Wednesday, October 16, 2013

A Principled Stand Against National Healthcare

Someone asked me to convince them why the fight against Obamacare is not based upon greed.  I stated that the Founding Fathers did not intend for big federal programs to exist, and his response was that they had no concept of such programs.  There's nothing to convince.  While government healthcare may not have been conceived during that period, other social services were.  There may be an argument for national healthcare, but it is not a Constitutional one.

Who said anything about greed?  I'm not greedy, yet I oppose it.  I am rational; therefore, I know that anything the government stimulates results in malformed equilibrium.  It is not possible for the government to create mandates without setting an entire situation off kilter.

As long as we rely upon other individuals, not ourselves, to provide healthcare, it will not be a basic right.  In other words, not everyone will have access to everything because the supply is limited.  Complicated brain surgeries, heart transplants, face transplants, experimental cancer treatments, etc. are all limited by scarcity of supply.  Someone needing treatment will be denied.  If it were a human right, there would be no denials, and since it is a person actually performing the medical service, who is anyone to order them (the doctor, hospital, or treatment center) to do it?

If I'm a brain surgeon, I may choose not to operate on someone for my own reasons.  You cannot force me to do it; therefore, your need for a complicate brain surgery may be a need to you but not to me.  You have no right to care.  I may provide it, but it is up to me to decide, and you are free to seek care elsewhere.

The move afoot to identify health care as a human right, as if it were air to breathe, is a bastardization of principles.  Identifying healthcare as a right obligates individuals (doctors) to provide care when they may not choose to do so.  We are not cattle, and we will accept orders for only so long.  The pile of barricades in front of the White House is proof enough of my point of view.

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