With Hillary Care back on the radar it’s time to reiterate a cosmic truth – there is no universal right to health care. You can talk about “the richest nation on earth” and inflated numbers of (mostly 20 somethings) those without health care insurance, but the fact is that there is NO inherent right to health care insurance.

The issue of course is whether or not one can afford the care and we all know that it can be expensive. I know from where I speak having a spouse with ongoing medical issues related to cancer and having both parents to cancer.

I pay for insurance for my wife – I’m covered by VA. My wife is not able to work and thus dependent on whether or not we can afford the care necessary. At this point – after nearly ten years – it’s a crap shoot on that question, but we’ve gotten by, both by insurance, out of pocket and few credit cards. Hey, you can’t take it with you.
Nevertheless I CHOOSE to carry life insurance for her, but I don’t consider it a “right” and indeed it is not, no more than eating is a right. I pay for health care and work so I can do so. Yet I don’t see it as an entitlement, or something that I should have at any means. Again eating is necessary, but it’s not my “right”. If I’m hungry and have no money I’m still not justified in breaking into a store and stealing food. If I do, I’m a lawbreaker and a thief. But I cannot claim that “I had the right” to commit the crime just because I didn’t have a dime.

However, statistics show that people don’t carry health insurance simply because they don’t want to, or are simply unwilling to work to pay for it. They look for their employers to give it to them outright or the Government to simply give it to them free.

I know that for a fact as I know many doctors who meet such people everyday. They’ve told me especially of the young who “refuse” to pay for health insurance because they feel they’re invincible or because it would dip into the “XBox 360 funds. Yet many doctors do the best they can by providing either sliding-scaled or even free service on occasion, but they cannot do it all the time – no one can and remain in a occupation for long.

Currently the debate has turned towards “the children” such as left wingers Bush bashers such as E.J. Dionne writes:

“On its face, Bush’s fight over SCHIP seems oddly chosen. The program provides coverage for children from families too poor to afford private insurance but not eligible for Medicaid. In many ways, it is a Republican creation. It made it through a GOP Congress in 1997 thanks to the work of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who is now furious about Bush’s veto threat.

By virtually all measures, the program has achieved exactly what it promised, and at a reasonable cost. But Bush argues that the $35 billion, five-year expansion of the program, worked out between the Democrats and such leading Republicans as Hatch and Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, might push too many children into government insurance. Bush wants a $5 billion expansion over five years, which the Congressional Budget Office says would eventually shove more than 1 million children out of the program at a moment when the number of children without health insurance is growing after years of decline. (That decline, by the way, was due in significant part to the success of SCHIP.) The goal of Hatch, Grassley and the Democrats is to expand the program to 10 million children from the roughly 6.6 million covered now.

This battle is central to the long-term goal of universal coverage. If a proposal with broad bipartisan support that is friendly to state governments and covers the most beloved group in society — children — can’t avoid being gutted for ideological reasons, what hope is there for a larger health compromise?”

No one can doubt the impact of play “The Kid Card”. But the fact is that it muddles the argument. Children’s health care by and large cost more than adult health care and someone has to foot that bill. Saying that we should open up another rainbow kettle of money to throw to the walls speaks volumes to why the system is broken in the first place, and again children have no more “right” to health care than their parents.

You can toss around “morality” and “the right thing to do” and you may have a point, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still not a right.

Socialized medicine doesn’t work – period. In every country it has been instituted it’s been shown to be a dismal failure.

The “Entitlement Party” has had the public convinced for years that big government is the solution to all our problems. That no matter how much you don’t want to achieve, and why should you, because big daddy government will take care of you no matter what.
What they leave out is the myriad of medical personnel who go to school for years, tacking on huge student loans, only to come out of medical school and get ripped off by insurance companies trying to protect their bottom line.

No doubt the health care industry needs an overhaul, but basically mandating coverage for all isn’t the answer.