As the issue of Medicare fraud is now being exposed like never before, another healthcare-related issue needs to be fully illuminated.
Driving through my neighborhood, I pass a yard sign: “Healthcare is a human right.” Who would make such a claim? Is obtaining a driver’s license a right? One needs to demonstrate competence in driving and pass some tests. Driving an automobile, legally, is a privilege and a responsibility, but it is not a right. Likewise, healthcare is not a right. For openers, government intrusion in all aspects of our lives has proceeded unabated for 90+ years, largely accelerated under Franklin Roosevelt.
Today, led by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the sacrosanct viewpoint has emerged that healthcare is a right and that the Federal government should lead the charge. Aren’t each of us responsible for our own health, with exceptions for those who have endured unforeseen, extraordinary circumstances, or those whom nature did not fully equip?
Some Try, Most Don’t
In the general population, individuals who maintain a healthy body, on average, enjoy better health than those who do not. Sadly, large segments of our population do little or nothing to maintain their health and, worse, engage in quite unhealthy behavior.
Are individuals who smoke, drink to excess, overeat, barely exercise, consume drugs, and rarely support their own well-being entitled to healthcare insurance on par with those who do the opposite?
The cost of covering individuals who take no responsibility for their health is staggering. Unfortunately, even if you are diligent about maintaining your health, the healthcare insurance that you have to purchase partially funds the healthcare coverage of others, in some way, who do not share in your vigilance.
What Have You Paid?
I summed my decades of healthcare insurance payments versus the actual benefits I received via claims and reimbursements. I had paid more than $175,000 while garnering a little less than $15,000 in benefits. So, all told, I forked over $160,000+ for coverage that I never used and which was allocated to others. Meanwhile, I did nearly everything I could to stay healthy.
Okay, I was insured and if I had incurred some gargantuan expense, I largely would have been covered. Still, add my payment experience to that of millions of others who also pay extraordinary sums but otherwise extract precious little from their healthcare insurers.
Do you doubt that the money generated among healthy payers is redistributed to those who never take step one on the path to personal health?
Forcing the Healthy to Pay More
My state, North Carolina, along with Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi, is part of the so-called stroke belt. In these states, the rate of stroke is 18 percent higher than the rest of the country. How? Why? Imagine a huge throng of adults who eat whatever they want, whenever they want, drink to excess, and under-exercise, then moan and groan about this ache and that pain, walk with canes, and ride in motorized wheelchairs.
Attend an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant such as Golden Corral or Western Sizzlin’ to view a “wide” variety of individuals of enormous girth, daily adding to their problems with no intention of taking responsibility for their health. Is the healthcare of such people a right?
When did the notion that “healthcare is a right” become unquestionable? Will any politician, anywhere, state the obvious or will they all continue to succumb to this mantra? To suggest that those who do not take responsibility for their physical health should pay much more than others, politically, is like stepping on a subway's third rail.
Whoa Be Us
Alcohol is recognized as an addiction, but first one has to start drinking to develop the addiction. Some say that overeating is non-controllable. Organizations such as the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance maintain that morbidly obese people have a right to however large their body expands and that airlines should offer them side-by-side seats at no extra charge. Does that seem fair or equitable?
If someone with poor eyesight, which even corrective lenses can’t help, wants to attend an NBA game, should they be given front row seating? Don’t they have the right to see the game? How about the hearing-impaired attending a concert? No one wishes for poor eyesight or poor hearing, and some conditions are not treatable, but poor consumption habits, added to insufficient exercise, somehow merit a free second plane seat?
If you weigh 50 to 150 pounds more than your frame can comfortably handle, you put enormous strain on particular organs and body parts. Soon, you might find it difficult even to walk. How does that situation square up with healthcare being a federally mandated right?
Anything but Hardy
Our population has slipped so far in a mere two generations that we have regressed from being hardy Americans to unhardy Americans. This is obvious to anyone who visits America from Asia and some distinct parts of Europe. In any event, the contention that healthcare “is a human right” needs to be examined in an entirely new light.