If you think health care is a right, you support slavery

Photo/Roosevelt Institute

Jimmy Kimmel opened his show Monday night with an emotional monologue about his newborn son.

The poor little guy was born with a rare heart disease that required emergency surgery and will require more care down the road.

Kimmel told the story to his studio audience and thanked all of the healthcare workers involved, and at the very end he advocated for more health care spending so kids like his son will be taken care of.

As compelling as this story is and as much as his baby deserves to get well, that doesn’t change the basic premise that we don’t have a right to other people’s services.

Health care is not a right.

Somewhere along the way, even the Republicans have given in to a horrible falsehood – Health care is a right for all people and those who are more sick deserve equal care at equal cost.

To those of you who hate capitalism, you agree with this, and you think it’s possible.

The fact is, there is no way to provide different levels of services to people for the same cost, regardless of how intensive.

The first premise we need to understand is that health insurance is not health coverage. These two terms have gotten confused and even the politicians have conflated the two to mean the same thing.

Insurance has one specific role – to allow you to prepare your funds for a catastrophe before it happens.

Think about the other kinds of insurance people buy. Phone insurance, home insurance, car insurance and others.

We’ve decided that people should be allowed to go buy health insurance after they are sick with an expensive disease and we are forcing the insurance companies to cover them.

That sounds nice on the surface, but compare it to the others types of insurance. When you drop your phone and it breaks, can you go buy Apple Care afterward and have them fix it?

When your home floods or burns down and you loose all your belongings, can you go get a homeowners insurance policy that replaces everything?

Can you buy car insurance after you wreck and have your car fixed?

If you have a preexisting disease, that is a horrible reality. I feel sorry for you and I would love nothing more than for you to have access to the care your disease requires.

But the bottom line is, nobody has a right to anybody else’s services, and if they think they do, they support modern slavery.

Medical care is a service. It is offered by doctors who have given their lives to build up hundreds of thousands in student debt, hours of intensive work and studying and demanding jobs that keep them constantly working.

If it was easy, we would all do it because the pay is usually pretty well.

To consider health care a right, you are saying you believe you have the right to force another person to give you their services. This is the same philosophy plantation owners had in the 19th century.

We don’t have a right to anybody else’s services. In a prosperous capitalistic society, people are free to learn a skill, trade or service and then offer that service for their own compensation. This is called freedom.

Each one of us has a service we offer and we offer, and nobody has a right to our services unless we agree with them that the compensation they will give us is fair. We can volunteer our services for free, people do that all the time and that’s a great thing to do. But voluntary service and coerced service are not the same.

So if you believe health care is a right, I hope you’re prepared to give me the right to whatever services you offer. I could use the savings.

Bottoms up.

 

 

 

Democrats are wrong, but Republicans are stupid

On Nov. 8, I cast my vote for Donald J. Trump because I knew what the alternative was.

I knew he wasn’t a conservative, I knew he didn’t really have any set philosophies.

What I thought I knew was that he would give the supposed conservatives in congress the seat in the Oval Office they needed to move forward with conservative policy regardless of the opposition.

But just over 100 days since the inauguration of the Republican president, the Republicans are acting as weak as they were when they were the minority party in every chamber.

The Republicans worked with the Democrats to pass a spending bill through September to avoid a government shutdown.

This bill doesn’t include funding for border security. It doesn’t include defunding of the abortion machine. It includes continued funding of Obamacare. We’re still funding a way for Iran to develop nukes.

What did conservatives get out of this bill that is considered a “big win” by Paul Ryan? Military spending increases without increasing domestic spending… that’s all.

I’m old enough to remember when Obama was in office and the Republicans didn’t want to fund his spending bill, the government shut down. The president, the Democrats in congress and the news media all blamed the shutdown on the Republicans.

Remember the headlines? Republicans were responsible for the shutdown and they were the bad guys. So what did they do? They caved and gave Obama everything he wanted in his budgets.

Fast forward to 2017, The Republicans control every branch of government and they are looking to pass a budget.

So, they should propose a spending bill, let the Democrats argue about it, hold out and shut down the government and then they get the blame. Seems easy enough, right?

Well, yeah, it should be easy enough, but never underestimate the ass-hattery of the Republican congress.

If the Republican Party doesn’t learn to grow a backbone and play the dirty, steamrolling political game the Democrats continuously play, the party will end.

The Democrats are wrong about policy. Government isn’t the answer. Social programs fail. Socialism is a bad thing.

But the one thing the Democrats do well is unapologetically push their agenda. The Democrats have a unified goal to make our entire country dependent on government, change the culture away from American values and work toward a world government of authoritarian control.

If Republicans continue to sit back and play soft, if they continue to let the Democrats control the government even in the minority because they’re afraid of what the mean media will day about them, they will lose every election for decades to come and they will lose hope any of us have of saving this country from the democrat world dictatorship on the way.

Bottoms up.