There is no right to medical care

In the advertisement "A Renewed American Agenda" (USA Today, May 4, 2006)—placed by The Bedell World Citizenship Fund of Spirit Lake, Iowa, the organization urges us to "Recognize that All Americans Have A Right to Medical Care." I suppose they mean well but in fact they are perpetrating a gross misunderstanding about individual rights.

First, those who belong to this organization may mean no more than that we in these United States of America have a legal right to medical care, which is true enough but not crucial since governments can establish such rights—entitlements—whether justified or not. Those who have power have always been able to confer legal privileges on others especially if they can obtain these privileges from people by force of arms, by taxation or outright conscription.

Second, and which is the more vital point to make in response to this claim about a right to medical care, no one in fact has a natural right to medical care comparable to one's right to life, liberty, the pursuit of one’s happiness, private property, and so forth. These are what political theorists call negative rights because all they require is that people refrain from intruding on one another. But in fact no one can have a right to medical care because if one had such a right, others would lose their basic rights to liberty, and to property, which are unalienable and cannot be lost (only violated).

Medical care is a value doctors, nurses and other medical professionals would, if they were free men and women, provide to those they would choose as recipients, on terms they regard as acceptable. These provisions are not owed to anyone. Doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals may not be placed into involuntary servitude to those needing their services—the relationships must be voluntary, no matter how vital those services are to the recipients.

The belief that others may justly be placed into involuntary servitude so as to secure funds to pay medical professionals—who then will service those who need their work—is a gross error. In a free country—a just country—adult men and women treat each other as ends in themselves, not as unwilling tools, instruments, or means to each other’s ends. Just as I may not go over to my neighbor’s home and conscript some unwilling individual to come and mow my lawn or even drive me to the hospital (but must ask for this and await willingly given help), so any service such as medical care must be obtained without coercion.

There are those, of course, who believe that once it has been democratically determined that people must pay for medical services to all, there is nothing wrong with collecting the taxes for this purpose. This is wrong—no group or majority of a group may decide to take what belongs to people. It is no less unjust to do such a thing than it is to hang someone because the majority in some town decides it’s OK to do so, without first following due process, namely, demonstrating via the justice system that the hanging is deserved.

It needs to be reiterated again and again that taxation is a reactionary device that had been used by monarchs to collect “rent” from the folks who lived and worked on what the monarch (misguidedly) believed was his or her property. Taxation went hand in hand with serfdom and neither has a place in a free society where individual citizens are sovereign, not their government (which is merely an administrative agency to secure the rights of all the citizens, even non-citizens, of a country).

The myth of having a right to medical care—or all sorts of other services that need the work or resources of others—generates the mentality that people can proceed with their lives without having to be responsible for what living entails. These are all kinds of costs one must cover and be prepared to cover, alone or with the voluntary cooperation—trade, charity, generosity, or grant of loans—of others. Dumping these costs on unwilling others is like dumping pollution on unwilling others, a natural crime. The folks at the Bedell World Citizenship Fund ought not to be complicit in peddling the perverse political ideology that supports such practice.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL hospitals and health insurance schemes should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the very poor and minimal regulation. Both Australia and Sweden have large private sector health systems with government reimbursement for privately-provided services so can a purely private system with some level of government reimbursement or insurance for the poor be so hard to do?

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