Healthcare Is Not A Right

Rights are bestowed upon men by God. Rights are also timeless, and transcend culture and technology. There is no such thing as a right that is not God-given. The God-given rights include life (which can only be given by God) and freedom to choose (as first exercised with dubious skill by Adam and Eve). Healthcare is not a right. Healthcare is a service commodity that is either sold or donated from one person (a doctor) to another person (a patient). The patient does not have the RIGHT to the doctor’s time, skill, knowledge or expertise. To say that a patient has a RIGHT to those things is to dehumanize and subjugate the doctor to the patient by force of law. Christ does not call us to forcefully subjugate one another. He calls us to subjugate ourselves – which is an entirely different matter, and is ultimately an exercise of our God-given right to free choice.

If we do not make this distinction, aren’t we operating in the same mindset and worldview that justifies abortion? Isn’t abortion the forced subjugation of one person (the baby) to another person or persons (the mother, father, etc.) in the name of false “rights”, namely the “right” to not be inconvenienced? The hallmark of Marxism is the reduction of human beings to units of economic value, and declaring doctors to be slaves to another person’s “rights” is precisely that. History shows us that once this mindset is adopted, there is no end. Up next will be the forced subjugation of those who produce food – because if healthcare is a “right”, then surely food is a “right” as well. Next up will be those who produce clothing, followed closely by those who build homes, followed by those who build cars, followed by those who produce energy. Where this process ends is totalitarian statism wherein every person is a slave to the state, and thus an object – not a subject.

One more logical point. I said earlier that rights, by definition, transcend culture and technology. If healthcare is indeed a right, then it must follow that a pre-Columbian resident of the Amazon River Basin was deprived of his fundamental human rights because he did not have access to modern healthcare. That is, of course, ridiculous. I find that if one uses this cultural-technological transcendency criterion as a litmus test, it helps bring into clear focus what is and what is not a right. - Ann Barnhardt