Jacob Hornberger points out that no one has a right to health care:
… If I have a right to something, then doesn’t that mean that you have a correlative duty to provide it? If you’re a doctor, then it means that you are required to serve my needs, like it or not.
…
Now, the proponent of health care as a right might say, “That’s not what I mean. Why, to force doctors to provide health care services to others would be akin to slavery, especially if it’s for free. I think that doctors deserve to be paid for their services.”
Fair enough. But then doesn’t the right to health care entail the power to force someone else to pay for it? …
Thus, the right to health care entails the power of everyone to get into the pocketbooks of everyone else. That’s not only a ridiculous notion of rights but also a highly destructive one. Since obviously people can’t go and take the money from others directly, it inevitably entails converting government into an engine of seizure and redistribution. Or to paraphrase Bastiat, such a concept of rights converts government into a fiction by which everyone is doing his best to live at the expense of everyone else.
This brings to mind a statement of the late Alexander Solschenizyn, “When Western society was established, it was based on the idea that each individual limited his own behavior. Everyone understood what he could do and could not do. The law itself did not restrain people. Since then, the only thing we have been developing is rights, rights, rights, at the expense of duty.”
Should we, as a society, try to provide health care for everyone? Of course we should. The problem with framing health care as a “right” is that, in today’s way of thinking, the government has to get involved to guarantee that the right is provided.
People who, out of charity, show concern for others and help them in their needs are doing something virtuous. People who, out of fear of the coercive force of the state, allow a portion of their wealth to be taken (some would say stolen) from them for “redistribution”, are doing something self-serving in order to avoid jail.
Whenever the government gets involved in a charitable endeavor, it ceases to be charitable.
