The notion of a “right” to health care is merely a perversion of the concept of rights. Any system that seeks to fulfill this “right” is, ironically, a system that violates the actual rights of almost everyone involved.
Accordingly, any kind of public universal health care plan is immoral.
People have the right to do whatever they wish with their persons and property so long as it doesn’t interfere with the rights of others to do the same.
Wanting or needing something that belongs to someone else does not give you the right to take it from them by force, whether at the point of your own gun or that of the government.
Therefore, the right to health care doesn’t exist, because any such “right” imposes an affirmative obligation on others – it forces customers to purchase insurance, providers to insure all of those customers, and doctors to receive any patient, regardless of their own judgment of the best course of action.
The rights most obviously violated by this arrangement are the rights of the companies themselves.
The individuals who own and operate a company have the right to do so however they see fit, so long as they are not violating anyone else’s rights.
If it is unprofitable to sell health insurance to a particular individual, the company has the right to refuse the sale.
Forcing the company to accept all customers substitutes the judgment of bureaucrats for the experience-based judgment of the owners.
This is true whether the insurance companies are actual private corporations or government-run organizations.
Additionally, universal health care violates the rights of customers. First, it forces everyone to have health insurance.
Today, healthy people may decide not to buy health insurance because they expect to have few or no medical costs.
Universal health care would deprive them of the right to exercise their own judgment in meeting their health care needs.
Furthermore, it violates the rights of employers to decide how to compensate their employees. Employees do not have a right to anything except what has been mutually agreed upon in the negotiation for employment.
Additionally, employees whose skills are not high enough to make them desirable when an employer must pay for health care on top of their wages will not be able to work at all.
This problem is compounded by the fact that, in a universal health care system, the forced insuring of individuals drives up costs for everyone.
Finally, universal health care smuggles in a premise even more vicious than its explicit goals.
In a universal health care system, doctors must treat any and all patients that come to them; they no longer have the right to practice medicine as they see fit.
Thus, universal health care violates the rights of both the people forced to provide it and the people forced to purchase it.
The consequences, not surprisingly, are quite dismal.
Increased average claims will drive up costs for everyone, doctors will provide a lower quality of care, and fewer people will want to be doctors, which will exacerbate the problem for existing doctors and push costs up even more (or result in longer waits for care).
In short, the medical system as we know it will simply deteriorate until it is destroyed or health care is returned to the private sector.
It is not the government’s job to provide health care.
The government exists to protect rights, not violate them.
Any system that requires the violating of our rights must be denounced.
Triplett is a UCLA alumna. She is the former director of finance for L.O.G.I.C.