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Your idea that US Healthcare is worse than other countries is misleading.

Please post your information about Canada beating the US in cancer survival rates. I believe your information is incorrect.

Also, some major reasons for the US having the highest infant mortality rates is because those rates are not tabulated equally. One example of this is that some countries do not count aborted babies while others do. This skews the data significantly. The low life exectancy rate is similarly skewed. Of important note: is it not desireable for a country to have increased freedom and because of that allowing its people to determine their own life-expectancy outcomes? The low life expectancy rate argument is a red-herring. Increased governmental involvemnt will only make some of these worse whereas consumer driven healthcare is more efficient. The problem with our system is that it is not consumer driven. The reason our system has the problems that it does is BECAUSE of government interference. And well-meaning yet misinformed folks like you want us to have more of it!

Nonetheless, positive rights cannot trump negative rights or exist in harmony as you infer. In order to have a positive right, a negative right has to be violated, thus meaning no rights. Some of what you listed are not even negative rights! There is no right to breathe clean air! That is made up! It is impossible in our world today as we know it to ensure people breathe clean air. Some of what you call positive rights are wishes, and not rights.

True negative rights do not infringe upon others. If a “right” infringes or violates another’s equal exercise of their rights, it is not a right! And therefore, no positive rights are valid since all of them violate someone else’s negative rights.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

A right is a moral claim to freedom of action that a government can either protect or infringe. Government is not the source of individual rights; the source of individual rights is man’s nature as a rational creature of volitional consciousness.

When a government grants “rights”, it infringes individual rights and as such, these granted “rights” are anti-rights.

There is a right to health care in the sense that it is right for a man to freely pursue health care through voluntary trade with health care providers under terms acceptable to both and absent coercion from a third party.

There is a right to health insurance in the sense that it is right for a man to freely contract for that insurance through voluntary trade with an insurance provider under terms acceptable to both and absent coercion from a third party.

Our government has and continues to infringe our true rights to health care and health insurance through its vast infrastructure of regulatory agencies that interfere with and coerce both those seeking and those providing health care and health insurance.

In order to secure our rights, our Constitution must be amended to guarantee a separation of economy and state: “Congress shall pass no law abridging the freedom to produce and trade”.

What if people took it upon themselves to establish trusts, charities, etc. dedicated to providing assistance (many already exist) to those in need and unable on their own to provide for themselves these “rights”. What if Ted Kennedy (and many many others) had spent the last 50 years building private organizations dedicated to truly helping the needy and delivering assistance through their large personal wealth and connections?

Could you imagine what could have been built to help people with all the resources that have been wasted on 50-100 years of trying to achieve universal health care using the state and federal governments? Mindboggling!

Would we have a better system today if all health care was delivered by private enterprises only regulated by a customer’s ability to seek alternatives? I think so!

The idea that government has the power and authority to grant rights is dangerous because implies that government also has the power and authority to take away rights. Many people already accept the encroachment of government into areas that challenge their constitutionally guaranteed rights to a dangerous extent. To accept that the government can confer positive rights exacerbates the perception that government may rescind negative rights, which are supposedly guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

I’ve also observed how they bristle when the shoe is on the other foot. They want to be the “who” in “who is doing what to whom.” I, for one, am tired of being the “whom” in that relationship.

By the way, there seems to be a typo in the article. The following sentence doesn’t read correctly: “But how would does the trump work with a right to health care?”