Is Healthcare a Right?

The fundamental driver of the left's desire to create socialized medicine and pass Obama's healthcare legislation is the belief that healthcare is a right that the government must secure for all people. Specifically, this means that if a person can't afford to pay for healthcare themselves, the government should pay for it.

At some level, it sounds like the left is taking the principles of the Declaration of Independence and applying it to a new area of public policy. It is worth repeating here the critical passage from the Declaration:

All Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted amongst Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the Governed.

The right to life can be thought of as a person owning their own life, that nothing is more precious than your life being your own to live and not to live at the dictate of another.

The right to liberty reflects the right to think and act for oneself, that the distinctive means by which a person lives is through the use of their mind, and that for another to control or limit the freedom to think for oneself is to subvert this most profound means of human survival.

The right to the pursuit of happiness reflects the need to translate your thoughts into concrete actions, that nature requires effort to achieve your goals, and that you should be free to pursue your own goals to achieve your own personal happiness.

While these may seem "self-evident" to us as they did to Thomas Jefferson when he wrote them, they reflect a radical vision of human existence as compared to the vast sweep of human history - where tribes, kings, emperors, and religious leaders claimed ownership of a person's life, the right to dictate what they should think and believe, and the right to control their actions.

One fundamental aspect of these rights is that they are held equally by all people (the "all Men are created equal" part articulates this), so for something to be a "right", it must not infringe another person's rights. As Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas said: "My freedom to move my fist must be limited by the proximity of your chin." Or in other words, Bill Gates has the same rights, no more but no less, as the poorest man in the country.

So it is worth asking: is government-provided healthcare a "right"?

To secure such a "right", either the government has to tax someone to pay for it or coerce a doctor or healthcare provider to provide healthcare services - but whether by taxation or coercion, another person's rights are violated (in this case, their own right to the pursuit of happiness) to make the "right to healthcare" a reality.

To paraphrase William O. Douglas: "the right to pursue my happiness by securing access to healthcare must be limited by the proximity of your wallet."

If you say in objection, isn't this an argument against all forms of welfare spending, the answer is: it is.

And that is why the left despises the founding principles of America, the Declaration of Independence, individual rights, and capitalism (as the economic system that reflects individual rights). A leftist wants to deprive some people of their rights, so the government can steal their money to give to someone the leftist wants to have it instead.

It used to the Democratic Party, under the leadership of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, who most strongly believed these principles as the basis for governing America. It is one of the great tragedy's of American history that the party of Jefferson became the party that led the revolt against the principles of the Declaration of Independence.