Theodore Dalrymple is a long time Physician in Britain and writes in The Wall Street Journal in an attempt to explain to us that there is no such thing as a 'right to health care'. As you know, medical care is provided by doctors and nurses and technicians that are people like you and me. They went to school and made something of their lives - they provide a service - their job is to treat our medical conditions FOR PAY. Why do we pay them? These doctors and nurses also have to earn a living like you do and like I do. So if you have a right to health care simply because you were born then that means that another person HAS to provide it to you. Now the government steps in and says since health care is a right this service will be centralized and run by the government so that we can be sure that everyone gets the health care that they need. What could be more false than this.
If the government is to provide health care how can they know how much to provide, how many doctors will be needed, what the payments should be, who should be seen for what conditions etc. etc. All these decisions need to be made in the market place otherwise the government run health care will cause scarcity as it has in Canada and in Britain...besides also delivering mediocre if not downright BAD care.
The only rights any individual has and which is enshrined in our founding documents are the rights to one's life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. This is so profound a statement that I believe to this day that not many people understand this. The job of governments is to protect these rights - NOT to invent new ones that have to be provided by others. I have a right to find a doctor who agrees to treat me if I pay for it but I don't have the right to demand it of anyone. Neither do you.
If there is a right to health care, someone has the duty to provide it. Inevitably, that “someone” is the government. Concrete benefits in pursuance of abstract rights, however, can be provided by the government only by constant coercion.
People sometimes argue in favor of a universal human right to health care by saying that health care is different from all other human goods or products. It is supposedly an important precondition of life itself. This is wrong: There are several other, much more important preconditions of human existence, such as food, shelter and clothing.
Everyone agrees that hunger is a bad thing (as is overeating), but few suppose there is a right to a healthy, balanced diet, or that if there was, the federal government would be the best at providing and distributing it to each and every American.
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?
If, on the other hand, the right to health care did not exist in those benighted days, how did it come into existence, and how did we come to recognize it once it did?
...After 60 years of universal health care, free at the point of usage and funded by taxation, inequalities between the richest and poorest sections of the population have not been reduced. But Britain does have the dirtiest, most broken-down hospitals in Europe.
There is no right to health care—any more than there is a right to chicken Kiev every second Thursday of the month. (Read at WSJ).
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