The AAFP Continues Their Cluelessness
At the most recent AAFP yearly meeting, it was decided:
Healthcare is a basic human right and there should be a “publicly funded universal primary care program,” according to resolutions adopted Wednesday by the American Academy of Family Physicians Congress of Delegates here.
The healthcare-as-right resolution stated that the AAFP “recognize that health is a human right for every person, not a privilege.” It was amended to clarify “that the right to health includes universal access to timely acceptable and affordable healthcare of appropriate quality” and was passed with resounding applause.
Good for them. It is so easy to be the good guy. It is so easy to say everything is free. The problem is that the answers are not easy. They don’t say how it will be paid for. They have no plan. Just another wish for the AAFP.
I want better health for everyone. The problem is that I cannot control what people eat, drink, how much they smoke, or how much they exercise. Correct me if I am wrong but everyone has the right to do ALL of this. They just don’t do it. The AAFP, of course, takes the easy road and mentions none of this. They do mention that somehow “universal access to timely, acceptable and affordable healthcare of appropriate quality” should be magically created and paid for. Don’t get me wrong, for a reasonable price, you can actually get this with DPC, which is only attained via a free market. You cannot, however, get it with a government-run, bureaucratically heavy system. It will fail.
And someone please explain to me why having food, water, and shelter is not a right but yet healthcare is?
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Er, um. Along with rights come responsibilities. If health care is a right then people should be
responsible for reasonable health practices. None of this it going on. I hope ACA and all the
other acronyms are dumped and we start over with the idea that the person is going to held accountable for their lousy behaviors.
You have a right to a court apointed attorney but the court picks the lawyer. Patients need to realize that if they have a similar “right” to a primary care provider it will not be one of their choosing.
One of the problems that trips people up frequently is – what does it mean to have rights?
Wikipedia discusses CLAIM rights and LIBERTY rights, an important distinction for those who recognize the difference between rights and obligations
.
“Some philosophers and political scientists make a distinction between claim rights and liberty rights. A claim right is a right which entails responsibilities, duties, or obligations on other parties regarding the right-holder. In contrast, a liberty right is a right which does not entail obligations on other parties, but rather only freedom or permission for the right-holder. The distinction between these two senses of “rights” originates in American jurist Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld’s analysis .”
Everyone has the right to good healthcare, in that they are free to seek it. The AAFP went on to state,
… “health is a human right for every person, not a privilege”, and “that the right to health includes universal access to timely acceptable and affordable healthcare of appropriate quality”
It is usual for people to muddle up these two principles. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are liberty rights cited in the Declaration of Independence. Governments exist so as to allow these rights to be pursued by its citizens: That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Governments do not distribute a claim to these services. Rather, they assure the opportunity to pursue these rights. Let them pursue healthcare! But we do not have the ability to offer it.
“Claim rights” sounds like the arbitrary construct of an activist government advocate, and its BS.
Rand Paul has it right: making health care a right enslaves those who provide it.
as much as i think the aafp are clowns with their heads in the clouds, i don’t think looking to some like rand paul (a notable antivaccine goofball) as our savior is a very sound idea either.
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/rand-paul-vaccines-114845
perhaps we need better champions?
Point taken. I’ll stand narrowly on my reference for this topic.
Boom.