“In the animal kingdom, the rule is eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.”
Dr. Thomas Szasz
Defining healthcare sparks endless debate, especially in America. Canada seems to have settled on rights, with socialized medicine. The Romanow Report declared that, “Canadians view medicare as a moral enterprise, not a business venture.”
However, the right to stand in line for promised care is itself immoral. In the 2005 Supreme Court of Canada Chaoulli case, Chief Justice Beverly McLaughlin famously said, “Access to a waitlist is not access to health care.”
Rights
Defenders of rights form a crowd of dignitaries.
Earlier this year, President Biden said, “Health care should be a right, not a privilege, for all Americans.”
Former President Obama celebrated the seventh anniversary of his Affordable Care Act by saying, “We finally declared that in America, health care is not a privilege for a few, but a right for everybody.”
Pope Francis said health “is not a consumer good, but rather a universal right, and therefore access to healthcare services cannot be a privilege.” Francis moves the right upstream, which begs the question whether healthcare actually delivers health.
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, declared that “Health is a fundamental human right.”
Rights-talk appeals to natural rights. It assumes they are self-evident. Rights also touch on negative and positive rights: the right to be left alone vs the right to demand something from your neighbour.
Jeremy Bentham, 19th century philosopher, said only the state can confer rights through law. Natural rights confuse the existence of a want with the means of fulfilling it. Bentham called rights “nonsense on stilts.” Those who admire Bentham’s collectivism usually ignore his “nonsense.”
Privilege
By default, those who refuse to pledge allegiance to healthcare rights must be apologists of privilege. However, it is hard to find many saying so explicitly.
Media accused President Trump of calling healthcare a privilege. He said state care was like giving a “bozo with zero experience a management position.”
In 2017, Miss USA was asked onstage whether Affordable Care was a right or a privilege. Caught off guard, she called it a privilege related to her employment — clearly the wrong answer. Media had a fit.
Misplaced Privilege
Privilege, if it existed at all in healthcare, used to lie with the medical profession, not patients. Doctors used to control their own profession.
A physician shared recently how he felt forced to change careers. Continue reading “Healthcare is an Obligation, Not a Right, Privilege, or Commodity”
