On its surface, calling health care a “right” sounds like compassion. Physician and Senator Rand Paul strips the prettied up packaging. Calling health care a “right” isn’t just abstract.
Saying you have a “right” to health care means you think someone else owes you their work.
Such logic means you have a “right” to conscript the doctors, nurses, janitors, clerical personnel, etc. that provide health care.
That’s a form of slavery.
Are We Willing to use State Force to Mandate Healthcare?
Plainly speaking, saying you have a “right” to a doctor’s services implies you are willing to use police, take the doctor at gun point, and make him/ her treat you. The same applies to the hospital cleaning crew and office personnel.
The use of state violence to force healthcare simply does not make sense.
What rights do we have?
We have the right to pursue happiness. We have no guarantees of material comforts or tangible items.
For someone to give you a “right” to someone else’s time, expertise, or resources they will have to take it from them first. And there will be some implied coercive action.
Politicians want to get around this. They describe government-run healthcare as moral progress. They disregard that every “free” service is either funded through taxation (extracted from you at gunpoint) or through mandating that providers supply such services.
Americans Refuse to Trade Liberty for Authoritarianism
The implications of these policies become much clearer once you follow the chain of causality.
Do you have a “right” to plumbing? Food? Water?
Every additional positive “right” will require that someone else provide services for your benefit via force. The societies which follow this path replace voluntary charity and marketplace exchange with centralized control and reduced liberty.
Senator Paul contrasts the reality of how things currently exist on the ground with how he envisions healthcare to operate. Medical providers, particularly doctors and hospitals, have been providing medical care, including 100 percent accessibility through emergency rooms for true emergencies.
Many do so freely. Many are motivated by a variety of reasons, including the Hippocratic Oath, Christian obligation, hospital privileges, etc.
These systems were able to function without doctors becoming part of the state apparatus. Though it takes some time, human decency eventually steers the course of society through philanthropy, charity, and altruism.
Granted, emergency room visits differ from routine primary care. No one argues about this. However, the drive to establish universal positive “rights” muddles those distinctions and increases the role of government in virtually every decision regarding medical treatment.
This is typically the end of the discussion in polite society, however, the underlying mechanics of how granting “rights” to services will ultimately erode liberty and quality of care expose common historical patterns.
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