Nanny-state health care
June 18th, 2008 | by Brian Schwartz |
In a previous post I challenged the notion that medical care is like services we receive from the fire department — a flawed analogy to justify politician-controlled single-payer health care. In it I claim that a more accurate analogy is that medical insurance is like homeowners or renters insurance.
Colorado single-payer advocate Kristen Hannum is against this line of thinking. Her comments reveal the ethics behind those who promote single-payer health care. She writes:
The problem with that analogy is that homeownership is completely optional - as is, to a lesser extent, upkeep. Health isn’t optional. A good portion of what happens to our health isn’t choice-driven either. No one chooses their father’s stroke proclivity, their mother’s and sisters’ breast cancer. No one chooses to grow up down river from a chemical plant, or for their mother’s crappy prenatal care.
Yes, homeownership is optional. If you rent and have posessions worth insuring against unanticipated hazards, you can buy renters insurance.
The rest of her argument rests on the premise that since no one chooses the health risks they are suseptible to, adults need not take personal responsibility for protecting themselves against these risks. That is, “society” via politically-controlled medicine is responsible for providing medical care in response to these unchosen health risks. But why?
“Health is not optional,” she writes. Optional - for what? Health is not optional to achieve a specific purpose, which in this case is to remain alive and achieve desired goals. What about other requirements of living? Should adults be responsible for acquiring their own food, shelter, and protection from the elements? That is, other goods that are “not optional” for living?
What else should be “single payer,” then? Food, clothing, housing? Should we relinquish all of our money to the State and allow politicians to be the only ones who can pay for these products? That is, let them be the “single payer”?
Should adults live like infantalized children, where government pays for their necessities?
Hannum appears to object to a fundamental of life itself. As Ayn Rand writes:
Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life.
The bottom line here is that medical care is not a right.
tags: Ayn Rand, right to health care
