A Post About Smug Self-Satisfaction That Isn’t Written By E.D.?
November 6, 2009 2 Comments
Rights and Responsibilities
This has been on my mind quite a bit of late, because I keep seeing this argument that health care is a fundamental, positive human right (sometimes quoting the Declaration of Independence “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” language) that the government has an absolute obligation to provide. As many times as I’ve seen it, I’ve never been able to figure out how it makes any sense. Rights, generally speaking, are absolutes for which infringement is justified only in particular, usually exceptional circumstances. This is, to my mind, definitionally true – in order for a right to be infringed, the scope of that right has to be defined well enough to know it is being infringed, and by whom.
Put another way, they are generally non-excludable and non-scarce – although there may be a right to bear arms, there can be no right to be provided a government-issued AR-15. There is thus a definable and timeless ideal with regards to any “right” that can at least theoretically be achieved: the right to say whatever you want without interference from the government, the right to be imprisoned only for actual crimes you committed, the right to a trial by jury, etc. In this sense, I can see a strong argument that there is a right to seek health care without government interference for the same reason why there can be a right for adults to enter into consenting relationships or contracts with other adults (whether these should or should not be considered fundamental human rights is a different topic – the point is just that they at least can be rights in theory).*
But the idea that there is a fundamental human right to receive health care without regard to your ability to pay makes no sense because there is no conceivable, static ideal – what counts as an ideal level of health care varies from person to person, country to country, and year to year. I can’t, for instance, have a right to a life-saving treatment that doesn’t exist yet.
Perhaps you can say that this is sophistry – you can always frame the right as being a right to the best care available at a given time within your country. Well, fair enough – but define “best.” Is “best” the care that most prolongs your life (“life”), is it whatever course of treatment you decide is best without regard to cost (“liberty”), or is it the care that most improves your quality of life (“the pursuit of happiness”)? Or is it somehow all three? And regardless of how you define “best,” how do you handle the fact that health care is a scarce resource with greater demand than there can possibly be supply? In other words, if everyone has an affirmative right to the “best” healthcare, but there is only enough supply to provide 50% of the population with the “best” healthcare, how do you decide whose rights will be respected and whose disregarded without violating the quite real fundamental human right to equal protection under the laws?
September 3, 2009 46 Comments
