John David Lewis

John David Lewis who teaches at the Duke University wrote a piece called What ‘Right’ to Health Care? where he rips Obama’s health care proposal to shred.Here is what the professor in Philosophy, Politics and Economics wrote: What ‘Right’ to Health Care? By John David Lewis As the issue of health care reform builds to a legislative climax, it is important that we not merely parrot the same kinds of proposals we have seen for the past 50 years. A Point of View writer on this page recently lamented that “after a half-century of attempted reform” we have not reached the promised land of equality in health care.

Historically, the huge rise in health care costs began in the 1960s with the Great Society programs, especially Medicare. Fiscally, that program is approaching insolvency. To create an even greater labyrinth of bureaucracy now — in new programs that, after juggling the figures, advocates are proud to say will cost less than a thousand billion dollars over 10 years — is to add to the very cause that led to the rising costs and to invite a monumental financial crisis in the next decade. Economically, this is hard to dispute.

The answer is that the advocates of government medicine are upholding health care as a moral right. Desiring to mandate this “right” by legislative fiat, they have been unwilling to face the cause and effect relationship between increasing government actions and rising prices. That is because the moral goal of equality, measured against the claims to a right to health care, has trumped the mere economic arguments.