Heath Care Right

For John, BLUF:  The term "right to health care" gets bandied about, but without analysis.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Is health care a human right?  No.

From Pastor Don's Blog, by Pastor Don, 3 March 2020, first written in 2009.

Here is the lede plus three:

I first wrote this in 2009, but it seems relevant to today as well; I have updated it.

Is health care a human right, as the United Methodist Church says?  I don't see how.  Human rights, as Americans have always understood them (beginning with Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders) are a fact of nature that cannot be rescinded by human beings.  Rights are immutable, indeed, unalienable ("Not to be separated, given away, or taken away" Dictionary.com, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence.)  As a precursor to his Declaration theology that unalienable human rights are a endowment by God, Jefferson wrote in his pre-revolution essay, Summary View of the Rights of British America, "The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.  The hand of force may disjoin, but cannot destroy them."

Since his day, and certainly preceding it, the historic American understanding of human rights is the exercise of individual freedom, especially in the political realm, for both public and personal good.  We have historically never understood our rights as encompassing access to services or commodities.

Rights are inherent in each individual equally, they are not divisible.  Take the Declaration's famous insistence that among human rights is "the pursuit of happiness."  Note that it is the pursuit of happiness that is a right, not the achievement of it.  Nor is one person more entitled to pursue happiness than another, no matter one’s station in life.  Besides, happiness (what Jefferson meant was not happiness as we use the word today, but a state of contentment in life and possessions) is not something that can be given us, it is something we have to create.

This is a long blog post.  But worth the read.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff