Jacob Sullum offers his thoughts on the supposed right to health care. A snippet:
While liberty rights such as freedom of speech or freedom of contract require others to refrain from acting in certain ways, “welfare rights” such as the purported entitlement to health care (or to food, clothing, or shelter) require others to perform certain actions. They represent a legally enforceable claim on other people’s resources. Taxpayers must cover the cost of subsidies; insurers and medical professionals must provide their services on terms dictated by the government.
A right to health care thus requires the government to infringe on people’s liberty rights by commandeering their talents, labor, and earnings. And since new subsidies will only exacerbate the disconnect between payment and consumption that drives health care inflation, such interference is bound to increase as the government struggles to control ever-escalating spending. Rising costs will also encourage the government to repeatedly redefine the right to health care, deciding exactly which treatments it includes.
I wrote about this topic here.
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The health care as right versus health care as privilege is a red herring fallacy. While rhetoric on the left may have bought into the war of words because it draws support to their cause, and those on the right fixate on the semantics of the right to health care the real issues are left without substantial debate because of this distraction.
ReplyDeleteDoes it matter if it's a right or not? There are plenty of government subsidized and provided goods and services that are not rights: transportation systems, access to electricity, research infrastructure, public green space, deposit insurance, education and emergency services to name a few.
If we all agree that the government does good by providing certain goods or services beyond protecting minimum rights, than the problem can be summed up by two basic questions:
1. Does anybody deserve to be without access to reasonably priced health care?
2. Does providing health care maximize our resources?
The right to health care argument is a dodge that allows advocates of selective health care to turn a blind eye to the moral dilemma posed in the first question and prevent data and analysis of the second question take center stage in the debate.
As a btw Locke believed in the right to defend one's "Life, health, Liberty, or Possessions." That's pretty different than the oft cited Declaration of Independence's unalienable right to "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
There has been substantial analysis by the "right" on this issue, but selective hearing by the "left" has prevented it from becoming mainstream (eg Obama claiming to want all possible policy solutions, but then shutting out all free-market approaches). If you don't think free-marketers have provided good analysis of the issue and only use the "right issue" as a red herring, you simply haven't acknowledged that such studies and analysis exist.
ReplyDeleteI would start with "Healthy Competition" by Michael Cannon and Michael Tanner.
I'm not saying there isn't analysis of health care by free market proponents (whether or not it is good is open for debate), but the issue of health care as a right isn't particularly relevant seeing as how the public has already reached the conclusion in many other cases that just because it isn't a right doesn't mean Government should let the market sort it out.
ReplyDeleteLess debate about whether health care is a right, and more debate about what a health care system should look like and how to do that is in order.
Saying health care isn't a right and saying the free market is equipped to deal with health care are two separate arguments. I believe the second one is the important problem to focus on.
I would start with "The Cost Conundrum" by Atul Gawande
ReplyDeletehttp://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=1
Will take a look at the link tonight.
ReplyDeleteI think the argument about whether health care is a right or not is integral to the issue at hand. The primary, if not sole reason government exists is to protect the rights of its citizens. If a new positive right is suddenly determined legitmate, than that is granting a significant amount of additional power to the state while sapping a significant amount of liberty from individuals.
You state, "the issue of health care as a right isn't particularly relevant seeing as how the public has already reached the conclusion in many other cases that just because it isn't a right doesn't mean Government should let the market sort it out."
Yes, of course. But government intervention should be the last resort.
A sidenote. You write, "Less debate about whether health care is a right, and more debate about what a health care system should look like and how to do that is in order."
Don't you think it is a tad bit naive, if not arrogant, to believe that the health care industry, a sector of the economy that involves billions upon billions of individual, personal and unpredictable decisions, is an industry that can be envisioned, designed and ultimately implemented by central planners?