When it comes to health care, Americans are no longer concerned about losing the free markets that created our prosperity in the first place. Leaders in both parties clamor for a government-controlled system, differing only in minor details.

Democrats have promoted fully socialized medicine for over a hundred years, and now, after decades of incremental steps in that direction, our country is nearly there. Democratic success in nationalizing the health care sector was enabled by the fact that Republicans have been overwhelmingly impotent, making no case whatsoever for liberty and free markets.

There is still a glimmer of hope that America could once again become a strong, individual rights-protecting nation, but that will never happen unless we seriously question whether there was ever such a thing as a “right” to health care in the first place.

How can there be a “right” to a complex, technological service? If there’s a right to health care, then there must be a right to food, a right to housing, a right to transportation, a right to other people’s stuff. For “rights” such as these to be imposed on us, we must grant that our government has the right to violate our rights.

Such thinking has saturated our entire culture. The last two generations of college graduates have been taught that protecting “individual rights” was a mistake by our Founding Fathers, since it privileged the elite (!).

In keeping with the current generation’s view of rights, it looks as if the new Republican health care bill has embraced most of the mandates, regulations and controls already written into Obamacare. It looks as if the new bill fully embraces the notion that our government has every right to violate individual rights.

Dr. Ronald Housley

Buxton

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