Jay Bookman makes a great point... it falls in line with my quandry when debating true classical liberals--in the fact that political reality and their philosophical preferences run head long into one another...
Does the right to life include the right not to die?
Do people have a right to health care? That’s the crucial question — the question that resolves many lesser questions — in the ongoing debate over health care reform.
Personally, I’d say yes, of course people have a right to health care. Others argue no, they don’t.
When it comes down to it, though, I doubt most of the opponents really mean it. They may mean it in a political sense, in an ideological or theoretical sense. But they don’t mean it where it counts, in real life.
In real life, here’s how the question would be put: Are you willing to deny life-saving surgery to Mr. X, a father with two children, on grounds that he or she could not afford it? Would you allow Mr. X to die?
If your answer is yes, then you sincerely don’t believe people have a right to health care.
However, if your answer is no, you would not be willing to deny life-saving care to Mr. X, then at some level you do believe that access to health care is a right and the whole debate changes.
Having crossed the threshhold of whether to treat that person, the question becomes how. How will you pay for it? How will you provide it?
At the moment, we’re trying as a society to straddle the fence. We won’t insure the millions of uninsured, because we haven’t accepted that health care is a right. But we also won’t turn the uninsured away from the emergency room, because we actually sort of do believe that health care is a right.
As a consequence of that indecision, we provide health care to the uninsured in the most expensive, irrational and inefficient means possible. It’s a bad system for everybody involved.
Because we are going to end up paying to save that persons life, shouldn't we have some kind of system to fall back on to control costs? Only those who don't care about government spending would not care about controling those costs... (which would make the other insurance companies more competative as well...)
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