Is Healthcare Really a Right?
With President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to repeal and replace ObamaCare now a priority in the GOP-led Congress, it’s worth asking why ObamaCare — as well as other government-sponsored healthcare initiatives, including Medicare and Medicaid — should be such a contentious topic. Socialized medicine has been a front-burner agenda item for the European Left for more than 100 years, and for the American Left since the end of the Second World War. Healthcare being so often a matter of life and death, it is contended, all of us enjoy a right to it — and withal a right that government ought to guarantee, via programs such as ObamaCare and “single-payer” schemes in other countries such as England and Canada.
The term “right” has seen a lot of abuse in our allegedly enlightened modern era. Whereas it was once applied to freedoms conferred on us by the “laws of nature and of nature’s God,” the term is now used more or less indiscriminately as a label for anything to which we are entitled by man-made law. This distinction between “natural” and “civil” rights is reasonable enough; many purely civil rights, such as the right to a trial by jury or habeas corpus, may not arise directly from natural law, but have been proven worthy features of our legal code.
But not all civil, or man-made, rights were created equal. Some of them, such as habeas corpus, can exist only where the powers of the state are correspondingly limited. Others, such as the right to trial by jury, involve not only a limitation on state power (in this case, judicial power), but also an obligation on the part of private citizens to guarantee that they are upheld.
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