The current administration, the media, and a good chunk of the populous seem to be confused about the definition of rights. First and foremost our constitution grants very few rights, the right to vote being one of the granted rights, but it enumerates many rights. The Bill Of Rights cover rights that the founding fathers believed were granted to all people and was set up to protect the people from the government attempting to infringe rights that exist outside of any government’s ability to grant them. So there are two kinds of rights in the document that is the framework for governing this nation. The current administration says that we have a right to health care in this country and I couldn’t agree more. However they do not mean what the words the use actually mean. What they mean is that we are all entitled to health care. We have a right to health care in this country already. We have a right to buy insurance as we choose. We can go to any doctor that will see us and pay him to perform all sorts of medical services for us. The government can only regulate what is safe and what is not. I have a right to have the level of health care I want to provide for my family. We are not denied this right by not liking insurance companies, by not being able to afford their rates, or by not having any number of things covered by said insurance companies. Like it or not the right to health care exists in this country.
For something to be a right all people must have equal access to said thing. Every single citizen of the United States of America has equal access to health care. Every one of us can have the same services for the same price as anyone else. For a thing to be a right it does not mean, by any stretch of logic, that we all must have the same exact level of said thing. It must also, conversely, mean that we can choose to not have the thing. If you start applying the current liberal definition of “right” to other rights enumerated in our constitution it becomes painfully obvious just how ridiculous it is to say the current push to pass laws requiring us to have insurance is based on some sort of “right” to a thing.
If having a right to a thing means the government must provide it for me, as stated concerning health care, then I also expect the following in short order: my own printing press so that I can exercise my right to freedom of the press and a shipment of top quality arms so that I can exercise my right to keep and bear arms that has been affirmed by SCOTUS as an indivual right. We can talk about other rights later and how the government can provide them for me.
It’s not a right if the government requires us all to have it, gives us money for it, and runs the industry. At that point it’s a straight up entitlement and I do not believe we are entitled to anything. We have rights that we must choose to exercise but more importantly that we can choose, without penalty, to not exercise. The current attempts to push a set of health care entitlements on the American people and attempting to cloak them as rights is almost as perverse as the Patriot Act claiming to defend freedom whilst yanking freedoms away from us.
You have a right to believe that you are entitled to health care but since that isn’t codified anywhere in our laws your right to believe that ends where my belief that there is not an entitlement begins. You can claim, at the top of your lungs all day long, that the government should cover the cost of medical care for you and yours and it won’t make it right or true. You can scream about health care being a right but as long as you want to government to provide it what you mean is that it is an entitlement you want the government to give you since you already have a right to pay the same amount of money as me and have the same health care I have.
I can see how this wouldn’t seem fair to someone raised in the entitlement mentality that has permeated through our school systems and news media over the years as fair has been redefined to mean that everyone has to have the starting position, the same engine, and the same pit crew for this race and if their driver fails then it’s not their fault. That is not what fair has ever meant, not what it means now, and will not be what it ever means. It is fair because the government cannot stop either your or I from getting health care, it is fair because for the same dollar I can buy the same amount of health care as you. If you think that having better health care because I have money or having worse health care because I have less money than you isn’t fair then please tell me how we will start dumbing down smart doctors so no-one receives better care because their doctor is smarter because that’s where that logic takes you.
In closing all of this talk about rights and fairness is about neither one. They are merely words the current administration and the MSM is using in order to make this entitlement they want to pass more palatable to the American people. What they are doing is not fair, or just for that matter, and it certainly isn’t about rights since the right they are pushing already exists for every American. It’s just like the last administration trying to redefine freedom to make the Patriot Act easier to swallow and it’s still disgusting.
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