Doc – we think the right to a trial by jury (Amendment VI in the Bill of Rights) permits the government to compel citizens to serve on those juries. I earned something like $10 a day for the five days of jury duty I served (since I had exhausted all my vacation days on sick leave). So there’s one right that compels people to incur very tangible costs.

I want decisions to remain the patient’s, with input from the doctor. Right now insurers, employers, pharmaceutical companies, and even the government all have a lot more say than patients do. I’m not advocating for more government involvement – just a system that closes the gap between patient and provider.

Donna – you’ll be relieved to know that nearly every industrialized country that has a universal health care system actually has better health outcomes than our system, at about half the cost. I’ve lived in one of those countries, and I can tell you: it’s not bad. Meanwhile, is your disabled child going to be able to afford care when he’s an adult? Through his job? I hope he’s the right kind of disabled for that – the alternatives are pretty bleak.

Frank – Yes, out with experts and bloggers, in with the comment trolls. Concerning rights, see the discussion of Amendment VI above. As for socio-economic status: re-read my post. As for ad-hominem attacks: I’d be just fine with a system that rewarded reasoning, but who are you kidding?

You have a right to bear arms, but not a right to ask me to pay for your gun.
You have a right to vote, but I don’t have to drive you to the polls unless I want to.

Interestingly, children’s health, or anyone’s, seems to be inversely correlated with the amount of healthcare available in their locality. Do you have a right to healthcare that shortens your lifespan.

“Healthcare” is not a simple, disambiguated good like money, or sex, or religious perfection perhaps are. The amount of resources that can be spent on your health is unlimited. The amount that can do you any good, or enough good to be worth the effort, might be very limited indeed.

Why should people too stupid, or ignorant, to understand that distinction be given control of one of the largest, most inefficient and dynamic sectors of our economy?

If you want to increase your life expectancy, sight unseen, increase your relative socio-economic status. As long as you reason at so unthoughtful and self-centered a level, that’s not going to happen (I hope.)

I also shudder every time I read or hear the phrase “high quality health care” because it’s undefined, yet it is assumed everyone knows what it means.

I agree about King, and I do wish for a similar “awakening” regarding health care. But so long as most people see the problem as simply being sick or not, getting medicine or not, seeing a doctor or not, that awakening will not happen. Most people – and this is my criticism of you and Shadowfax – do not discuss the extent to which health care affects the many other areas of a sick person’s life, including civil rights. Not even most sick people understand this problem. It took me thirteen years of struggle to really get it. (You and Shadowfax may well be aware of this problem, but it’s missing from your exchange.)

So the first step to that awakening is getting people to recognize that their rights as citizens are diminished and denied simply by virtue of their illness. Sick people need to recognize their circumstances as a contingent fact, the same as race, religion, and gender, and thus not legitimate grounds for discrimination. For all King’s challenges, he had this going for him: his people were plainly obvious, as was discrimination against them. The chronically ill spend their lives trying not to look sick, trying not to think sick, trying to be normal as possible; we’ve internalized the norm that says we shouldn’t talk about our illness, and it prevents us from recognizing our circumstances. Imagine if King first had to convince people that it was okay to talk about being black: where would we be?

If we’re discussing societal priorities more broadly, “moral obligation” is fine – but I don’t think it’s adequate to the task of understanding sick people’s place in society. From a sick person’s point of view, it is deeply disempowering to have to argue that the rest of society has a “moral obligation” to provide my care. (In fact, I don’t think I could mean it.)

So, yes: we have a moral obligation to provide health care. But I – as a sick person – also have civil rights that are denied by our current system.

Ironically, I agree with virtually everything you say– except that
“right” is the best way to describe why every human being should have access to high quality health care.
Usually, when people talk about healthcare as a “right” they are debating whether it is a “right” or a “privilege.” As I said in my original post, when you put it that way, I will circle “right” every time.
But Shadowfax introduced a third choice to the discussion: healthcare is a “moral obligation” in this sense: a civilized society has a moral obligation to ensure that all of its citizens have healthcare.
To me a society’s moral obligation exists on a higher plane than an individual’s right. under the law. When we move from man-made laws to morality and ethics, we are on firmer ground.
MOreover, the idea that society has a “moral obligation” to ensure healthcare for all asks us to think about health care collectively, not individually. We all deserve health care because we are all in the same boat. Whether we are sick or heatlhy today, we are all human being, and insofar as we recognize each other as equal, and human at we recognize our moral obligation to each other.
In this way healthcare is, as you say, close to what you call a civil right. But I would argue that people like Martin Luther King got as far as they did in campaigning for civil rights by awakening the conscience of the nation. King didn’t say “I” have a legal right–and you have to respect it.
He said “we”– and dreamed of a society in which we would treat each other equally.
Rights under the law, like the right to bear arms, may change with changing times. Moral obligations to treat each other as equals (becuase we are all human) do not change.