Part 3. America: Is healthcare a right?

In parts 1 and 2 of this series, we began to delve into the question of rights. We discovered that some groups feel that healthcare should be a right. In part 2 we saw that there are both Natural Rights and Legal Rights.

Briefly, Natural Rights can be thought of rights conveyed to us by God. Legal Rights are conveyed by law or legislative process. A possible subset of Legal Rights are Entitlements, rights that are conveyed to a select class. For example, Social Security is an entitlement only conveyed to those who pay into the Social Security System. Entitlements tend to be tangible rewards, not philosophical attributes such as "freedom of speech".

So, with this background, is Healthcare a right? Or, is Healthcare an entitlement? Well certainly it is not a Natural Right: nowhere in Holy Scripture do you find a command from God to provide healthcare. In the legislative realm, healthcare has exclusively been conveyed to special classes: the poor, the elderly, and children. So, it is most accurate to describe healthcare as a Government Entitlement.

The providing of healthcare of course is not free. Services, equipment, and drugs all cost money. The presumption of an Entitlement is to provide some minimum level of the entitled subject to all who qualify for the entitlement. Since the entitlement is not free (as a Natural Right is), now we gravitate to the subject of economics. Given that economic resources of a country are not infinite, is healthcare the right place to put resources? And is healthcare the last word in entitlements? We will look at these questions in the last and 4th part of this series.