Thoughts on the ‘right’ to health care

Is health care a right?

You can die without heath care, so it must be a right. Right?

You can also die without food. Is food a right?

We're not likely to make much progress here until we figure out what a constitutional right is.

First, when we call the first 10 amendments to the Constitution the Bill of Rights, we're being imprecise. They're really more a "Bill of Restrictions" on government.

Government doesn't grant any rights. Rights are things we or our forebears were naturally free to do before the government was empaneled, liberties that government shall not be allowed to infringe.

Did you think the Sixth Amendment granted you a "right" to a jury trial? Go down to the courthouse and ask for your jury trial. They'll ask what crime you stand accused of.

"No crime," you say. "I just have a right to a jury trial. I'm tired of waiting. I want mine now."

You won't get it. The amendment says government can't seize your stuff, put you in prison, even take your life, without granting you the opportunity to throw the question on a panel of your peers, fellow citizens not "in government," who must agree unanimously with what the government wants to do.

It's a restriction on government.

(Jury trial is the one provision in the Bill of Rights that creates the most definitional problems, because it would appear to be something that can only be "provided by government," though in fact Saxon warriors were sitting as jurors long before they had any courthouses or salaried judges. As currently enforced, moreover, my "right" to a jury trial does appear to impose a requirement on my innocent neighbors, who are conscripted to serve on the jury. There is no need for such coercion. Simply raise the juror's stipend and call for volunteers.)

We have a right to freedom of speech. Does this mean the government is empowered to tax our neighbors in order to buy us a microphone, a radio station, a printing press? No. It merely means government shall do nothing to shut us up.

Does the "right to bear arms" mean the government has to provide me with a free machine gun? Actually, under the separate responsibility of the central government to help arm the militia, that's an interesting question. But for our purposes today, no, the Second Amendment imposes no duty on the government to seize money elsewhere to buy me guns -- it simply means that, if I care to prioritize my resources so as to buy arms, the government has no legitimate power to limit me.

A right is something I or my forefathers could do before the creation of the current government. A right can't be something that can be delivered only by government action (government is funded by taxes, which have to be grabbed from someone else), nor can my legitimate attempt to exercise a "right" create a situation in which government goons get to use force or coercion or the threat of same in order to seize something from someone else, or force an action on the part of someone else.

So, again, do I have a right to health care? Of course I have a right to get a reasonable amount of exercise in order to preserve my health. But this neither grants the government any authority, nor imposes on it any duty, to buy me a trampoline or a treadmill.

I have a right to take vitamin supplements. But asserting this "right" neither empowers me to go down to the pharmacy and steal vitamins at gunpoint, nor does it grant the government any power to use force or threat of force to do this theft and looting for me.

(If doing a thing is immoral, how can it be moral to delegate or deputize someone else to do it for you?)

Similarly, while I suppose I have a "right" to eat -- in the sense that government should not steal from my mouth or my family's the bread I've grown, gathered, or purchased with my labor (that's Jefferson) -- the assertion of this "right" cannot grant government any power or duty to go steal me my food, or to tax from others the wealth needed to feed me, even if I'm "underprivileged," or "at risk," or whatever euphemism du jour you favor.

By easy steps, we thus reach the question of whether I have the right to employ the services of a nurse, a physician, or a hospital. Of course I have the right to negotiate for those services, at a rate of payment agreeable to the provider. Once government gets out of the picture, I imagine installment payments could become the norm. But to contend I have a "right" to such services without paying for them would violate the 13th Amendment, because it would turn people foolish enough to have become medical professionals into de facto slaves.

Nor is it much better to assert that government goons can order these medicos to treat me for lower fees than they would ask in the free market. This merely approaches the same slavery by smaller, incremental steps.

This is not a merely theoretical objection. I have spoken to medical professionals who now advise their gifted children to go into other fields, rather than put up with the increasing government regulation of medicine. If you want to know where that's leading us, ask how many people flew from here to collectivist Russia in search of their fine medical care last year.

Yes, you have a right to health care -- as much as you can buy.

You just don't have a right to steal it, or to hire bully-boys with government badges to steal it for you.

If you don't like today's prices, demand that government get out of the business of regulating medicine, which drives up costs enormously. No such power is granted to any branch of government, anywhere in the Constitution, anyway.

(Groceries are cheap because they're unregulated. They're also pretty safe.)

Even health insurance would be vastly less costly if it were no longer pre-paid routine medical care, loaded up with coverage mandates most of us don't need -- if, instead, we were simply allowed to buy high-deductible, catastrophe-only policies across state lines.

Ask your insurance agent.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal, and author of the novel "The Black Arrow" and "Send in the Waco Killers." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com.