Our Readers Speak - Nov. 7, 2009

Is health care a human right or a commodity?

Sen. Evan Jenkins (Cabell County) delivered a wonderful program on health care to the Beckley Rotary Club. It was well received and quite informative. The intensity of the questions that followed affirmed both the timeliness and the quality of the program.

There is an unstated reality about the national debate over health care that dictates what’s proposed and the pros and cons every proposal generates, be it the public option, pre-existing conditions, insurance coops, employer mandates, bureaucratic inertia, whatever. That reality? That health care is a commodity, not a human right.

As a commodity, it must be purchased. Those who can’t buy it go without — unless government moves in to subsidize it. But always it remains a commodity, never a right.

Like all commodities, there are different levels of quality. Those who can buy the “Cadillac Plan.” Those who can’t make do with much less (usually defined by the deductible). John Locke explained a long time ago that property’s true value has meaning only when compared with what others have or don’t have. So it is with health care. And education. Automobiles. Airline tickets. What we wear. Where we live. Even whom we know.

In this society, there are far fewer seats in first class than in coach. Not everyone must bring their own snacks aboard. Or pay to check their bags. Then always there are the “Gold Club” members and the stand-bys. We try to deny it, but occasionally there are stowaways as well.

The key here is that commodity-driven services define who matters and who doesn’t in a society. So long as those in first class continue to call the shots, that won’t change, in health care or anyplace else. Critics of health care reform see the long lines in search of the H1N1 vaccine as a snapshot of what government-run health care promises. The alternative, of course, would make the vaccine available only to those able to pay. The lines would disappear, for sure, but America would sacrifice a lot more than convenience in the process.

If health care were a human right, then all the controversy surrounding immigration, convicted felons, even Gitmo inmates, would be gone. It would define for the world the kind of society that the United States of America aspires to be.

The heat associated with the health care debate suggests that Americans are not yet ready to commit to the values that our founders entrusted to us. Like Jefferson, forced to strike abolition of the slave trade from his Declaration of Independence in order to get it passed, President Obama may indeed be well ahead of those he leads. But lead on he must.

William A. O’Brien

Beckley