Health Care: When talking about liberty and rights is radical and extreme

Published October 24, 2011 | By Bruce McQuain

The other day, Michelle Bachman said:

“We will always have people in this country through hardship, through no fault of their own, who won’t be able to afford health care,” Bachmann said. “That’s just the way it is. But usually what we have are charitable organizations or hospitals who have enough left over so that they can pick up the cost for the indigent who can’t afford it.”

That initiated the usual reaction from the left:

Before the advent of Medicare and Medicaid, charities did provide health care to those in need. But to suggest that they can do the same today is to misunderstand the enormity of the health care crisis, as charities simply do not have the capacity to handle the demand. As the number of uninsured creeps up to 50 million, for any politician to argue that government should outsource the task of keeping Americans healthy to charities is like saying that people should be punished with death if they are unfortunate enough to be poor or are priced out of insurance due to a pre-existing health condition.

And that’s one of the more family friendly reactions.

But let’s look at it. First question, why is it that “charities simply do not have the capacity to handle the demand?” Any takers?

Is it because there are no established charitable programs in place anymore because government usurped the need for them with Medicare and Medicaid? Perhaps not wholly, but it certainly is one of the reasons. Charities, like any other organization, focus their giving where there is a need. And where no one else, usually, is helping. No need, no priority, no charity.

Secondly, you see the insidious conclusion that “the demand” that would strain the capacity of charities can only be met by … government, of course. Naturally there’s no way to really test that conclusion because government has destroyed the market for charitable health care giving.

So, as usual, government has helped create the problem (lack of charitable institutions focused on providing health care for poor) and now, according to the left, the government is the answer to the problem it created. It may not be something you traditionally consider a market (charitable giving in health care) but there’s no question that government intrusion into the health care market changed the dynamic completely.

And finally the unspoken premise: Health care is a human right. Sorry, but health isn’t even a “human right”. Obviously health care requires the labor of others. It requires their time and the abilities they’ve developed over the years. It is their property to dispose of as they will. But bottom line, health care requires the labor of others in order to fulfill this assumed right.

Clue: To be a right, the right must not violate the rights of others. It cannot take precedence or priority over someone’s right to decide how to use their property – i.e. their developed and marketable abilities. Period. That’s slavery. Here we see another twisting of a word that denotes a condition of freedom and liberty into one that demands virtual slavery from others.

You may or may not agree with Michelle Bachman’s statement. But, in reality it is the way a truly free country should work. Instead we seem to opt for “government is always the answer” (even when it is the entity that created the problem) and coercion is just fine for fulfilling utopian dreams.

Hard to call that “free” isn’t it?

~McQ