Is Healthcare a right?

It is often taken as given that health care is right without much thought at all. Before you regard all health care as a right, think through your position first. Healthcare has been around for less than a 100 years in a form that could do you any good. A wealthy industrialist or his children of 100 years ago could much for an infection for all the money in the world. Healthcare is expensive now because it can actually do something.

First, you need to look at health care as a continuum. The poorest people in the world have zero or very close to zero healthcare. The richest can get the best doctors, procedures, and drugs instantly without any thought of the cost and little or no waiting time. Most Americans rely on employer or government provided health care with some waiting, deductibles, and paper work. Does everyone have the right to the same level of healthcare? If that it is the case, we will probably have to restrict the health care choices of the richest people since a government provided plan would be insolvent if it tried to provide the best of the best healthcare for everyone.

Looking at the high price of health care, we see that a large amount of the expenses are incurred in the last year of life and much of that in the last quarter. This sort of healthcare does not add much value, and there are many patients that would be more comfortable and better off spending their last days at home. Some of this healthcare spending is out of the desire to do something rather than nothing even when it would be better to do nothing at all. Healthcare adds much value in antibiotics for infections, vaccines, treating some traumas, hip replacements, and probably quite a few other areas. With developments in materials, nanotechnology, and biotechnology healthcare, at least in the short run may become more expensive if you want the absolute best money can buy. Like other technologies we may see a decrease in prices at some point even if the system is confounded by the third party payer issue, which I will discuss in a later entry.

Once, I went to the doctor after feeling ill for several days. After the doctor listened to my lungs and ordered a chest x-ray, I was admitted to the hospital for two days and administered IV antibiotics. When I began writing this entry, I was thinking about the different levels of care that could be administered in this case. Unless I was truly destitute, without a cent or credit to my name, I would not have been able to go to the doctor. However, even someone without health insurance in most cases could find the money to go to the doctor to get something checked out. People are generally not in a vacuum; they have access to friends and family, credit, and their own savings to pay for medical expenses. At least they should have the resources to pay for doctor visits and relatively routine medications. They may not have been up for being admitted to the hospital, but they could still knock out the infection with antibiotics. Of course, there are exceptions to this and everyone has heard an anecdote about health care in the United States. However, life expectancy in the United States is not all that bad. It is much publicized that American’s life expectancy is lower than other industrialized countries. However, much of this could be due to habits and demographics rather than an inferior health system. In any case, at least in life expectancy there cannot be too much inequality for the simple fact that there are no people walking around living 200 years or more skewing the average up.