Patient Power

Arguing for free-market health care

Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute summarizes the case for free-market health care. He concludes:

The solution to this ongoing crisis is to recognize that the very idea of a “right” to health care is a perversion. There can be no such thing as a “right” to products or services created by the effort of others, and this most definitely includes medical products and services. Rights, as the Founders conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but to freedoms of action.

You are free to see a doctor and pay him for his services–no one may forcibly prevent you from doing so. But you do not have a “right” to force the doctor to treat you without charge or to force others to pay for your treatment. The rights of some cannot require the coercion and sacrifice of others.

Real and lasting solutions to our health care problems require a rejection of the entitlement mentality in favor of a proper conception of rights. This would provide the moral basis for breaking the regulatory chains stifling the medical industry; for lifting the tax and regulatory incentives fueling our dysfunctional, employer-based insurance system; for inaugurating a gradual phase-out of all government health care programs, especially Medicare and Medicaid; and for restoring a true free market in medical care.

Read the whole article: Why Are We Moving Toward Socialized Medicine?

• Health care is not a right
• Jefferson, rights, and health care
• Obama: health care should be a “right”
• Canadian gov’t: “no freestanding constitutional right to health care”
• To defeat government-controlled medicine, repudiate morality of need