Healthcare is not a right

No matter the fate of the Republican Party’s efforts to repeal last year’s health care reform act, this country is not finished debating the issue.

Recent developments — including increasingly threatening court challenges to the law and increasingly negative public opinion — have ensured that we haven’t heard the last of the health care discussion.

Although that surely means we’re in for even more inanity from politicians and pundits on all sides of the issue, I’m glad for this reason: The renewed debate offers a chance to clear up some of the more harmful misconceptions surrounding this issue.

These misconceptions plague the debate at every level, which is why I plan to devote my next few columns to this issue.

In coming weeks, I will be addressing what I see as the true flaws with our current health care system and the ways last year’s reforms will exacerbate them.

I’ll also discuss the policies I believe should be implemented in order to bring truly beneficial reform to our health care system.

This week, though, I’d like to briefly reiterate and expand on an argument I made almost 18 months ago on these pages about the fundamental mistake most people make when debating health care.

That mistake is the failure to defend and properly understand individual rights.

I have argued that health care cannot be considered a right because it is, essentially, a good or service. Goods and services cannot be inherent rights because their provision requires the effort of other people, so making them rights implies that all people deserve to be provided with them even if those in a position to provide them are unwilling to do so.

That is, making health care a right deprives health care providers of their rights by declaring that they must provide their services whether they can expect to be compensated or not.

Others have countered that I am overlooking the all-important right to life mentioned in the Declaration of Independence and protected by the Constitution. Their claim is that the right to life implies a right to health care.

This, of course, perverts the meaning of the word “right” because no one can possess a right to violate the rights of another. If that were permissible, then any person who considered something necessary to the maintenance of his life could force someone else to provide it to him on the grounds that his right to life demands it.

As I intend to demonstrate in the coming weeks, the mistake of classifying health care as a right is one of the major reasons for the sorry state of our current quasi-state-run health care system.


E-mail: jarlower@indiana.edu