Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending the current US healthcare system, it’s horrible and riddled with perverse incentives, and should be mostly (if not entirely) nationalized. I’m just not sure how to justify the idea that healthcare is a “right”.
I know that sometimes people on the left draw a comparison to the right to a public defender. I’m not sure that argument really holds up though, because you only have the right to a public defender under the specific circumstance of being prosecuted by the government for a crime. The logic there is “if the government is going to significantly interfere with your life by arresting you and trying you for a crime, then it at least has to allow you to get legal defense from a qualified attorney, even if you need the government to pay for it.” There’s not, like, a right to a publicly paid lawyer for any and all purposes.
Everything requires other peoples' labor. All forms of service and products only exist because somebody else did the necessary work to make it exist. I think one angle to look at rights is that they are essentially a promise made by the state that resources will be allocated properly in order that everyone gets a share. This is fair because everybody contributes in some way to society's inputs.
Another way of looking at this could be to argue that just because healthcare isn't currently a right, doesn't exclude the fact that there are people (the bourgeoisie) who benefit from the labor of the healthcare workers' labor by virtue of being able to pay for it (not to mention by virtue of reaping rewards of all of their workers' labor, that they profit off of)
furthermore, what exactly is the crux of the argument that "healthcare can't be a right because it requires other people's labor"? Is the point here that it isn't fair? If the chief concern is fairness, then we could just gesture vaguely around at all aspects of capitalism as a sufficient rebuttal. By that measure, we should adopt policies that are merely more fair than presently existing affairs - which, universal nationalized healthcare is, relative to existing systems.
I think the point of that statement is, what about poorer, less industrialized societies that don’t have a lot of medical facilities? In order for people to have a right to healthcare, there has to be healthcare. That means doctors, nurses, hospitals, emergency rooms, and means of producing medicine and medical devices. If a society doesn’t have all of that then any “right to healthcare” won’t amount to much in practice.
I mean, that's not true? A right exists independent of the ability of a state to meet that right.
If a person has a “right” to something their society isn’t technically or logistically capable of providing, then that right is meaningless.
I mean, rights kind of are meaningless lol. It's just a statement of the values of a society.
gotta be careful about saying rights exist when they're inventions of relatively modern societies and pre-agricultural people probably thought killing somebody for no reason was wrong
Why do I have to be careful about that
whether rights exist is a philosophical debate that probably needs its own post