Is Healthcare a Right?

On a recent car ride I made a voice note of my thoughts about healthcare as a right and posted it on YouTube with a transcription to hopefully make it more discernible.

Link to YouTube

Here is the transcript if you would prefer to read it:

Driving home from Santa Barbara to LA and on the freeway I see, once I get near LA , a big plume of smoke and I know it’s a fire. You see them occasionally but you know what it is. It is a fire. Might be a grass fire might be a home might be a business. But am I worried? No. There is a whole team of people who are waiting for this kind of thing to happen and are responding to it on my behalf in some ways. I mean I don’t live in LA but I’m driving through it. It might impede my passage. I’m part of it. On behalf of all of us these people are dealing with that fire. What is fire? It is this innocuous really indescribable thing. It doesn’t have substance but we have teams of people whose sole job is to combat that thing on behalf of us all. It is a tremendous demonstration of the cooperative project that we are all involved in and that is making this thing called life, another indescribable entity, thing, there’s no substance to it, life, but that is our project. We are doing it together! We can’t do it alone. It has been demonstrated. I don’t think that anyone could seriously posit that a human could survive on their own in the wild like a lot of animals do. We have to get together to perpetuate. No one (could say otherwise). Maybe someone could. I would be interested to hear the argument. I don’t think it is possible. So we get together. That has been our formula for success is we collaborate and take care of the things that threaten us. And we get together and we take care of certain needs. That we have to fulfill them or to make them go away such as hunger or shelter. That is all collaborative. We rely on each other, which means everyone, to solve those issues; food, shelter...

Healthcare is another one of those things and that is why some people call it a right but they don’t say we have a right to food or shelter. Some people do. Not really commonly accepted right now in 2016 that people have a right to that. There is definitely a segment of the population (saying that) but health care we are hearing people allude to it as a right. And I don’t know if I buy that. I don't know that I buy that as a right. I really see health care as an obligation.

I think it should be a single payer, us collectively, the government …

So, the government as a single payer is us, all of us, collaboratively paying for this thing to happen. I do think that we have an obligation to do that for each other. Just like we have an obligation to put out fires and protect and serve, the police, things like that. In that way it is a fundamental ... I wouldn’t call it a right. I think it is part of what we owe to each other. Rights are things that are given to you, I don’t know how to describe it but god is close. There are inalienable rights given to us by our creator, I think is a good way of putting it, that precede, a priori, government. We give government power, I do believe that, so our rights come before the government. We create the government in order to form a more perfect union. That is how it is described in our Constitution; that wonderful document. That is our project. To create a more perfect union. Notice it doesn’t say the first union. It says a more perfect union. Which means it recognizes that we are already involved in this collaborative project and the reason that government is being established is there is another layer that we are putting on top of that collaborative project in order to make it more perfect. Perfect being a euphemism. Obviously nothing could ever be perfect but "more perfect" insinuating that it could be better. So that is what we are attempting to do and in order to do that we, collectively, are going to create an environment that is conducive to that and health care is part of that. 

And the fact that we can provide healthcare? That we have gotten to such a level this is something we can provide? I mean governments back a couple hundred years ago at the very least, sure we could ask them to provide healthcare but there was not much they could provide at that time compared to what can be provided at this time. So the fact that we can provide healthcare comes from this collaborative project. It would have never come out of any solo... it hasn’t... there are so many facets to it. It has come out of this collective project. So it belongs to the collective. I know this sounds like a socialist or communist statement. I’m not going there. I’m saying it came from our collective project so it is something that we could give because it is ours and there are benefits to giving it. It makes our union more perfect. It makes our citizens better able to perform their duties as citizens and as a consumer. Our citizens have certain roles that we need them to play in order for our union to be more perfect. Citizen, consumer are a couple of them and healthcare enables them to do that. So why not provide it as best we can as cheaply as we can?

Certainly people deserve to get paid for this service and that is why I don’t call it a right because we are asking other people to perform this service so it is really an obligation. There are people who love doing it and are good at doing it and we need them to do it. They deserve to get paid to do it absolutely. It is a vital function. But at the same time it has to be cost effective in order for it to be ultimately successful in aiding our more perfect union.  So how do you keep the cost down? Frankly my answer to that is that you take the profit motive out of it. I know that sounds communist/socialist as well but I’m not advocating taking the profit motive out of everything. Hardly! I believe in the profit motive. It is a tremendous engine for growth but in this instance it is counterproductive. So that is what government can do for us. It can take the profit motive out of providing a resource that enables our citizens to become better able to serve in the role that we need them to serve in because this is a collaborative project. 

Why is the profit motive counterproductive to healthcare? Obviously it increases the cost but my argument is by the nature of healthcare it disproportionately increases the cost because profit motive is a tremendous growth engine in the free market (which is another area we need our citizens to be stewards playing roles in) purchasing, that decision is the fuel of the profit motive [sic] engine but in the instance of healthcare you can’t make a decision, a rational decision, a free market decision, you can’t make that kind of decision in the arena of healthcare. Your supply and demand are way out of whack because your life is precious and you don’t have the option of saying no. That is really what the key to free market growth profit center - is the consumer has to say no. That is our group decision on what is valuable and what is not and consumers can’t say no to healthcare. They don’t have that option. So it does not work in the free market profit mode and it is costing us. It is something that is taking resources away from things that we could better apply those resources to. I’m talking about money. Certainly we need to figure out the best way to provide healthcare. It is possible to screw that up and be counterproductive by not providing enough incentive for service and development. We definitely need to maintain a level of that. Growth and change are absolutely imperative. We can’t stagnate. We have to bring good people in by offering a living wage or some other incentive. When I say a living wage I mean something competitive. It may be a stipend, a guarantee in retirement. It doesn’t have to be a wage. As a society we can say “you are valuable”, “we will take care of you”, “there may be certain things you can rely on if you make this commitment to help us out”, there’s options. That we have to do, we have to do it right. But still, it can’t be based on free market decisions and process because it is not applicable. You can’t say no.