The “right” to free health care is the right to own the labor of other people without their consent.
Any time you’ve got a right TO something like that you take the rights of other people to their own selves and their own freedom away.
The libertarian idea, as I understand it, is that your rights end where they intersect another person. I have a right to “pursue happiness” to make my way in the world, to worship my own God, to feed myself, to supply my physical and other needs, rights to my own body and self-determination, rights to my own property, rights to employ violence to defend my rights (which is pretty much a good way to define what is a right and what is *not*)… just up *until* I intersect another human being. I may not take someone else’s food nor compel their labor nor sacrifice them to my God nor otherwise violate *their* rights in the pursuit of my own.
We could argue til judgment day over the extent to which this may be followed in the “real world” but it does illustrate something about the deterioration of the understanding of “rights.” We call things “rights” that are in no way rights at all and don’t understand anymore that a separate thing called “rights” even exist.
The “right” to access to medical care without having to pay for it doesn’t exist. A law is in place that allows it, (as hospitals and emergency rooms may not refuse care), but it is not a right.
Compare this to the right to bear arms, which so many people hedge about or outright deny.
The right to self-defense and to arm one’s self to the effective level of technology and to commit violence on other people (or your government, something our founding fathers saw as a moral imperative) in order to secure the RIGHT to life, liberty and the freedom to pursue happiness… that is not malleable. It’s not *limitable*. It exists no matter what the laws are in place in any culture in the world.
We may CHOOSE to provide a level of health care and medical attention to those who can not pay. It *ought* to be entirely voluntary, but we do have a representative process and collectively we have decided that hospitals should not knowingly turn away anyone who is ill.
This is a choice of those paying, NOT a right that those who seek care they can not afford are entitled to compel.
I was poor growing up andwhen we got sick my mom gave us some aspirin or whatever and i have lived to be healthy and 57 as of today!! We didn’t go to the doctor or to the grocery store unless we had some money to pay for what we needed( not wanted!)!!
it’s the same today–we get waht we NEED not WANT and no one gives it to us….
It is never a “right” to steal from someone in order for another to be more comfortable, and that’s what socialism is all about, that’s what “redistribution” is all about.
If I want to aid another person or group, I am perfectly willing to part with what few shekels I have, but when the guvmint comes in, steals my hard-earned cash and gives it to anyone else for any reason not covered specifically by the Constitution of the United States, I am irate and completely out of sorts, get my back up and refuse to comply with anything I think I can get away with, from the feds clear down to the local water district.
They want to steal from honest folks, let them be honest about it themselves. And so far, I haven’t heard one peep of honesty from this admin, and danged few from the three previous.
The capitalist argument would be that since we are getting so rich (get rid of the deficit please) it makes sense to provide free ‘catastrophic’ health care to everyone. Congress would define the vanilla policy; it may well lag, say 5 years, on expensive new technology, as well as include a cap on heroic life saving techniques at about $100k.
Congress then would have to also pass tort reform, since no government other than USA has not. Socialized medicine, in any form, demands it.
To let the market work, private industry would provide such a Congress defined plan and the government would purchase it for everyone. Private industry would then also compete across the nation with their own supplemental varieties of plans, which would be purchased by individuals, and have no tax deductible component for businesses.
The issue with that idea, even as suggested, is that government has never proven they can leave their hands off. So the danger is the the defined program would continue to grow over time.