Obama: health care should be a “right”
October 22nd, 2008 | by Brian Schwartz |Barack Obama says we should ”believe that health care should finally be the right of every American.” The Economist recently published an excellent letter (on-line) by Dr. Paul Hsieh that refutes this:
SIR - Governments should not guarantee health care as a “right” (”Running for cover“, special briefing on the US election, October 4th). Rights are freedoms of actions (such as the right to free speech), not automatic claims on goods and services that must be produced by others.
Individuals are legitimately entitled to services such as health care that they purchase with their own money, are promised by prior contractual agreements, or are given to them via voluntary charity.
Otherwise, government programs to guarantee health care as a “right” must necessarily violate someone’s actual rights - either the rights of those compelled to provide medical care or the rights of those compelled to pay for it. Such programs then become just another form of state-sanctioned slavery or theft.
Dr Paul Hsieh
Co-founder
Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine
Sedalia, Colorado
For more on how this notion of “rights” is flawed, see here. To see how government cannot make such a guarantee, see here.
One Response to “Obama: health care should be a “right””
By bill-tb on Oct 22, 2008 | Reply
Socialism is a code word for stoopid.