelter, and jobs, as well as health care, comes rather from his reasoning on the failure of too many to provide these things for themselves.
For we just don’t like to see the streets filled with the hungry and the homeless, and being relatively affluent ourselves we naturally (?) want to provide for them, share with them our relative wealth. And for most of our history, and in fact right up until the present time in most of the world, we have done so, not by means of government programs but by our charitable actions.
But then, at some point, probably at the time of the Great Depression in our own history, charitable actions were no longer sufficient to provide for the homeless and jobless among us. We decided that those of us who had more ought to be obliged, through taxation, to share with those who had less.
Perhaps it was at that time that someone among us even went so far to say that those who had less, and even more so those without, had a right to that “more.”
Perhaps that was the beginning of entitlements. Under FDR, there was Social Security, not really an entitlement as we did pay for it ourselves over the course of our working lives.
Social Security was so successful that later, under President Lyndon Johnson, it was expanded to include real entitlements, the most costly being the “right” to health care for the old and the poor, called respectively Medicare and Medicaid.
These were entitlements in that the beneficiaries didn’t have to pay the full cost themselves over the course of their working lives. And the expansion of rights, the increased care provided, is still going on in spite of our seeming inability to fund it adequately.
First Social Security, and then entitlements, or welfare payments of various kinds, have largely replaced, or at least shoved to the side the significance of charitable acts. Why? for two reasons. One, there’s not enough charitable acts to go around. And two, charity is considered, in the eyes of the beneficiary, demeaning.
It needn’t have been that way, anymore than caring for our young is demeaning to the young.
But more important the well-being of our old people should never have been placed ahead of our obligation to provide for our young — the very thing which is happening at the present time when our entitlement obligations to the elderly poor prevent us from caring adequately for the disadvantaged and also impoverished young people.
The mistake we made was not to help our oldest and poorest citizens, but to let what we were doing for them become an entitlement, a payment which was our obligation and their right. Government charity should have always included duties and responsibilities on the part of the recipients. Welfare, but you will have to work. No free right.
Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and perhaps whatever revised health care insurance program comes out of the present discussions going on in the Congress, have become huge financial obligations upon all of us who have the ability to pay, and will be especially huge obligations on our children in the years to come. It’s not at all clear now that either we or our children can meet these obligations without growing our already trillion dollar deficits.
We’re at the point now where universal free health care, not unlike universal free public schooling, is assumed to be everyone’s right. The story of how we got there still needs to be told. During the last presidential election the major candidates certainly assumed this right, and President Obama is now acting on that assumption.
What is particularly troubling is that expanded rights seem to have brought about diminished responsibilities, almost pushed them out of the picture. An unmarried teen age mother, a jobless young man and father will readily talk up their rights to health care and much else, but not readily or willingly will they recognize and accept their responsibilities.
