CNSNews.com reports: President Barack Obama said in his weekly address on Saturday that in the United States of America health insurance is now ‘your right.’
‘So I’m going to keep doing everything in my power to make sure this law works as it’s supposed to,’ Obama said of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare). ‘Because in the United States of America, health insurance isn’t a privilege–it is your right. And we’re going to keep it that way.’
Hmmm’let’s think about this.
Health insurance is a ‘right.’ If so, then why aren’t these other things rights?
The right to purchase health insurance in a completely free market, across state lines—with no impositions by either the federal or state governments as to what kinds of policies may be sold, and to whom. Why isn’t this a right?
The right to not buy health insurance at all, and then live with the results of your choices. Why isn’t this a right?
The right to not have to pay for the health insurance or health care of other people who choose not to buy insurance. Why isn’t this a right?
The right to contract with your own doctor, fee-for-service, voluntarily and to mutual benefit—instead of the directly or indirectly imposed third-party payment systems created by government. Why isn’t this a right?
Also: If health insurance is a right, then why must people be forced to buy it? Isn’t this like saying, ‘You have a right to life—but only if you pay this gigantic company a premium to protect you’?
Why does Obama get away with claiming that health insurance is a right, without even having to enforce it as a right? What is so impractical or undesirable about having a national health care insurance card, provided at birth, that he stopped short of using his supermajority in Congress several years ago to simply bring this into existence? He’s trying to have it both ways.
What about the people forced to wait in emergency rooms for urgently needed care, people who pay for these services, while others are treated free of charge, as a right? Federal law has required this since 1986. Nobody questioned it then, and nobody questioned it 24 years later when a health care crisis was deemed justification for passing an “affordable care” act.
What would happen if everyone stopped attempting to gain health insurance, even through a diminishing number of employers able and willing to provide it? If all health care is already a right, on demand and for free, at hospital emergency rooms, then why is there such a crisis over health care in the first place?
Why don’t we just make doctors provide health care, if it’s a right? Why don’t we simply fine or jail doctors who don’t provide health care as a right? This is absurd, of course, and nobody (to my knowledge, at least yet) is proposing it. But if health care really and truly is a right, then why should those who possess the skills and abilities to provide it have any choice about whether or not, or under what conditions, to do so?
I’d love to hear an answer to some of these questions. I’d love to see the democratic socialists and the other unchallenged “authorities” who run our academic, media and governmental institutions be forced to publicly tie themselves up in the intellectual knots of their own pretentious evasions.
Oh, and one more thing. Logic tells us that with freedom comes responsibility. Rights protect an individual’s choices relevant to life courses of action. But ‘choice’ by definition implies the willingness to think. A human’s responsibility, first and foremost to him- or herself, is to choose and accept the consequences of his or her actions. Without rational thought and the responsibility it implies, freedom is non-existent. By insisting a product or service such as health insurance is a “right,” choice is taken away from individuals — both those who are given the freebie, as well as those forced to produce and pay for it.
If ‘rights’ refer to the ability to be protected from the choices of your actions—as all democratic socialists such as Barack Obama claim—then how can a person be truly free?
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