It is not the intention of anyone who seeks also to be a practicing Christian to deal with the obiter dicta of Senator Edward Kennedy as though they were freshly minted laws from Aristotle, or pensées of Pascal. But what he said at the National Governors Conference is so egregious an effrontery on social philosophy that one must, out of a sense of obligation to reason, deal with it gravely. What he said was that national health care is a human right.
The circumstances were these. Participants at the political meeting were considering various approaches to health care, including President Carter’s. Mr. Carter’s proposals are more modest than the wholesale nationalization of health care. It isn’t that Mr. Carter’s philosophy excludes nationalization of health care, it is simply a prudential matter with him. We can’t go all the way, says Mr. Carter, until we can afford to do so. On this gesture of moderation Senator Kennedy turned the full force of his scorn. You can’t, he said, argue that national health care depends on the state of the economy. Why? Because “a conditional right is basically not a right” at all.
The inordinate extension of almost any right bumps into the inordinately extended complementary right.
Now the trouble with that statement is that all secular rights are conditional. So that if you accept Senator Kennedy’s broad generality, then it must follow that there are in fact no rights at all. One’s right to one’s own freedom, indeed to one’s life itself, is most conspicuously conditional on the existence of peace. During a war, one of Senator Kennedy’s brothers was drafted, told what to do, sent out on a mission, and killed. If that brother, a brave and patriotic man, had defied the law, he’d have been stuck in jail.
Moreover, every commonly acknowledged right is conditional in the sense that it is not permitted to impinge on another right. The inordinate extension of almost any right bumps into the inordinately extended complementary right. Under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution you have the right to decline to answer questions, but under the Sixth Amendment I have the right to require you to answer questions. Under the First Amendment you are entitled to freedom of the press, but under the Sixth Amendment I am entitled to a fair trial. Any putative “right” to national health care is conditional – never mind the prudence of nationalizing health – on the resources of a nation.
Senator Kennedy wouldn’t let it go. He’d have been better off with a fallacious hit-and-run. “We don’t condition Social Security on the rate of inflation or the size of unemployment or the size of the deficit,” he went on to say. The answer to that is: But we do exactly that. Social Security payments in fact are automatically increased to accommodate inflation. Unemployment benefits are universally limited to specified periods of time. The size of the deficit has a great deal to do with Social Security, for the very simple reason that unless Social Security is self-supported, which it no longer is, it requires a public subsidy. But public subsidies are available only out of public residue. If there is no residue, there can be no subsidy. It is the point President Carter is attempting to make – that at a period when everyone is being taxed by such inflationary policies as are routinely pursued by Senator Kennedy and his colleagues, the whole question of the value of the dollar is at stake. Every time the dollar depreciates by 1 per cent you have had a confiscation of income – without due process. Provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment are also human rights.
There are plenty of philosophical objections to the nationalization of health care, but the prudential ones are quite sufficient to let the hot air out of Mr. Kennedy’s balloon. The American people last year spent 8.6 per cent of the gross national income on health care. This year we are scheduled to suffer an inflation of something on the order of 10 per cent. If Senator Kennedy would vote to cut inflation down to zero, he would be returning to every American the entire cost of medical care, plus a huge bonus. I dispense this advice to him out of a recognition that he has a human right to be educated.