Week One (SOC 490)

Disclaimer for anyone reading my blog that is expecting an update for my time in Rome, I apologize, almost every other blog will be for my comparative health class! So, if you see a blog titled SOC 490, skip it, it’s not about my time in Rome.

The argument is whether or not universal healthcare should be a privilege or a right.  I personally think it’s a privilege.  Leonard Peikoff, founder of the Ayn Rand Institute, says it perfectly when he says, “Now our only rights…are the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.”  Nowhere in our basic rights does it say that we have the right to healthcare.  If you want healthcare, then you need to work for it.  Find a job that provides it and supplies it for your kids if you have any.  We were never promised in the constitution, the right to healthcare. 

Then there is Donald J. Boudreaux, the chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University, he argues that providing universal healthcare would drive the cost of healthcare through the roof.  He uses the analogy of food.  If the government were to provide food as a universal right, in order to satisfy this right they would have to raise taxes enough to gather the money to be able to provide the anticipated amount of food.  Once people were provided with this free food they would get greedy, wanting to get as much as they could before other people take it, after that happened the government would then have to put all kinds of regulations on the amount of certain foods that you could receive.  It would cause more problems for the government than are being fixed by having it in place.  The same goes for healthcare, the rise in taxes to pay for the services and the regulations the government would have to put on it, would cause more of a headache for the government than is needed.   

Then in class there was brought up the point of the Catholic Church, and their view on the argument of universal healthcare.  They believe that universal healthcare should be a right, that everyone should have access to it.  That being said, where I live in Cincinnati, and I cannot talk for any other city, but our Christ’s Hospital, which is a Catholic hospital, will not treat you unless you have healthcare.  If they believe that everyone should be treated with universal healthcare why are they not providing the care now?  The people they supposedly want to help get health insurance are the very people they’re turning away now.  Seems a little fishy to me.  Not only that but way back in, I believe, the 1800s there was separation of church and state in America.  So, the Church can have its opinion but at the same time it shouldn’t then be turned into law because the church wants it to be.  There are more religions that Catholicism in America, and none of those churches are trying to have their opinion turned into law.