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

Fri Sep 4 01:13:25 CDT 2009

See Donald Sensing's bio here: 
http://senseofevents.blogspot.com/2007/10/donald-sensings-biography.html

From: oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net [mailto:oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf
Of Ruth Landmann
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2009 11:42 AM
To: oe at wedgeblade.net
Subject: [Oe List ...] by : Donald Sensing-Is health care a human right?

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 United
<http://www.umc-gbcs.org/site/apps/nl/content3.asp?c=frLJK2PKLqF&b=3631781&c
t=3956183>  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the other Founders) are a fact of nature that cannot be rescinded by human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," Dictionary.com),
<http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/unalienable>  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 Meg
<http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/09/practical_philosophy_a
gain.php>  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 Tenth
<http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+20:17&version=NIV>
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 Michael
<http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/health_care_is_not_a_group_ser.html>
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, explains.
<http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/53356> 
[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/be7477e9/attachment-0001.html>