Senator Obama has gone on record saying that health care is a right. Bad move, pandering to his base. Dr. Wes warns that this is a slippery slope that will dwarf the current housing crisis. As Hawaii learned in the example below, providing this right will almost certainly drive the country into bankruptcy:
As we consider this entitlement, we must now ask ourselves how, exactly, the government will implement this initiative to make healthcare a “right.” Can the government really supply the facilities, the doctors, the finances to make this happen? Or will they, like the housing industry, turn to private corporations to lead the charge?
I lean more towards Shadowfax’s and Maggie Mahar’s assertion that health care should be more of a moral obligation. By entitling health care, there will be little incentive for the American public to make the sacrifices necessary to tackle rising health care spending.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I don’t understand why framing universal health care as a moral obligation instead of a right changes the incentives (the difference seems largely a semantic one).
At the foundation of this discussion, “right” and “moral obligation” are semantics when address from the point of view of applying a system for the government to provide that service. “Right” vs “obligation” is a state of mind, and has little bearing on how care is delivered, in practice.
As a start, it would be nice to see physicians be able to deliver service pro bono while
1) their malpractice insurance covers it,
2) having complete flexibility to charge paying patients however much the physician sees fit, and,
2) if the physician accepts Medicare, not being held as legally defrauding the government for providing a service for less than the Medicare-allowed charge.
Heck, attorneys have a history and tradition of providing pro bono legal advice, because they can adjust rates to clients to cover the cost. But, we should also note, that the government sees legal representation as a right, and provides free legal representation to those accused of crimes. However, anyone who can scrape the money together will go out and get a “real” defense attorney, because the government-supplied service is, on average, considerably sub-par. Should we expect more from government with respect to healthcare?
I don’t think Obama is suggesting that health care will be free, just that it is a right. His approach is to let people who either lose their employer sponsored coverage or those who just would prefer it, to purchase Medicare. I know that if I had the choice to pay for my current commercial coverage, which is good, or to pay the same or even more for Medicare, I’d chose Medicare hands down. Not free, mind you. The goal would be that the sudden influx of cash from healhty people like me would give Medicare a huge infusion of needed cash yet not be a drain. It is a good plan, really. Whether it is good for specialists or primaries, both or neither, who knows? I suspect that it would help primaries and hurt most specialists.
I think the difference is more than semantics.
A right implies that physicians are obligated to provide this entitlement, no questions asked.
Framing health care as an obligation carries less of an entitlement mentality.
A subtle but important difference in my opinion.
Kevin
Well, I’m not sure exactly what a “moral obligation” means if it is something different than something that obliges us, no questions asked.
Perhaps the distinction you see is a question of distribution - if health care is a right, it may seem to the contemporary practitioner that the physician is obliged to provide it, even when society doesn’t want to (as the discussion of ASL interpreters below highlighted), whereas Shadowfax and Maggie Mahar carefully craft their language of moral obligation as acting on societies rather than individual agents. In theory, the distinction is a false one (its relevance here is a function of context within our broken system, but there’s no real reason a right to care implies an obligation on physicians but not the rest of the population).
I don’t personally care about all the twisted logicabout medicare, costs and rights.( I am from India).
” Is health care a Right?”. Yes, It is a right. It simply means that Everyone, without discrimination, has a right to timely, easily accessible and best possible health care.
The problem does not lie with defining health rights as a duty or obligation. It lies with the twisted and complex system of paying for it. The present financial meltdown is ample proof of a financial system gone berserk!! Here, In India, we have a scheme through which the Govt. pays for health care for the economically weakest 20% (about) of the population. This is done by providing such families with a smartcard for allowing easy deductions of payments by hospitals. The sum to be paid is predeclared in the scheme(after extensive debates) depending on the Diagnosis. So the hospital deducts Rupees 10,000/- for an Appendectomy and 12,000/- for a cataract. You can visit http://www.rsby.in to look at this scheme.