I've not really been paying much attention to the Presidential Race for 2008. However, I have seen that THE BIG issue this season is going to be Health Care. Many of the candidates on both sides of the aisle seem to be spouting some kind of rhetoric that people have a "right" to health care.
Our society has become too squeamish to talk about human life in terms of trade-offs. However, trade-offs are an inescapable fact in every aspect of life, including human health and human life. The problem is that in our "feeling" and emotional society, anyone who talks about these trade-offs when life is at stake is likely to be denounced as someone lacking in compassion, if not cruel. This squeamishness is oft confused with humanity. But what are the costs of this humanity, especially when it comes to a "right" to health care?
What is a "right?" Well, a right is a guarantee of access to a certain benefit or entitlement. There are two types of "rights." Some rights are alienable, meaning they could be sold or granted. Other rights are natural (or inalienable) rights that are conferred upon a person just by the mere fact that he is a person. So, there are rights that are conferred upon the citizenry by the government and then there are a set of inalienable rights that can be thought of as being inherited.
We see clearly in our Declaration of Independence that our Founding Fathers thought that all men have been given a basic set of human rights that were granted by the Creator and not by any man. They then listed three, but the verbiage insinuates that there are more natural rights than were listed. According to them, every man has a natural right to life, to liberty, and to pursue happiness.
Most people would agree that inalienable rights supersede granted rights. In other words, the government (or society using the force of government) cannot grant an alienable right to its citizenry by infringing upon one of the inalienable rights.
The problem, therefore, with a "right" to health care is that it is blatantly an alienable right that is infringing on an inalienable right. In order for a person to receive health care some other individual must expend either his life or his property. When a doctor spends time treating a patient, he is actually investing a portion of his life in that patient. He has chosen (self-determined) to trade that portion of his life for a certain amount of money (a representation of a portion of the patient's life) . At some point he also chose to trade a certain portion of his money for supplies (which are his property) with which to treat patients. If a patient is granted an alienable right to health care, it comes at the expense of the doctor's inalienable right to life and the pursuit of property. To have a "right" to health care means that you have a "right" to a portion of someone else's life or property.
And that is the trade off that we cannot talk about. Can we force medical professionals to provide treatment to sick and dying people? If we say yes, then to grant the right of health care basically turns all medical professionals into slaves. If we remove our emotions from the debate, we can see that the long term effects of forced work is worse for our society than the dying of people. Everybody will die. But slavery can dehumanize a society for generations.
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