We commend also the WSJ piece by "Theodore Dalrymple," the pen name of a British physician who aptly analyzes the ill-conceived and executed notion of a "right" to health care. Along the way he notes such obvious but timely points as these:
- When benefits are conceived as rights, government must grant them by coercing the populace.
- Health care is not more fundamental to human existence than other goods or products, like food, clothing and shelter.
- Asserting a right to health care seems to leave people without an ability to imagine why health care ought to be provided apart from the assertion of a right.
- The question ought to be not about rights but organization: how can we best deliver health care? In that light, America needs fixing, but Britain is much worse off.
- A "right" to health care has produced an even more unequal delivery of health care to the UK population, in what Dalrymple calls "the dirtiest, most broken-down hospitals in Europe."
4 comments:
Doesn't the fact that people die without (certain types of) medical care make it more fundamental to human existence than clothing and shelter?
No, because if they didn't have food or shelter, they'd already be dead before they had the condition that created the need for medical care, and even while getting the medical care, they still need food and shelter. Some people need medical care sometimes to live. All people need food and shelter at all times to live.
I didn't say "food or shelter," I said "clothing and shelter."
OK, sorry for the oversight. We'll still argue that in most climes, all people die if naked while some die if untreated. Certainly SWNID would die of embarrassment. Same is especially true of shelter. But the larger point is to show that in a hierarchy of needs, medical care isn't at the top, yet this and not the higher-order survival matters is rhetorically labeled a "right."
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