The Morality of Health Care

Paul Hsieh has a post at NoodleFood which is a good resource for advocates of a free market in health care.

He contends that the focus in the health care debate is shifting from economics to morality:

This is good news for free market reform advocates. . . . Most Americans want to "do the right thing", but they are sometimes mistaken as to what that right thing is. Fortunately, more and more people are raising the point that universal health care is wrong because there is no such thing as a "right" to health care.

Paul surveys some recent op-eds on the morality of health care, and includes a look at Leonard Peikoff's classic essay, "Health Care Is Not A Right".

Rights are guarantees of freedom of action. There is no such thing as a right to the product of another person's effort. This includes medicine.

Yes, we do need to reform the government's policy on health care: government needs to get completely out of the health care business and let the free market do its job.

As Anders Ingemarson put it in a letter in the Denver Post, this

. . . will result in an abundance of health care options for people of all means.