A clear demonstration of why health care isn’t and can’t be a right
Few things are as important in this country today as making sure people understand that health care is not a right. The very existence of the United States of America may hinge on it.
But what’s involved in conveying that message? I’ve written blog posts and columns for years now about it, and still I preoccupy myself with finding yet more effective ways of getting through.
Let’s try this. Let’s start with some things on which we’re all in agreement as to being rights, and see how it is that we have concluded thusly. I think that starts with how the average human being reacts to really visualizing what it means to have the right violated.
Let’s start with the right to life. If someone threatens you with gunshot or strangulation or bludgeoning or poisoning, I think you can see that the outrage is over a kind of theft. The violator is taking something you already have. You had your life, and along comes this being that is determined to take it away. Your life was yours. You didn’t have to go to a government agency or anyone else to get it. And, most importantly, your having it doesn’t depend on the labor of your fellow human being. You draw a breath because your determination and God’s grace make that possible.
Okay, on to the right to liberty. (And let’s be grown-ups here. This is not the forum to debate the claimed “right” to have sex with three partners at once with a king-sized spliff hanging out of your mouth.) If anyone interferes with your right to, say, marry the person of the opposite sex of your choice, apply to a given school for a particular degree, stroll down to your local Dairy Queen for a banana split, paint your house blue, go to central Iowa on vacation, or join the Democrat party – or, how about this one? – start a health insurance company, that person is in the wrong.
On to the pursuit of happiness. If someone interferes with your ambitions to make it as a folk singer, or to play tennis on Sunday morning, or give all your money to charity, that person is in the wrong.
You have rights to things that are naturally yours. How does this supposed right to health care fit into this model? For one thing, who gets to define the very term? There are Christian Scientists and others who do not go to surgeons or pharmacists and do not want to participate in a system that requires them to spend money on such activities.
So let’s say you get sick, or bust up your knee in a bike wreck. In our present arrangement, who is taking away your right to anything? For the sake of this scenario, let’s say you come down with a really exotic disease, and your research indicates that it just may kill you. You approach five different specialists and get price quotes on treatments. They’re quite high. You could never pay them out of pocket. You submit a claim to your insurance company. Its response is, “We can only pay for one night’s hospital stay. Your actual treatment is way beyond what you are covered for.”
You have a dilemma on your hands, to be sure, but has some right of yours been violated? Is there something that you had always had that is now being taken away willfully by someone?
Of course not.
People in such scenarios do indeed need care, not to mention compassion. But saying to the rest of us that we must forfeit our money – the operative term in that last phrase being our – to provide the skilled labor that such people need is a violation of our rights to do as we choose with what is ours.
I sincerely doubt that this is my last word on this subject, but I feel pretty good that I have come as close as a philosophical level will allow in formulating conclusive proof of something like this.
03.07.10
It doesn’t work
The Brit Freedom-Haters are trying to conceal the failure of the National Health Service.
03.06.10
TCM relishes opportunities like this – to demonize private business, that is
So TCM thinks, insurance companies raise premiums “arbitrarily,” does he?
When one looks at their profit margins, one can see that what they’re are actually doing is covering costs:
And if you don’t like the way your company is raising premiums, why don’t you go shopping for a company that doesn’t raise them so much?
Oh, that’s right. We can’t shop across state lines! Even though there are 1300-plus insurance companies in this country.
03.05.10
About that Canadian system . . .
One of them is a doctor shortage, which prompted Canadian planners to look at Eurpoean models, to which Germany responded, “Don’t be looking to us as something to emulate.”
Oh, and our northern neighbors can’t afford what they’re doing, either. They’re plagued by the same spending and deficit problems we are, and, just like our Freedom-Haters, continue to seize people’s money at gunpoint anyway, knowing full well it will never make up the difference.
Not only is it morally wrong, it doesn’t deliver
Time to revisit Free Market Cure’s Ten Myths about Single-Payer Health Care.
Really get your brain around the consequences
This is serious stuff. Play-time is over. We are talking about whether the United States of America will survive in the form in which it’s existed for 234 years.
Our enemy is playing for keeps. We must be relentless in fighting it.
To quit being the Stupid Party, one thing the GOP will need is some spine
Andy McCarthy on fear of being demagogued by FHers as the reason no fellow Pubs stood by Bunning. McCarthy also makes the point that, along with jobless benefits, another feature of this maeasure was preventing steep slashes in payments to Medicare doctors. Hell, those are the kinds of cuts they’ll be facing under TCM-care. Why not let them get a taste of the new order of things now?
Can you imagine how the fed-up populist groundswell would have cheered the Pubs if they’d come together on this?
The American people must have a choice between stupid and evil.
Time to get ugly
The jackbooted Freedom-Haters intend to use reconciliation.
This is way outside the parameters of historically normal Washington back and forth.
This is war.
03.02.10
A great weapon to use if they try reconciliation
Hugh Hewitt says, “Counter the jam-down with a flood of amendments.” He suggests everybody get into the act.
Jim Bunning, American hero
For the simple act of pointing out that we do not have the money for a new package of jobless benefits, insurance subsidies and highway projects, the Kentucky senator is being made out to be some kind of wacko by the MSM and a heartless ogre by the Freedom-Haters.
This gets to the core of the decline in society’s overall maturity level that we discuss frequently here at BN. We have before us a simple fact. The money is not there. Still, the regime whines “But I want it!” like a three-year-old at the supermarket. Hell, yes, they want it. It’s their key to appearing compassionate to a desperate and near-desperate swath of the populace. (So maybe the more apt analogy would be to a teenager willing to max out her parents’ credit card to get a brand of jeans that will gain her acceptance into the cool crowd.)
None of which changes the fact that the money is not there.
02.26.10
A beautiful sight: Pubs with spines
I didn’t have a lot of time to stay moment-by-moment abreast of the summit today, but reading the immediate post-pow-wow coverage makes it clear that those with a keen and principled interest in human freedom and the resucitation of the United States of America had it all over the jackbooted socialists .
02.22.10
Now that TCM’s plan is out there
. . . Pundit and Pundette have coverage of such phenomena in its wake as the CBO’s inability to score it, and the latest display of Robert Gibbs’s sinister deceitfulness.
The right response
John Boehner’s statement on TCM’s latest desperate attempt to salvage socialist health care.
Does this mean you won’t be going to the summit?
