Not a right, a benefit
My inclination was to tear into the claims in Victoria Fortuna’s [Comment, “Cause for Celebration?” May 18], but I decided to instead leave the particulars to their unfounded wanta-haves and argue on a higher plane.
Healthcare cannot be a “right”, because it cannot be an innate condition: it must be delivered by (taken from) someone else. Your “right” to healthcare can only happen when some doctor (and staff, and pharmaceutical company, and . . . ) give up their right to pursue their happiness to provide for you. Comforting in the abstract, this cannot be reconciled in a free society. Those who concocted it, and tried (and failed) to execute it, are culpable of compromising our free society for their vision of a socialist utopia that can only exist when compelled by a totalitarian government.
The only part of Obamacare that actually reduces net health cost is the Death Panels: no care if our tables categorize patient as unprofitable to society. Everything else is simply a transfer of cost to other citizens, compromising their unalienable rights for your comfort. The “20 (or 30) million” people whose healthcare will be “stolen” are hugely comprised of work-capable adults without dependents who were added to the Medicaid rolls so taxpayers provide the personal healthcare the beneficiary is neglecting. The rest are orphans of cancelled care formerly provided their employers; now they are unemployed or hours-limited to avoid insurance and driven to unaffordable exchanges as a last (mandated) resort.
Add the implosion of Obamacare, which only “survives” by massively increasing the debt our children will have to repay (and still falls short), and each of Ms. Fortuna’s whines sound petulant. Someone gave you something which you did not earn and which was not theirs to give, and the current government is trying to take it back as gently as possible because “it” is the livelihood of future generations. Not a right: a government-appropriated benefit that someone else pays for.
Preserving Obamacare violates the freedoms on which this country was founded, in search of a “nicer world” which Adam and Eve abrogated for humanity. If you want socialism, move to Venezuela or Cuba. Leave our constitutional republic, founded on the principles enumerated in our Declaration, to those who cherish it and accept the risk exposure (“personal responsibility”) that our freedoms entail.