An outdated Health Care Op-ed - Controversy!

If only to further prove that I am a left wing New York Jew or to start outdated controversies, I wrote an Op-ed piece about the right of health care.  This falls under the heading of old philosophical writings I have discovered.  Here is the piece I am responding to  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203517304574306170677645070.html.
Enjoy an comment about an issue that has been solved everywhere, but in the House of Representatives.

In an article written four years ago in the paper Rupert Murdoch owns so that people take him seriously (hint not the New York Post), a physician named Anthony Daniels (not the actor who played C3P0) exclaimed that health care is not a right.  He then went on to equate the right to health care to that of being able to eat an Eastern European chicken dish bimonthly. 

But it was not that gem of a point that I would like to discuss, it is rather his point about rights through the ages.  He says that if the right to health care didn’t exist in 1750 A.D. or 250 B.C., it shouldn’t exist today.  He concludes by saying how did our ancestors miss this if they are supposed to be as intelligent as we are in present day times. 

            To start my ramblings, this so called argument (the first of my many zingers) presupposes that we have the same values and knowledge that we had in the past.  We have to adapt back to the standards of the past to use his argument.  Let’s use his example of 1750 A.D.  Yes, the standard of health care didn’t exist back then.  Instead, we had a standard of mandatory slavery for a specific race of people.  To put it lightly this policy gave way to very mixed reactions from different subsets of the population.  We also had just discovered that the island of Tahiti would be a very nice place to have a mutiny on the Bounty.

Rights have always been evolving to fit with the times.  Look at our very founding documents.  We have expanded the right to vote from just land owning whites to everybody over the age of 18 in a scant two hundred years.  We didn’t give women the right to vote because of what I assume was a very hurtful breakup (Brenda, you slut!) but then we suddenly discovered we had feelings for them.  The way to get to a woman’s heart isn’t by giving them suffrage.  It’s obviously through chloroform (joke?  I certainly hope so).  As a society we decided to right what we felt was wrong. 

Making health care universal isn’t just discovering new rights.  It is righting what was once wrong, and extending rights to all who need them.  Just because people didn’t believe in a right doesn’t make it not there.  The same applies for evolution and the metric system.   

And yes, these rights will have a cost.  Rights cost money.  We all believe in the right of due process. Keeping the ensuing court system that maintains it costs an overruled arm and a may it please the court leg, but we still love it anyway.  Everything has a cost and in this instance the right to health care is greater than the cost.

            I do though agree with his point about us being as smart as our ancestors preceding us.  A good example of this is that we are still arguing about the same issues from sixty years ago like the right of universal health care.  If we were smarter than our ancestors this would not be an issue and it would have been passed already. 

 So let’s keep the dream alive!  Believe health care is a right just to get back at those idiot mouth breathers we descended from.  Screw them, they were bigots and a good chunk of them were Nazis.  Yeah I’m looking at you Germany. 

So Mr. Daniels take that!  I look forward to blindly throwing your response away in the trash.