Here is a good posting at the relatively new blog of Fr. Thomas Berg and the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person
The posting outlines the Catholic position - hit the link for the entire 699 word essay.
Is There a Right to Healthcare?
In a provocative op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal in late July, Theodore Dalrymple (the pen name of British physician Anthony Daniels) argued that there simply is no such thing as a fundamental right to healthcare. “Where does the right to health care come from?” asked Dalrymple. “Did it exist in, say, 250 B.C., or in A.D. 1750? If it did, how was it that our ancestors, who were no less intelligent than we, failed completely to notice it?”
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... in answer to Dalrymple, yes, the right to health care certainly existed in 250 B.C., and even prior to that, at least in the form of a fundamental right to have one’s physical maladies attended to with dignity and adequate care.
Rights are fundamental requirements of justice which people bear toward one another for the procurement of those conditions necessary for every individual to pursue genuine human flourishing. In this sense, a right to healthcare is anchored in the very good of human life itself ...
*****************But does it mean people have a fundamental right to a particular standard of healthcare, such as the current American system? And does the government have an obligation to provide for it? Few would deny there are such obligations, but in parsing the intricacies of that question we must avoid confusing the basic right to healthcare with some putative duty of the federal government to provide for it directly. ...
So we can certainly support, with our Catholic bishops, broad changes to the health-care system, changes that will, among other things, cover legal immigrants, heavily subsidize insurance for the poor and spread costs fairly. But we cannot fail to demand that lawmakers provide for such requirements of justice without instantiating a broad abortion mandate, facilitating euthanasia, or endangering Americans with socialized medicine. On those issues, we must be uncompromising.
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