No "Right" to Healthcare

The following is a letter published in the New Jersey Star-Ledger on February 19, 2009, followed by my posted comments.

Affordable health care


The time is long overdue for America to catch up with most of the other industrialized nations in providing affordable quality healthcare.

When everyone can get the same kind of care that those in Congress already enjoy (on our dollars) then we will definitely be on the right track. Right now, we are paying top dollar and far too many of us are getting unsatisfactory care.

Health care is a necessity and a right for everyone and should be equally accessible to all regardless of their bank statement or social standing. That is what democracy truly looks like.
-- Diane Beeny, Westfield


My Response

Posted by Zemack on 03/06/09 at 7:59PM
The idea that healthcare is a right (Diane Beeny letter, 2/19/09) is wrong and a dangerous threat to freedom. Rights are a sanction of freedom of action...such as freedom of speech or religious practice...that are unalienable and possessed equally and at all times by all people, and which impose no unchosen obligations on others. This is one of the fundamental principles of America's founding, along with the idea that the government's proper role is to protect those rights. Rights are the natural birthright of each individual, not whimsical creations based upon need or "necessity".

Rights are not an automatic claim to the earnings, products, or services produced by others. The only way a government can guarantee a "right" to healthcare is by violating actual rights to life, liberty, and property...i.e., by assuming the totalitarian power to loot and enslave its citizens in order to pay for and make healthcare "equally accessible to all regardless of their bank statement or social standing". There is no other way. A government-guaranteed "right" to healthcare is indeed "what democracy truly looks like"...democratic fascism, that is, not the American concept of democratic republicanism limited by constitutionally protected individual rights.

Under the American concept of democracy, the natural unalienable individual rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence are constitutionally placed outside the power of the ballot box. Those rights are considered the natural birthright of each individual, not creations based upon the whims of any state, king, politician, or "society". No democratic majority (or its elected representatives) has the power to seize the earnings or property of private citizens to pay for some arbitrarily asserted "right" to healthcare simply by assembling a large enough voting block. Nor does any voting block have the power to place an entire industry under state control in order to force doctors and other healthcare professionals to provide that service according to the dictates of bureaucratic tyrants.

Under the American concept of individual rights, a person can acquire healthcare only through voluntary means, such as paying for it with one's own earnings either directly or through a prior contractual agreement such as insurance, or by voluntary private charity.

But American principles have been all but forgotten today, which is why we are steadily evolving toward the very enemy we defeated in World War II, fascism.