” 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.

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).

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

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?