[Oe List ...] by : Donald Sensing-Is health care a human right?

[Ruth Landmann]

My brother sent this to me today. Do any of you know who Donald Sensing is?

Thursday, September 3, 2009

<http://senseofevents.blogspot.com/2009/09/health-care-is-not-natural-right.html>Health 
care is not a natural right

Is health care a human right, as the 
<http://www.umc-gbcs.org/site/apps/nl/content3.asp?c=frLJK2PKLqF&b=3631781&ct=3956183>United 
Methodist Church says? I don't see how. Human rights, as Americans 
have always understood them (beginning with Thomas Jefferson and the 
other Founders) are a fact of nature that cannot be rescinded by 
human beings. Rights are immutable, indeed, unalienable ("Not to be 
separated, given away, or taken away," 
<http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/unalienable>Dictionary.com), 
as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence. As a precursor 
to his Declaration theology that unalienable human rights are a 
endowment by God, Jefferson wrote in his pre-revolution essay, 
Summary View of the Rights of British America, " The God who gave us 
life gave us liberty at the same time. The hand of force may disjoin, 
but cannot destroy them."

Since his day, and certainly preceding it, the historic American 
understanding of human rights is the exercise of individual freedom, 
especially in the political realm, for both public and personal good. 
We have historically never understood our rights as encompassing 
access to services or commodities.

Rights are inherent in each individual equally, they are not 
divisible. Take the Declaration's famous insistence that among human 
rights is "the pursuit of happiness." Note that it is the pursuit of 
happiness that is a right, not the achievement of it. Nor is one 
person more entitled to pursue happiness than another, no matter 
one's station in life. Besides, happiness (what Jefferson meant was 
not happiness as we use the word today, but a state of contentment in 
life and possessions) is not something that can be given us, it is 
something we have to create.

It does sound all high minded to say that, like rights, health care 
should be equal for everybody, which I suppose is why clergy are so 
susceptible to claim it. It's more than obvious that no one in the 
Congress or the White House believes it, though. If they did, the 
bill awaiting Senate vote would require members of Congress and the 
rest of the federal government to fall under the "public option" 
along with the rest of us proles. But they've protected their turf 
completely and much better turf is theirs than ours. I'll believe 
that equal access and care for everyone is a moral imperative when 
the people who say it is a moral imperative place themselves under 
the same imperative.

The presumption that health care is a right, and therefore must be 
equal for everyone, is founded on two critical errors of 
understanding. The first is that health care is a resource that is 
simply available for those who need it, or that can be made equally 
available through proper legislation and regulation. The second error 
is that medical care and access to it can be rationed by command more 
equally, economically and fairly than by demand.

Health care is not a resource to be exploited

Medical facilities and doctors are not phenomena of nature, like 
water or petroleum are. Hospitals don't just appear. They are 
produced. Medical care is not a resource that can be "mined" through 
more regulation to be more plentiful. Medical care is a service. 
Specifically, it is a contracted service, in much the same way that 
legal assistance, automotive maintenance or pastoral care are 
services. Why? Because men and women choose of their own accord to 
get medical training. Once graduated, doctors, nurses, paramedics and 
technicians of various kinds reasonably expect that they will be 
compensated at a rate greater than their costs to enter the 
profession, greater than their extremely high overhead to run the 
practice, and enough to make their grueling hours materially 
worthwhile for themselves and their families.

This fact has very direct consequences under the Medicare and 
Medicaid systems we have today. The Atlantic's business 
journalist <http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/09/practical_philosophy_again.php>Meg 
McArdle explains:

[W]e have a comprehensive national health care plan for seniors. Yet 
we have a shortage of geriatricians, the one specialty that you would 
think would be booming. Why? Because Medicare sets a single price for 
the services of geriatricians, and it is low. Since the field is not 
particularly enticing (though arguably it really should be, since 
geriatricians have extremely high job satisfaction compared to many 
more popular specialties), very few people go into it. It's one of 
relatively few specialties that consistently has most of its slots 
and fellowships unfilled.

Moreover, the skills and equipment a doctor or hospital possess are 
their individual property, not the property, even partially, of the 
state or public. (There are publicly-owned facilities such as VA 
hospitals, but in operation there is no difference to the general 
public between them and private facilities). No one has a natural 
right to someone else's property. To think we do directly violates 
the 
<http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+20:17&version=NIV>Tenth 
Commandment. As McArdle says, "People have no obligation to perform 
labor for others. I may not [justly or legally] force a surgeon to 
save my mother at gunpoint."

That means that to receive a doctor's services, the doctor and a 
patient must come to a mutually-agreeable arrangement of what medical 
care will be provided in exchange for a specified fee. This is a 
commercial transaction no different in type than hiring a plumber, 
cab driver or lawyer. That medical services often are life critical 
does not change the fundamental nature of the contract.

We have access to medical care only as long as a doctor is willing to 
provide it. No one has to become a doctor or continue in medical 
practice. If any "reform" of the present health care system reduces 
the rewards of practicing medicine or complicates the practice, fewer 
men and women will so choose. Access will then go down for everyone 
and costs will inevitably rise, no matter what the rate-payment of 
the public option is, because access or its lack is itself a cost and 
also drives other costs.

Health care is a service

As 
<http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/health_care_is_not_a_group_ser.html>Michael 
Keehn explains, health care is a service but not a community service. 
Police and fire departments provide community services. That seems 
obvious enough, but consider: fire departments do not protect your 
home individually. The fire chief definitely will let it burn to the 
ground if firefighting needs are greater elsewhere in the town. Just 
look at what is happening near Los Angeles as of the date of this 
post. Police and fire protection are in fact rationed to protect the 
lives and property of the greatest number of people possible with the 
resources available. But when the resources (manpower, equipment or 
money) run out, individuals are exposed to greater danger or loss 
though the community at large may still be protected.

Individual residents of a city do not contract for their community's 
police or fire protection. When you call 9-1-1 because someone broke 
into your home while you were in bed, you don't have to sign a 
contract with the police when they arrive, specifying the actions you 
want them to take and how much you are going to pay.

In contrast, under the present system medical care is an individual 
service. Doctors do not provide their services to the community as a 
whole, but to individuals. Because of that, each patient enters into 
a contract with his/her doctor specifying the medical services to be 
received and how much it will cost. This is mostly mediated through 
insurance companies, of course, which greatly simplifies the 
contracting process even as it diminishes the full range of choices 
available to a patient. But a patient 's health is protected in a way 
that their safety or homes are not protected by the police or fire 
departments.

Interestingly, the Roman Catholic Church rejects the idea that health 
care is a human right. The Most Reverend R. Walker Nickless, bishop 
of the Diocese of Sioux City, Iowa, 
<http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/53356>explains.
[T]he Catholic Church does not teach that "health care" as such, 
without distinction, is a natural right.

The "natural right" of health care is the divine bounty of food, 
water, and air without which all of us quickly die. This bounty comes 
from God directly. None of us own it, and none of us can morally 
withhold it from others. The remainder of health care is a political, 
not a natural, right, because it comes from our human efforts, 
creativity, and compassion.
Like any human endeavour, health care is finite. It can be properly 
understood only as such. Any reform that treats medical care as if it 
can be made infinitely available is a product of cloud-cuckoo land. 
Medical care, like every other finite thing, must be allocated. The 
current buzzword is "rationed." That's the foundation of the second 
critical mistake people are makming about health care, that medical 
care and access to it can be rationed by the government more equally, 
economically and fairly than by consumers. It can't, but that's a 
topic for another post.
By Donald Sensing
-- 



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/oe_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20090903/069ac03c/attachment.html>