Is Health Care a Right?

Is health care a right?

No way. If health care were a right, then the person providing the medical care would have to be a slave.

For you to say, “I have a right to health care” means, at the same time, that you have a right to the years of training spent by doctors and nurses in school, the hours of research and risks taken by the people who use their brains and money to produce effective drugs, and devoting years of self-discipline and self-deprivation in order to earn the desired goal of a degree in medicine.

There is no right to health care. If you have a right to health care, then that means everyone else has a right to the products of your effort. Your paycheck, your property, your savings account, your investments, your possessions – all are fair game to those who can claim a right to what’s yours, so long as you may claim a right to what’s theirs.

Yes, there is a right to life. But there is no right to the lives, earnings, efforts, labor, thought or achievements of others.

The right to life applied to health care means you have a right to trade your efforts and money for the services and labors of others. You have a right to trade for health care in a free market, something the government continues to deny you.

You certainly have a right to accept charity, and anyone has a right to offer it. But the right to offer or accept charity does not mean there’s a right to provide charity. “Charity” and force are a contradiction in terms. If you have a right to force another to provide your health care because of your right to life, then you have the right to raid somebody’s refrigerator because of a right to life. One is as absurd as the other, only a right to the skills of a medical practitioner is even more absurd, because of the years of incredible effort that went into learning those skills.

It’s so easy to preen on Twitter and in front of one’s peers, “There’s a right to health care. How DARE that Miss USA say otherwise!” It’s so easy to assert a right to anything you wish. Wishes are so easy. Reality is so much harder to face.


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