“Right” to Healthcare
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I–VT) claims that “health care is a human right — to be guaranteed to ALL.”
IN FACT, Sanders is conflating entitlements with rights. The U.S. Constitution, which Sanders swore to uphold, doesn’t specify or countenance a single social program, much less call them “rights.” Instead, it recognizes rights that shall not be infringed, like “life,” “liberty,” and “freedom of speech.”
What Sanders calls a “right to healthcare” is really a license to get in line for services that government rations through “waiting lists, gatekeeping, and limiting individuals’ choices,” as documented in the Encyclopedia of Health Economics.
Sanders alleges that “every other major country recognizes” healthcare as a “right,” which is far from true. Among nations that do, they ultimately derived this doctrine from the Soviet Union, which was the “first country in the world to provide health services to the entire population as a public service paid from the state treasury.”
Beyond healthcare, Sanders and his endorsees like Zohran Mamdani have embraced major economic elements of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, the Soviet Constitution, and the official Law of the Soviet State. In that state, the average living standard “was roughly one third that of the United States.”
