I saw an interview with Matt Damon on CNN the other day. He said he had a recent conversation with a conservative strategist and tried to get this person to explain to him why he opposed the health care law. Damon was told that health care is not a right, and that this is why many if not most Republicans oppose the law. First of all, what was passed was actually a Republican idea, apparently meant to help their buddies in the private health insurance industry, but I'll leave that aside here. Secondly, the law does several things, including making health care less costly to the government, meaning the tax payers. Thus, notions about "rights" need not be present in this "debate" at all, even if they should be theoretically. However, hasn't "reality" left this "debate" behind long ago?
My focus here will be on the notion that health care should not be a basic "human right." Obviously, just about everyone else in the world disagrees, but again, I'll leave that aside in this diary for the sake of being concise. The major point I want to make here is that this is more about the attempts of strategists to play semantic games in order to achieve particular goals, and the primary goal seems to be to get Republicans elected, no matter how bad a job they do of running the nation if they get too much power.
In the previous system, if you were apparently very ill or seriously injured, you went to the emergency room of the local hospital and they could not turn you away, regardless of your insurance status. The person was treated as if he or she has a basic human right to health care, regardless of the language used. Beyond this point, it becomes a matter of the kinds of assets the patient possesses. If he or she has gold bars buried in the woods, wealth might be retained and health care continued, as a Medicaid patient. If he owns a house, it may or may not be own asset that can be retained (if I am wrong correct me here). It's clearly about the ability to take assets away from someone who does not have insurance if he or she claims to not be able to pay the bill in cash. The "right" is apparently present; the only issue concerns what might happen to at least some of that person's assets.
If the right wingers want people to die in the streets because they are poor (in other words, hospitals could refuse to allow certain people into the facility), let them stand up and proudly state their position (as incredibly "un-Christian" as it may be); this would be advocacy of the "no right to health care" position. Otherwise, it's just an incredibly inefficient, unfairly punitive system that does include a right to health care. In fact, "conservatives" should be happy with the current law because it will cost the taxpayer less in the not-too-long run. Instead, the word games are front and center, no matter how little sense they make and regardless of the perspective from which they are viewed. "It's socialism," some of the apparently less intelligent among them proclaim, and of course the "liberal media" never seems to point out that their claims are simply illogical. At best, they could claim that there should be no right to health insurance, but presumably that would sound too much like the financial issue that it actually is.