the realm of Asclepios: part 1a
I'm going to begin with a small disambiguation.
In these posts, I will refer to receiving medical care and treatment (eg: a doctor's visit) as health care. I will refer to means of paying for care (eg: insurance plans, Medicaid, etc.) as health coverage. The equivocation of these terms, to me, has contributed to both ignorance and willful misleading in this discussion.
As I mentioned in my last post, I began with three basic premises about health care that I believed necessitated a certain stance on the issue. Through my journey, I discovered that while my premises weren't necessarily false, I had made them more narrow than necessary. I had determined the end to which I thought they pointed without examining whether that application was indeed the only application.
I was going to attempt to deal with my first two premises at the same time, since they are applicationally related, but the post was long. Really long. Therefore, this post will simply deal with the idea that that receiving health care is not an inalienable right. This premise was my reason for determining that it was needless, and possibly dangerous, to force our current system of paying for/providing health coverage in order to insure that every citizen has health coverage or even health care. Now, many of my readers may agree with this premise, some may disagree. Whether or not you subscribe to this premise, my point is this: it is really a reason to walk away from the proposed models of health care reform (HCR), or even going so far as having a government-run, single-payer system. I will admit that I'm not convinced of the superiority of a single-payer system at this time, but I will note that holding to this premise does not make the a single-payer system illegitimate. At this point, you might be wondering how I justify this position. Well, here goes my explanation:
It is good to delineate between things that are inalienable rights and things that are not. This is the basis for making determinations regarding human rights violations. We consider it a human rights violation to imprison someone for disagreeing. We don't consider it a human right violation if a child cannot afford schooling. This is because we view liberty and its exercise to be inalienable while we do not view receiving an education to be so. While it is worthwhile to make distinctions between inalienable rights and benefits/priviledges/whatever you wish to call the other things, we should not allow our list of inalienable rights to limit our perspective when it comes to providing benefits to all citizens. Take education, for example. (By the way, I will be using education as my example several times, largely because it is an acceptable, entrenched, publicly provided service.)
It has long been recognized that it is of particular interest in this country to ensure a general education for all citizens. It is particular because of the fact that America's government is directly enacted, governed, and guided by the votes of her citizens. An uneducated populace is a disaster for a republic such as ours. Even the Founders recognized the importance of education. Thomas Jefferson was a staunch advocate of Thomas Jefferson public proposals for education in Pennsylvania that would tend greatly toward providing public education for said state's citizens. Even George Washington seemed to feel that education was a non-negotiable for maintaining a strong republic capable of rebuffing tyranny. His Farewell Address touches on the importance of education. (You'll find that five paragraphs from the bottom.) In all, the early Americans and the Founders were quite convinced of the necessity of education to the preservation of our republic, even going to far as to propose different methods of providing said education to all citizens. It is clear (and further examination by my readers would make it even more so), that general education is a desirable thing to insure and provide.
Whew. This is getting long. The point to be made above is this: while something like education may not be considered an inalienable right, it is widely (and early on) acknowledged that an education populace is far more beneficial, and even necessary, than an uneducated one. Thus, it is beneficial, and even right, for the government to provide for a general education. This general education does not supplant, undermine, or eliminate privately offered alternatives; but instead, supplements and challenges it. Merely because something is not an inalienable right does not mean that it is not a good and excellent thing to insure to all citizens, even to the point of the government providing the structure and funding for such a thing. I spent a great part of this post outlining this fact using education. Let me spend a small part (part 1b, in fact) applying it to health care and health coverage.