A right to health care

I felt the need to respond to Mr. Ken Miller of Little Rock’s response to Ruud DuVall’s letter “Medical care’s a right,” stating he would have agreed with him 60 years earlier when “socialist” ideas were more appealing to him.

So his point (1) was that we’d have lower-quality health care via a government edict? I must point to both Medicare and the VA to prove this statement wrong, and as for (2) with lower quality through government-run health care, that’s also a fallacy. Both Medicare and the VA are far more popular than via health insurance, which I might point out is not health care.

We cough up an additional $608 billion per year to ensure their profits whereas Medicare’s overhead is around 3 percent. The majority of the pharmaceutical R&Ds are though government grants to universities, then handed off to the private sector for free, who then turn around and patent the discovery paid for by the people and charge us outrageous rates. Most of their costs are in advertising.

As for the capitalistic marketplace, in case you haven’t noticed, it’s become a monopoly that has captured not only the mythical “free market” but now the federal and most state governments as well.

As for the libertarian view that all will be right if we just let the corporations do as they darned well please that they’ll do right by us and if not we can sue: Really? We can’t sue if we’re dead or broke. Does he then side with those who feel health care or a right to live is not a right but a privilege?

JUDITH ZITKO Hot Springs Village