The Immorality of Socialized Health Care

We have all heard the arguments against government “anointed” health care: The high unsustainable costs, the monopolies it will create, the special interest it will create, the lucrative contracts to favored constituencies it will create, the forfeiture of choice, the rationing, which ultimately leads to a total government takeover.

All are valid arguments; however, let’s not forget the most fundamental argument of all, which is: Health care is NOT a right.

A right is a moral sanction of mans actions. It says one’s actions are proper and good. Therefore to violate a man’s right is immoral and evil. The fundamental right, of which all others are corollaries, is the right to life. What this means in practical terms, is the right to live for one’s self not for the sake of others. The primary implementation of mans rights is to pursue a standard of living of one’s own choosing free from force or coercion. The only moral purpose of government, then, is to protect these rights. If government extends it powers beyond protecting these rights into the aggressive role of confiscating people’s wealth for the greater good of society, government becomes a tyrant plundering the people.

Any artificial right, such as the right to health care, destroys the real rights of people by forcing them to pay for the health care of those who cannot afford it. This is aggressive force to take one’s income and give it to another.

It is neither moral nor well intended to lay claim to the rewards of someone else’s productivity. It is vicious and predacious to demand a good or service without compensation, or to force someone else to pay for it. A right by its very nature makes no claim on someone else’s property or income, a right as our founders conceived it, only applies to the freedom of action not the compulsion of others. In other words these new rights, such as in the case of universal health care, which require the coercion of others cannot be a right. Such new rights are in fact immoral and evil.

What government health care—or any other form of government created publicly funded program that redistributes wealth or subsidizes one group at the expense of another—does, is it turns the productive in society into serfs of the state.