Having a right to healthcare is excellent as far as it falls into the category of liberties upon which no one must infringe. However, as long as the person cannot provide for his own healthcare, literally, his right to healthcare must depend on others to set up the service and it is then that a right to healthcare falls into potential conflicts with the rights of others. There is no such thing as an obligation to provide a service in order to maintain a right.

There is such a thing, though, as a service set up in response to a market demand. And through rights such as the right to property and, perhaps, some ethereal right to pursuit of happiness etc., no one can deny a person healthware if and when the service legally exists and the person legally intends to pay for the service. The question as to whether or not a citizen is entitled to social healthcare then solely exists in relation to the reasons why society should pay for such services for its citizens. Not whether or not it's a human right.

Practically put, we can't give everyone the best, state-of-the-art health care, and this situation will continue for the foreseeable future. In that context, the issue of it being a right or not is immaterial since it is inachievable.

I suppose one could argue for a lesser form of it, but any lesser statement lacks elegance and involves a tie to economics. "You have a a right to decent health care that covers the following procedures ..." A "right" that ties into a list of medical procedures that will inevitably change with time (as medicine in the 18th century is not the same as medicine today or medicine in a hundred years) is just too inelegant to stomach.

As to the separate question of whether health care would be a good thing for society to provide, health care guarantees count as a societal luxury along the lines of Social Security which diverts money from workers to non-workers because we don't like seeing retirees begging in the streets. It could work in moderation, and is likely to both be popular and a step away from perfect efficiency. The current system guaranteeing only urgent care is worse than any alternative. We pay for the most expensive cases that produce the least economic and social return.

Rights, as an objective reality, indeed do not exist. The proper answer to the question in the thread topic is, "That is a meaningless question that cannot be answered." Or else, we could say, "Yes, health care is a human right in some countries, but in the United States it is not, it is a privilege of those who can afford it."

Rights don't exist as an objective reality, but they do exist if we say they do. A right is a liberty or a possession that we judge someone is morally entitled to. For example, if someone is driving a car down the street, but has stolen the car from someone else, that is the objective fact of the situation. To say that the person has no right to own that car (which I think we would all agree), is to make a judgment about whether or not he should be driving it; likewise, if we say to the contrary that he does have a right to it. The objective fact remains that he is driving it, and his right or lack of right to do so is not an objective fact but rather a judgment we make as to the moral appropriateness of his doing so.

And so the appropriate question for this thread is not "Is health care a human right?" which implies, wrongly, that there is an objective set of human rights out there to be discovered, but rather, "Should health care be a human right?" which implies, correctly, that this is a judgment for us to make.

My personal opinion is that yes, it should be. We do much harm by being so callous towards the members of our society, including its children, that we would deny them something so basic and necessary for healthy existence, merely because they don't have the money to pay for it. Objections that this requires taking property from one person for the sake of another are claiming that property rights outweigh a right to a decent life, and that is not true according to my own value system. And that's even if they were economically sound, which by the example of most advanced nations that have systems of socialized medicine, and get better health care for less per capita expended, they are not.

Just a reminder, this is the formal debate seciton, and as such, the last few pages are not within the rules. Please read before posting.

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