Let us know your answers: If there is a natural right to life, is there not a right to medical care, since medical care extends life? The desire to support life has animated much charitable work in many cultures and ages. Religious orders have been built around charitable health care work. Does this speak to a right?
What “right” to health care do political activists and governments profess in their efforts to consolidate and control the delivery of care and the livelihoods of those involved in delivering care, even to the extreme of advocating a single-payer system?
Is there a right to seek medical care? If so, what are the boundaries?
Who gets to define what is “medicine”, what is “care”, what is “quackery”, and what is “malpractice”? And what, if anything, should be done about each?
Do “traditional medicine” practices of indigenous peoples, associated in the West with “shamanism”, qualify?
What about the objection heard from Hippocratic physicians that “medicine”, properly understood, is rapidly disappearing, due to third-party payers, and that true medicine has been replaced in the West by a restrictive “healthcare industry”, which is budget-driven, ideology-driven, and a means of state- and corporate-control of subject populations and in which “care” has become a poor substitute for “medicine”?
Maybe declaring a right to healthcare is not so problematic, if no obligation to provide care is implied. There certainly is a right to seek medical care, but it is harder to justify a right to force unwilling healthcare providers to render care or to tax money away from some people to pay for the care of others. And, what if the medical knowledge deployed was only acquired by ruthlessly harming innocents, experimenting on them without their consent?
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