Healthcare: A Right Or A Privilege Or An Entitlement?

There was a demonstration yesterday FOR federally enforced health care in our nearby city, the bigger one with the TV stations. The four-person demonstration was actually a family which has a child that cannot qualify for insurance due to a serious pre-existing condition. TV covered them more than the town hall proceedings inside.

Pre-existing conditions have always been disallowed out of fairness to the patrons of insurance that use it for it’s intended purpose, which is to enter into a cooperative agreement with similar people to place money into a pool as a hedge against the possible future need for expensive health care; the cost is determined at a probabilistic rate.

For a person with a pre-existing condition to enter that insurance agreement with the knowledge that they would immediately take out of the pool far more than they would ever put in, has been considered not just bad business for the members of the pool, but also fraudulent on the part of the person with the condition, who is using other people’s money to cover their own problem.

But in the all new America where outcomes are guaranteed to be equalized, every person now apparently has a right to every privilege that is available, regardless of either their ability or intent to pay for that privilege. That was the basis for the sub-prime mortgage glut that ultimately brought the entire world’s economy to its knees: it was declared that everyone should own a home regardless of whether they could afford it or intended to pay for it.

But is that colossal mistake enough to cause reconsideration of the Principle of Equalized Outcomes which the Left reveres and pursues frantically? No, not a mere recession or even a depression could cause reconsideration. The Left accepts no culpability; they assign guilt to others and use the opportunity to seize more federal control to control those whom they blame. And then they look for the next equalization opportunity.

The next best thing to mortgage equalization is health care equalization, which is now being referred to as a “right”.

As a right, how did healthcare come to bestowed this distinction? Certainly not by God, since there is a separation keeping God in his place, and out of the Left’s way. No, the new “rights” are bestowed by the new gods: the Leftists themselves. And “rights” far exceed the power and glory of “entitlements”, which include only such things as payback for Social Security confiscations made from a lifetime’s earnings. Such entitlements are revocable and without respect, as we see when Social Security funds are raided time and again, and now, Medicare benefits will be reduced in order to fund the new, gods-given “rights”. The new “rights” are far more powerful than the older entitlements.

The demonstrating woman on the street wailed into the TV camera, “My daughter has a RIGHT to health care!”, and the TV news dutifully carried her pain to the masses.

As Alinsky might have put it, “We have whatever rights we can seize and hold; there are no other rights”. These all new rights, if actually bestowed, will reduce life’s benefits for the responsible, who again will pay for the irresponsible.

Is there a moral urgency to force taxpayers to pay for indigent children with serious health conditions? The question should be answered by taxpayers, who would need to enter into a new social contract in order to provide such care. I personally feel that special cases should, indeed, have recourse to special treatments. But that is a contract, not a right.

When my wife and I visited Xian, China shortly after the Tienanmen Square massacre, we took a long walk inside the ancient city walls. We were in a place that had seen almost no whites, where mothers brought their children out to stare at us, and a small crowd followed us around to see what we would do. Burned into my memory is this: sitting on a curb was a man and a woman with a deformed child and a tin can, begging for help for the child. When I think of equalized health care, that is what comes to mind.

The ultimate equalized outcome and right is the right to be impoverished, and with equal poverty at that, unless of course you are one of the elite masters. In other words, all your rights boil down to this: you have the right to be equalized.

A panicky president who wants a 1000 page bill approved immediately and without even being read, a healthcare bill written by an avowed eugenicist and totalitarian, is definite cause for rejecting the bill out-of-hand, and demanding a slow, deliberate, transparent approach to the issue, instead.

The government of the USA is wildly out of control.