| | A “right” to health care means the right to such care apart from and independent of anyone else’s willingness to provide it, which means the right to someone else’s labor — either the labor of medical personnel or of the taxpayers forced to subsidize it. If some people are entitled by right to the products of the work of others (either of the medical providers or of the taxpayers), it means that these others are compelled to work for them. A person who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave. Although a right to health care doesn’t imply that a physician will necessarily be conscripted to provide it, it does imply that he can (justifiably) be conscripted to provide it. And, in fact, doctors have already been subjected to a kind of medical conscription.
Consider, for example, the “Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act” of 1985 (EMTALA). As Dr. Paul Hsieh and Attorney Lin Zinser note: This law requires that hospitals that accept Medicare patients diagnose and treat anyone who comes within two hundred feet of an emergency room, regardless of whether the person can pay for the treatment. The effect of this law is that anyone can walk into an emergency room at any time and receive treatment — without concern for payment. If a bum wants a free meal and a warm bed for the night, all he has to do is walk into the ER and say, “Doc — I feel like an elephant is sitting on my chest!’” By law, the emergency room doctor and staff have to run tests until they can prove that he is not having a massive heart attack and can be safely discharged. And the failure of a hospital or physician to comply with any EMTALA-mandated responsibilities can result in fines of up to $50,000 for each infraction. . . .
EMTALA enslaves doctors. They are required to treat patients who are not required to pay them. What other industry is required by law and under penalty of a fine to provide services on a regular basis without any promise of payment? How long could restaurants survive if a law required them to serve free meals to anyone who showed up at the door and said he was hungry? How many grocery stores could exist if they were required to allow people to walk out with food that had not been paid for? EMTALA is classic socialist doctrine applied to medicine: Each patient gets care according to his need from each doctor according to his ability.
EMTALA not only enslaves emergency medicine physicians; it also enslaves any specialist called to the ER to treat a patient. For instance, because hospitals are required to treat patients at the ER, a hospital will typically require a cardiologist who admits one of his own patients to the hospital’s cardiac care unit to also be on call to take care of any ER patient who presents with a cardiology problem.
(“Moral Health Care vs. ‘Universal Health Care’.” (The Objective Standard, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 22-23)
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With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It's not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery.
