Polis vs. Polis on health care
December 29th, 2008 | by Brian Schwartz |
Dr. Paul Hsieh of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine had an excellent op-ed in the (Boulder) Daily Camera yesterday. He calls out Colorado Congressman-elect Jared Polis’s inconsistent view on the role of government and markets, and eloquently shows why health care is not a right. Some excerpts:
Boulder’s Congressman-elect Jared Polis recently took a bold stand against a federal bailout of the automobile industry, correctly arguing that that the car manufacturers’ problems should be handled by the private sector, not the government. Coloradans should urge him to apply the same principles to the issue of health care reform. …
… single payer health care necessarily interposes the government into the doctor-patient relationship in the name of cost control. According to the Telegraph, Great Britain’s National Health Service paid bonuses to primary care physicians who reduced the numbers of referrals to hospital specialists — thus forcing those doctors to choose between their oaths to their patients or the government which pays their salaries.
This corrosive effect on the doctor-patient relationship is one of the worst evils of single payer health care. The evil is not that it allows a few doctors to act badly, but rather that it takes good doctors and encourages them to become bad physicians willing to betray their patients’ best medical interests.
The fundamental flaw behind single payer systems (or any other form of “universal health care”) is the assumption that health care is a “right” that must be guaranteed by the government. Health care is a need, not a right. Rights are freedoms of action (such as the right to free speech), not automatic claims on goods or services that must be produced by another. There’s no such thing as a “right” to a car — or a tonsillectomy.
Individuals are legitimately entitled to health care that they purchase with their own money, are promised by prior contractual agreements, or are given to them via voluntary charity.
Any attempts to guarantee an alleged “right” to health care must necessarily violate the genuine rights of others — such as the physicians who are forced deliver health care on the government’s terms (rather than their own) and the taxpayers who are forced to pay for others’ health care against their will.
Read the rest here.
tags: Colorado health care, Jared Polis
