When I’m right, I’m right.
I wrote in May, 2017: It’s not a human right just because you say it is.
Health care is not a human right.
Nope. Not even close.
Freedoms enumerated and enshrined in the Constitution? Human rights. The right to free speech, the right to worship as you please, the right to bear arms in defense of yourself, your family, and the nation, the right to be free of the government quartering its soldiers in your home, yeah, all those things are human rights, built into the bedrock of human experience. That they have been violated more often than upheld is part of what makes them so precious, and worthy of defending. But these freedoms and rights require nothing more than our eternal vigilance to maintain. (Which is cheap at twice the price, considering the totality of human history.)
Health care is not a human right because it depends on so many other people doing things for your benefit. If I were a doctor, I would not agree that you had a human right to demand my services for less than I believe they are worth. (And if I priced my services too high, I’d probably go hungry a lot while my competitors lived off the fat of the land. But that’s my right and privilege to determine for myself.) If I were a nurse, I would not agree that just because your tummy hurts, you have a human right to force me to turn away from the cardiac patient who is coding in the next room and give you an antacid. If I were a dentist, I would not say that you had a human right to barge into my office and demand that I immediately pull the tooth that’s been bothering you because you don’t have enough sense to take care of your own teeth, when I already have a waiting room full of patients who made appointments and also have dental issues.
And so forth.
So today, via a Stephen Green post at Instapundit, RealClearPolitics has an editorial: Health Care Is a Right Only if Doctors Surrender Theirs
[F]ree health care — under whatever rubric you care to use — means that doctors, nurses and other health professionals are enlisted in a kind of indentured servitude. Because of my “right” to affordable health care, the health workers are forced to provide for my needs without regard for their own security, their own income and their own families’ needs. The end result would be to force the brilliant people who practice medicine into other fields where they would be rewarded for their work, and to create a cadre of low-paid health care workers who just needed a job.
Glad to see others waking up and smelling the coffee on this, even if it’s only been nearly three years since I pointed this out. On the other hand, I don’t have the same reach as Insty or RCP. So it goes.