We have been told, as the debate over health care reform unfolded, that health care is a right. Only one side in the debate was making this claim. I will leave it to you to guess which side.

Is health care a right?

Let’s begin by asking the deep philosophical question, “What is a right?”

Stated very simply, a right is something to which you are entitled, and for which no price can be exacted from you. For an example of such rights, we need look no further than the Bill of Rights, consisting of ten amendments that were very early on appended to our U.S. Constitution. (Remember the Constitution?) It cost the founding fathers nothing to acknowledge those rights, and they would not have dreamed of asking anyone for a penny in order to enjoy them.

The First Amendment guarantees the right of free speech and the free exercise of religion, among other things. The Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear arms, and so on. The U.S. government did not grant these rights by adopting the Bill of Rights; they merely acknowledged that these were already rights of the people—rights they possessed under God, and granted by God.

None of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights was granted as a privilege by the U.S. government. None. Those rights belonged to us before there was a U.S. government. They will belong to us if the U.S. government ever ceases to be.

So, is health care a right? Should health care have been included in the Bill of Rights? No.
Now be careful here. I did not say that people should not be free to seek health care. They should. But unlike our constitutional rights, health care consists of products and services. Like all products and services, someone provides them, and someone consumes them. The provider cannot provide health care for free, and the consumer cannot expect to receive health care for free. The right to keep and bear arms is not a product. It is not a service. It costs no one to provide that right, and no one has to pay for that right. (You have to pay for the gun, not the right.)

Are you seeing the difference?

Of course, we all need health care from time to time. We need automobiles, too, but you don’t see anyone claiming that the government should provide automobiles for everyone at public expense, do you? Why not? Regular people, and even some in government, understand that a car is a product. It is provided and purchased at a cost. No one thinks it is his right to be given one for free. We should not look at health care differently. The fact that you need something does not make it a right.

When someone tries to tell you that health care is a right, she is setting you up. She has an agenda that has nothing to do with rights. It has to do with power. She wants you, in the name of this supposed right, to give her the power to extract funds from some people (thus exerting power over them) in order that she might be seen to be giving a gift to other people (over whom she also wishes to have power). She may even have deluded herself that she is doing a wonderful service to humanity. But what she wants to do, in order to provide a false right, is to violate your real rights.

When men dethrone God in their hearts, they erect an idol, for man cannot do without a god. Often, the State serves as this idol, and man then looks to the State to provide for all his needs. When men love and serve God, they understand that certain things come from God, and other very different things come from the State. When men abandon God, and the State becomes all in all, man wants everything from the State—and much harm ensues as God judges that nation.

Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s. When you do so, God will bless you both directly and through legitimate government. When you fail to do so, God will judge you, both directly and through an overreaching State.