Everyone has a right to health care.
There, I said it. You have a right to health care. I have a right to health care. Our grandparents have a right to health care. Even illegal immigrants have a right to health care.
What you don’t have is a right to make someone else pay for it or to force someone to give it to you. Your right to health care — and mine — is exactly the same as your right to a big screen HDTV: If we can pay for it (whether directly or through insurance) and we can find someone to sell it to us, we have a right to it.
By definition, there can be no rights granted by government. Rights inhere in us as human beings. “Legal rights,” by contrast, are mere entitlements or privileges. If a law creates such a “right,” another law can take it away. And the very concept of a “right” for one person that necessitates the abrogation of the inherent rights of another to fulfill is self-annihilating.
Our current social structure is, of course, rife with such so-called rights. The fact that we countenance such abuses does not justify expanding the abuse, of course. We tacitly accept the ongoing abrogation of our real rights to provide ephemermal privileges to others because it’s easier than fighting back, we feel guilty, or we see some utility in it. But that does not make it right.
The solution to decades of government distortion of the health care industry is not more government. It isn’t enough to scrap Harry Reid’s abomination of bribes, buy-offs, and backroom deals. We need to go back to the post-WWII price fixing that started us down the path we’re on and rip out the whole skewed structure root and branch and really start from scratch. We need to make the industry an actual part of the free market for the first time in generations. Such a solution would also have the enormous benefit of being a lot easier to regulate.
