Health Care: Right or Privilege?

 

The main reason there is so much confusion over health care reform is that our society has yet to decide whether we believe health care should be a right or a privilege. Instead of answering this fundamental question, we have leaped into the details of fixing our broken system. Of course, proceding with reform without coming to a consensus on whether health care is a right or a privilege is equivalent to building a house without paying attention to the foundation. It can look beautiful initially, but is likely to collapse over time. 

If our society deems health care a privilege, then we need to decide who is not worthy to receive it. A privilege is defined as “a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people.” So if we believe only a particular group of people should have health care, then who does not deserve it and who do we entrust with this decision? I believe most people in society have been taught that health care is a privilege—something we should work toward and strive to achieve. But when we watch the elderly or poor die because they cannot afford basic care, our hearts take over and we develop programs like Medicare and Medicaid to help. If indeed health care is a privilege, then our society needs to stop thinking with our hearts, decide who should be denied health care and be completely unapologetic about it. We should base this decision solely on sound financial data and determine whose perceived worth to society is less than their benefit to society and let them die. By doing this, we could get rid of Medicare and Medicaid, and there would be no need for "free" clinics or community health centers.  Heck, over time, we could save trillions of dollars and potentially even pay off the national debt.

But if putting money ahead of people's lives sounds unsettling and we cannot determine a particular group of people who should be denied care, then we really believe health care is a right. If health care is a right, then, by definition, it needs to be universal. If health care is universal, then why are we quibbling about a “public option?” It should be a “public necessity” and our system needs to be completely revamped to make sure no one falls through its net. This could be approached as an onerous task of keeping the status quo and adding even more services for more people leading to untold amounts of bureaucratic paperwork and cost, or it could be seen as the challenge of our generation and we can face it with the vigor and sense of unity we have not seen since the NASA moon landing project of the 1960s. We could take the thoughts of Bodenheimer, Starfield, Emanuel, and all the great minds at the Institute for Health Care Improvement, and merge them into a system which uniquely American, cost effective, and the envy of the rest of the world.

But first we must take sides. Is health care a right or a privilege? Answer that question and we can then proceed with filling in the details.

John

Comments

[R Watkins]

But do we really have to take sides?

I don't care if you call health care a right or a privelege. This question was intentionally formatted by the right wing to divide us.

The point is that society works better if everyone has access to basic health care, in the same way that it works better if we have good roads, public libraries, and excellent schools.

Rights or priveleges? Irrelevant. Let's be pragmatic: it works.