This morning I was checking the news on CNN and happened to tune in just
as a woman, about 50 years old, was being forcibly ejected from a Senate
meeting discussing reforms in the health insurance system. As she was led
out she kept shouting, "We want guaranteed health care," "We have a right
to guaranteed health care," and so on. Not a soul replied to her, not in
the audience nor from the dais.
Why is it taken to be a palatable notion that people should get their
health care guaranteed? Of course, there are other services that are
treated as if people had a basic right to them, such as primary and
secondary education. But then there are many services people want, even
need, that few would regard as due people as a guarantee. The food we
purchase at grocery stores isn't anyone's by right--if it were, farmers
and other food service professionals would have to provided it without
payment and on demand. For that's what is due when one has a right to
something. My right to my life is not something the respect for which I
need to pay someone. (Yes, the protection of such a right, by the legal
system, requires funding but that's not the same as its respect! Once
protection comes into the picture, someone has already done violence to a
right! But those who don't do this aren't getting paid!)
Genuine rights can be respected without having to do anything except
abstain from their violation. If, however, an alleged right such as to
education or health care or insurance is observed, someone must do
something for another whether he wants to or not. That is what property
taxes are, forced payments extracted from residents to pay for educational
professionals, overhead, equipment, transportation, and so forth. While
when we want to get something as vital to our lives as food we need to
meet the terms of those who produce it, this isn't observed with education
and may not be for long with health services. But why?
I can only imagine that those who advocate health care as a guarantee must
think of health care professionals as involuntary servants, sort of like
those who used to be drafted into a conscript military. Same with people
who defend primary and secondary education as a right--they must see those
who provide it as conscripts. Or they must see those who are forced to pay
for these services by the professionals who are to provide them as needing
to submit to forced labor! And while this may all be palatable in a feudal
society, it should not be in a society that aspires to be home to free men
and women instead of slaves.
The fact that no one at that Senate hearing offered even the hint of a
protest to that woman who insisted that health professionals and/or those
paying for their work are conscripted servants is very discouraging. At
the highest levels of government it seems it is not really an outrage to
declare a professional group to be involuntary servants rather than free
men and women. This in a country the leaders of which still have the
audacity to call it free! And as far as I can tell, not too many
professionals in the field of health care protest the idea that what they
do belongs to their clients by some kind of basic right. Oh, maybe a few
doctors and nurses protest, in various obscure forums. But it appears that
at a Senate hearing when someone declare professionals as essentially
indentured servants of their clients no one speaks out in protest.
It seems to me that here is one place where our system of elementary and
secondary education lets us down but that's no great surprise either.
Considering that education, too, is deemed to be a right that people ought
to have guaranteed to them instead of having it be provided to clients in
a system of free exchange, waiting for educators to protest the idea of
education and health care being a basic right is utterly futile.
