A titillating health care conundrum

An interesting problem at the intersection of “rights” and health care. Many supporters of ObamaCare claim that health care is a right. But they don’t mean that in the commonly understood sense in the U.S. that, if one has a right to something, one is, as a general proposition, protected against government deprivation of that right. Thus, government attempts to limit one’s access to privately chosen health care would be a violation of that right. But, in the view of ObamaCare supporters, this notion gets turned on its head. A right is that which the government provides to the public as a result of emotion-driven and reason-free sloganeering, such as “No one should go bankrupt because of an accident or a disease.”

One of my colleagues has advanced an equality-based right to tattoos, clothing, and make-up. Whatever may be its constitutional oddness, this proposal relies on traditional rights notions at least to the extent of providing a restraint on government interference with one’s lifestyle choices. Of course, being grounded on notions of equality, especially cultural group identity-based equality, there is a fast path to requiring government protection of such individual “rights” from private infringement. Still, there is no sense that government itself provide the tattoos, clothing, and make-up.

With the developing health care “right,” there is an obligation for government to pay for the exercise of such rights, at least if people cannot afford to do that on their own. Let’s leave aside for now the odd notion that something can be a right but can be rationed by the government. If health care is a right, and if a right includes personal appearance that must be promoted by the government as an aspect of equality of identity, we get this conceptual mess, the human right to large breasts. At least for transsexuals who have a right to psychological well-being that apparently transcends the breast size limitations imposed by nature (and the government) on “natal females.” Natal females sounds like some less developed form of female (outside the breast department). However, it is just an edgy, politically correct and progressive way of referring to, well, actual women, rather than chromosomal males with some sexual identity issues.

Mark Steyn refers to this slyly as the problem of rights inflation. If the concept of rights gets inflated to mean anything that someone desires, the more real rights in the sense of freedom from government control, get curtailed. I have noted this before, in the notion that the scope of government grows and grows, becoming more intrusive through its regulations and burdensome through its voracious demand for tax money. Still, liberals cheer this on. All is well, as long as government recognizes more and more sexual license. Besides being a rather dreary and animalistic view of human nature, it ignores the manner in which government has taken control over our individuality beyond matters of superficial appearance and carnal satisfaction.

Note that I am not against either of those last two, though I do question the easy collective acceptance of our excessive preoccupation with such matters. Nor am I opposed to large breasts. On policy grounds, I could even be persuaded to have taxpayer money expended on such beautification projects rather than on yet another bridge to nowhere or another government-funded racial, sex-based, sexual proclivity-based, or other identity group grievance study. And such a program should definitely not be limited to transsexuals. But the very idea that we should be debating such issues, which are the inevitable outgrowth of a perverse conception of rights and of the societal acceptance of the responsibility of others for one’s health care, strikes me as a powerful illustration of our intellectual fecklessness and of the accelerating descent of the West into irrelevance as an ethical and political model for the world.