Ross Kaminsky for The American Spectator
here gets close to making a point which needs to be made more often, more forcefully, and more primary, namely, that one man's right to healthcare comes at the expense of another man's right not to provide it if he doesn't wish to:
[I]f health care is a right, that means that an American who for whatever reason does not have access to a doctor must be provided that access, whether that means redistributing taxpayer money to the would-be patient or even the potential of forcing a doctor to provide his services in an area "underserved" by health care professionals. ...
In other words, when one person's right is forcibly taken away for the benefit of someone else, it can no longer be a right any more than taxes extracted for the benefit of the poor may be deemed charity.
A doctor practices medicine by choice, not by compulsion, so we can no more force him to provide care than we can force people to become doctors. But, of course, if the courts decide that government can compel expenditure for health insurance, then it is a short distance to compelling other things, indeed anything, at which point this country is finished, if it isn't already.
Quibbling about how the inherent limitations accruing to conceptions of positive rights shows that they are not rights, such as that Obamacare under Berwick's rules will be provided as a right only
up to a certain age, a certain degree of sickness, or a certain cost,
has utilitarian value but is really beside the point.
A different contract governs the relations between a doctor and his patient, which Obamacare would overthrow, as full of negative pledges as the Bill of Rights is full of negative rights, the most famous of which people remember as "to do no harm."
The real offense of Obamacare is the compulsion at the heart of it, as real as the oppression of any tyranny.
What we need to stop it is a Hippocratic Revolt.
