The ACA and the fundamental right to health care

[Robert Sheridan]

The police power exists to protect our health, safety, welfare and morals.

The military power exists to protect our health, safety, welfare and morals.

We establish government to protect, ditto, ditto, ditto, and ditto.

We protect corporations because we find them helpful in accumulating wealth to support individuals and governments.

No one has said that the decisions to spend for these have no limits.

We have built roads, canals,  bridges, modern highways, airports, telegraph, telephone, and the internet, often subsidized and regulated by state and federal law, to bring such things into widespread existence and to make them function better.

Why is it okay to provide a navy to insure freedom of the sea lanes for our oil, coal, wheat, and freight carriers, for corporations initially and individuals around the world, but not to provide direct health care for our citizens and residents.  "Corporations are people" according to Mitt Romney.  People are garbage, as I understand the too-far Right.

How does the too-conservative and/or libertarian position improve by ignoring individuals, meaning leaving them entirely to their own devices, sink or swim, pray tell?  

Hayek thrived following WWI; I don't think FDR was overly impressed by him, preferring, it seems, the competing view of John Maynard Keynes.  

The invisible hand is rivaled by the invisible brain.  

Like the soul, don't look for it in any illustrated text.

rs


On Mar 26, 2012, at 9:00 AM, Jon Roland wrote:

> The Supreme Court is correct in holding that there is no constitutional right to health care, or to any economic benefit. The adjective "fundamental" when applied to "right" should be reserved for those immunities that arise from the constitutions of nature, society, and the state, prior to the establishment of a constitution of government, and no constitution of government can be regarded as well-designed or consistent with the constitution of nature if it declares a positive right to a sufficient amount of any scarce resource. It is a grave mistake to seek to declare "rights" the delivery of which can not be assured even if there are no public resources available to do anything. A well-designed constitution of government must be able to function using only the voluntary efforts of individuals and no public treasury at all.
> 
> There is a right to health care, but it is only a right not to have government actors impede persons from providing for their own or voluntarily offering it to others. The only historical exceptions for that have been when individuals who were immune because they had     recovered from an infectious disease were required, as militia duty, to feed and provide basic care for a few who had contracted that disease, as a way to prevent it from spreading, that is, to maintain a quarantine.
> 
> As Hayek and other competent economists have pointed out, those we sometimes call "progressives" suffer from the delusion that there are no economic limits on compassion, that somehow enough resources can always be found to meet infinite needs. Although we may sympathize and commend compassion using only one's own resources, it defies the laws of nature and economics to allow the compassionate to impose their will on those who choose not to aid others other than for militia defense against violent threats. 
> 
> Any intelligent person should be able to understand that it is not a rational decision to expend more for medical care, on the average, to treat an individual who cannot, on the average, repay that cost over his remaining working lifetime, allowing for a moderate rate of interest. The cost may be spread using insurance, but as a general proposition, only a certain proportion of the product of an economy     can rationally be dedicated to medical care without drawing down the capital needed to produce goods and services, including medical     services. Now some kinds of medical care can be economically justified, targeted on those who can be expected to be productive in the future, as a way to preserve the labor component of economic productivity, but only so much. That limited amount must, rationally, be allocated carefully to yield the greatest return on investment. 
> 
> The Universe is not organized for our comfort or convenience. The "invisible hand" is not compassionate and may just as likely create a lifeless desert as prosperity. That we have an opportunity to live as long as we do is an accident that cannot be expected to long endure. Life taps into gradients of available energy to realize local reductions in entropy by increasing it more everywhere else, and living things, especially social species, can develop instincts to nurture their young and care for others to a limited degree, but only to the extent that enables genes to propagate themselves. Any investment of energy that does not pay off in reproductive success is not sustainable.
> 
> Our situation is complicated by the fact of technological obsolescence of human beings. Our capital is replacing our labor, and we can foresee that it may eventually replace all of it. When that happens the cruel laws of economics will dictate that further investment of energy in human life can no longer be sustained. The singularity approacheth.
> 
> On 03/26/2012 09:15 AM, Zietlow, Rebecca E. wrote:
>> 
>> The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that there is no constitutional right to health care, or to any economic benefit.
> 
> 
> -- Jon
> 
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