Health Care Rights

Health care is being promoted by progressives as a right. Clearly, as rights are recognized in our US Constitution, health care is not a right and cannot be a right.

The founding Fathers of our great country recognized rights as being endowed upon man directly by the creator. The Constitution did not give us rights, The Constitution recognized rights that already existed. As such, the citizens were divinely blessed with these rights and the citizenry did not, and by definition, could not, depend upon a benevolent government or social system to deliver them. These rights were simply not the governments to give or to take away. They transcended government.

Suddenly, with the onset of the universal health care debate, leftists are allowing the whole discussion of rights to take on a new meaning, one that falls outside the definitions as we have always understood them, and one that bodes ill for future rights in America.

Health care is very expensive, and it is very expensive for a reason. Certainly government regulations shoulder a great portion of the blame for this as they have systematically crushed competition between insurance carriers, made it hugely expensive to bring new medical products to market, have allowed the system to bloat on tort abuse, and have created a system so gargantuan that even monumental fraud is almost undetectable. But, we have to recognize too that more than just health care costs have risen--the quality of health care has also risen.

A majority of the advances in health care have taken place in this country. It is the American dollar that paid for most of these advances, and these dollars were paid by the American payers of tax and premium.

There are, according to Barack Obama, approximately 47 million people who are uninsured in this country. Mr. Obama wants to insure all of these people (in other words, force them to enjoy the right of health care coverage) while promising to keep costs from rising on the overall system. While these numbers have been disproved as a lie by others, there is a subset of this so-called 47 million that is key to the implementation of a plan, however disastrous the plan will prove to be. That key group of people are those that can afford to buy insurance but who, for financial reasons, opt to stay out of the system. They are typically healthy and reasonably employed.

The aim of our enlightened bureaucrats is to force these millions of intentionally uninsured healthy folks into the paying pot so that their premiums can help to cover the vast and growing number of aging old farts such as myself who are less healthy. In order to enjoy their "right" of health care, they would be forced to relinquish property rights such as the ownership of their own money and the fruits of their labor, not to mention the simple freedoms of living their own life as they see fit without some buttinski nanny dictating how to spend the allowance.

Progressives are notorious for creating rights of their own imagination while attacking the rights The Creator bestowed upon us. If, for example, progressives believed in the right of keeping and bearing arms to the same degree they believe that health care is a right, they would force everyone that does not own a gun to ante up the purchase price for a government provided sidearm. Don't hold your breath.

Progressives want to control the machinations of our society through their discriminate picking and choosing of rights that they want the citizens to have. What they are emotionally attached to they promote as a right and what they emotionally oppose they wish to limit or eliminate. They wish to act as the givers of rights and the filters of rights and, in effect, wish to become the Creator that our Founding Fathers recognized.