Health care: an Individual Responsibility

Note: This passage is in direct response to someone who, in an earlier post, challenged me to come up with my own idea about health care.

-Charles Martin Cosgriff


As to creating my own solution to health care issues, I must respond that I am not obliged to do so for the very simple and sincere reason that I believe health care should be completely and totally privatized. Each individual must ultimately be responsible for their own health needs. I have no inherent right to any given person how to pursue that goal any more than I have a right to tell them what kind of a job they should have or where they should purchase a home.

With any kind of government health care, however, I am being told what kind of care I should get. This is a clear violation of individual rights and worthy only of, quite frankly, those who want to control others. At one time we called these people tyrants.

To be sure, we need to make it so that the poor and downtrodden have access to needed health care. But it is my experience that such is already the case: hospitals cannot turn down those with grave conditions, and there are hospitals (Receiving Hospital here in Detroit) in place precisely for those who cannot go anywhere else.

Governments should not be creating anything more than an environment which allows relevant and proper individual choices to flower. Then, and only then, will see any worthwhile solutions to the issues which concern us. Especially the greatest and most critical questions which do indeed plague the human condition.