Is health care a right? Why the social contract keeps changing and people want more free stuff

This isn’t a post about health care policy. It’s about why people keep wanting more free stuff.

A new liberal meme says health care is a right.

It puzzled me.

Health care isn’t in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. It’s not in the Code of Hammurabi (one of the first recorded codes of law) or the Ten Commandments.

It doesn’t really seem like health care is up there with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, does it?

It just kind of seems… entitled, along with a host of other new things people seem to want: internet access at utility prices, free college tuition, or six months’ leave for a new baby.

All of those things are great. We want health and education and family time for all our friends and neighbors. But can we really afford it? And is it right to encourage people to rely on, well, handouts?

My forecast is that in a few years, it’ll be normal to see health care as a human right. That’s because human civilization keeps getting more efficient.

Remember when the right to go to grade school was a big deal for kids? I remember reading about Nellie’s plight in the American Girl books. The main character, Samantha, went to a nice Victorian school. But her friend Nellie had to work at a factory.

It was a big deal when the U.S. decided to send every kid to school. Before that, kids had to forgo learning for full-time work in factories and on farms. It was a brand new right, but it made sense in a world where adults produced enough food, clothing, and shelter for a whole family. Not only was it more pleasant for those kids in Victorian times, but it accelerated society even more in the next generation: now an average worker could understand the difference between a reasonable loan and a predatory one, or aspire to the ministry, or operate specialized machinery to build a radio or an airplane.

There was a time when most rights didn’t make sense. Going much further back, the right to eat must have seemed “entitled” for some early tribes. If you didn’t catch or grow enough food, why should you take from the common store? If an enemy was foolish enough to get captured, how could they demand any of your tribe’s limited food?

Or what about the right to life? If you walked around without a weapon, wasn’t it your own fault if someone stole from or even murdered you?

From the vantage point of thousands of years later, it seems that freedom from fear of starvation and getting stabbed worked out pretty well for human society. It’s hard to pick grapes with a spear in one hand, and it’s hard to sing if your stomach is rumbling. It’s impossible to learn mapmaking or illuminate manuscripts or track warehouse inventory if you’re fighting for your life every night. But we did all those things and many more.

Human rights are an efficiency boost for humanity.

If, that is, they’re implemented at the right time.

For European-American frontier families in 1830s Iowa, it would have been a disaster to make health care a right: an expensive medical procedure for one person could have bankrupted an entire town. For hunter-gatherers, giving food to a sick person instead of a healthy one would make the healthy person sick too. They just didn’t have the resources.

Rights are all about context.

Someday I hope to go to Mars, and I’ll voluntarily give up a lot of my rights to do so: democracy is a bad idea on a spaceship, and taking a long shower could mean someone else has too little to drink.

But health care on Earth right now? When 8 people own as much wealth as the poorer half of the world? We’ve got the money.

I don’t want to call for a right that’s going to drive our society into the ground. So it makes sense to study it, and to roll out trials, and be ready to roll back if it’s not working. But, what doesn’t make sense to me, is that as of January 2017, the Republican party has banned the budget office from studying the effects of repealing the ACA.

I don’t like to be cynical, but from a fiscal responsibility standpoint, it seems like they know that the ACA is actually saving the U.S. money but the law is such a political hot potato they can’t admit it. Shouldn’t we be celebrating that a new right is not just helping us be healthier, but already saving money, too? And for the parts of it that aren’t working, don’t we need to study it to fix what needs to be fixed?

I look forward to building more rights for more people. I look forward to continuing the virtuous cycle. I want to see what our kids do with college degrees, good health, parents who could be home for them, and the world’s knowledge at their fingertips. And I look forward to seeing what new rights they can give our grandkids.

—The Polite Liberal