Why Healthcare is a good and not a right


Austin Swan, Reporter

Why Healthcare is a good and not a right

Many people in today’s society are moving towards the belief that healthcare is a universal right for all individuals and that the government is responsible for providing that healthcare to those individuals.

However, healthcare is not a right. No one is entitled to healthcare and no one has the right to someone else’s labor. Healthcare is a service.

The reason no one has a right to healthcare is because healthcare is a commodity that has to be provided to individuals by other individuals. No matter how much someone needs medical care, people do not have the right to steal labor from doctors and force them to provide healthcare.

Healthcare is different than rights such as freedom of speech or the right to bear arms, because healthcare has to be provided to you by someone else. Doctors have the right to charge any price they want to for healthcare because they are providing a service. Individuals who are seeking healthcare do not have the right to dictate to a doctor that they must provide care for a certain price, that is theft of labor.

The free market economy has proven time and again that it is the best way to increase quality and reduce cost.

Pew research center came out with a study in June of 2017 that states 60% of Americans currently believe that the federal government is responsible for providing healthcare to citizens. Public opinion is continuing to swing in this direction, which is scary because providing universal healthcare to all citizens requires theft of labor, leads to a drop in quality, a drop in number of doctors, an increase in wait time at hospitals, and increased taxes.

William Kissick, an american professor of medicine at Wharton, states in his book, Medicine’s Dilemmas: Infinite Needs Versus Finite Resources, that there are three main points of healthcare, universality, affordability, and quality. Kissick claims that in any given healthcare system, only two of those three things can be achieved.

When healthcare is handled by the federal government, the result is a system that strives for universality in affordability. Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of quality. In order for the government to make healthcare universal and affordable for citizens, they have to dictate that doctors provide care at a price much lower than they would like to.

To become a doctor, one must spend at least 11 years in college and residencies. Not only is this schooling challenging, on average it costs a total of $420,000. Doctors need to be charging enough for their practice to be able to pay off the cost of the schooling they had to go through to become a doctor.

When the government is given the ability to dictate the price at which doctors work, doctors make less money, this removes part of the incentive for becoming a doctor. Many people become doctors because they want to help people, but would be dissuaded from it if they knew that they would only be earning only a salary slightly above average.

Even after the partial removal of some aspects of free enterprise in the healthcare market, American doctors make an average of $186,000 annually. Doctors in Canada, where there is an almost fully universal system only make an average of $125,000 a year.

Less people would become doctors in such a system, making the amount of care go down and the quality of care go down.

If you want to make goods and services better and more abundant, you must first incentivize those things and allow for competition between healthcare providers.

In a free market healthcare system where healthcare is viewed as a commodity and not a right, and there is open competition between doctors, therefore becoming a doctor is incentivized.

An example of an area of healthcare that has been positively affected by the free market and the removal of government intervention is lasik eye surgery. Lasik eye surgery is one of the least regulated practices in medicine.

Lasik eye surgery used to cost people around $20,000 an eye, but now it only costs around $3-4,000 an eye. The reason for this is that insurance companies have nothing to do with it, and because there is free and open competition between providers.

Capitalism and free enterprise are the concepts that led America to becoming the greatest and most prosperous country to ever exist. We need to maintain these concepts and ensure that they are not removed from our society. By declaring healthcare a right, and making the government provide it, the free enterprise in the healthcare market is removed.