Comparative Healthcare Prompt 1

            The subject of universal health care is always a bit sensitive. Some have strong reactions not only when people ask if we should implement it or not but also when we are asked if access to healthcare is a human right or a privilege that one must work for and earn. On one hand if a person says they are for universal health care and that it is a right, they are in danger of appearing on the socialist side of the board and to many, almost anti-American. However, the other who decidedly claims that health care is something that is earned through working can sound very cold. After taking many history and theology courses at Walsh and reading much of Gaudium et Spes I have come to believe that healthcare is a human right.

            While I do believe that health care is a human right, I do not believe it is right for people who deliberately harm their own bodies to expect remedies, medications, and surgeries to be free or nearly free. This is where I do not think healthcare is a right because somewhere a choice was actively made by someone to do something that would eventually lead to health consequences. On the other hand, for people who are sick through no fault of their own, and who require frequent doctor visits and expensive medications, the idea of paying for all that on their own or with minimal insurance, is laughable. In Universal Health Care in chapter 2 the article “Access to Health Care is a Human Right” the author says that among those who are chronically ill but have insurance often still have debt due to medical bills. And for those without insurance it is even worse. For illnesses that cannot be helped or cured, is it right to expect those people to pay for, or try to pay for, extremely expensive things that they cannot live without?

            Gaudium et Spes makes points about all men having dignity and universal rights as human beings. It states “there must be made available to all men everything necessary for leading a life truly human, such as food, clothing, and shelter; the right to choose a state of life freely and to found a family, the right to education, to employment, to a good reputation, to respect, to appropriate information, to activity in accord with the upright norm of one's own conscience, to protection of privacy and rightful freedom even in matters religious.” Part of leading a “truly human life” involves being healthy enough to be able to find work, earn a living, and all of those sorts of things. For some people, actually most people at one point or another in their lives, staying healthy means receiving some sort of medical treatment. It would take a huge chunk of someone’s salary to pay for some treatments, extra money most people do not have. The document also calls man to look out for one another, recognizing that all have dignity; everyone must consider everyone his neighbor without exception as another self”.  After having said all this I do not advocate for any type of socialist government or a completely socialized form of healthcare, but nor do I think it should stay the way it is. There has to be another way that could maybe use elements of both systems that would lesson the burden on patients and taxpayers as well.

            I believe health care is a human right, I was not always of this opinion, but after taking classes from Walsh and learning more about it from the church’s perspective, I have come to believe it is right.