LETTER: Health care not a right? The courts beg to differ
In her July 3 commentary, Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute writes “health care is neither a right nor a privilege.” Instead, she says, it’s “an aggregate of goods and services.” Fortunately, most Americans and the U.S. Supreme Court disagree.
In Brown v. Plata (2001), the Supreme Court ruled that depriving inmates of basic health care was a violation of the prisoners’ Eighth Amendment rights. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a 5-4 decision, described a prison system that failed to deliver minimal care to prisoners with serious medical and mental health problems and produced “needless suffering and death.”
If health care is a basic right for criminals, then it is also a basic right for law-abiding citizens. Ms. Pipes will have us believe that the sick and injured are just another commodity, and the treatment they need is just another service amenity. I invite her to explain to a parent of a sick child, or the children of a sick parent, that their loved ones have no right to health care.
