Health Care as a Negative Right

Last night I saw Sicko, Michael Moore's latest expose about the state of health care in the United States. To look beyond Moore's black-and-white view of health care (socialized good, privatized bad), one can and should ask what kind of human right health care is. If it's a negative right, then the government's only responsibility is they can't prevent us from obtaining it. If it's a positive right, then the government is required to provide it to all. Without using these terms per se, much of the debate on health care in the United States depends on what kind of right you see it as. Republicans fighting the Clinton health care reform in the '90s repeatedly spoke of "government interference" in hospitals, which essentially implies that governmental control would prevent people from receiving care. In other words, it would infringe upon our negative right against government interference. Those for socialized health care, on the other hand, believe our rights are already being denied, as it is the government's duty to provide it's citizens with medical attention when needed.

Moore clearly takes the latter view, as evident by his glorification of Canada, France, and even Cuba. That does not mean, however, that one who sees health care as a negative right has nothing to gain from the movie. The dozen or so people denied treatment Moore interviewed show that people can be left choiceless when it comes to their medical care and the laws of our nation fail to protect them. Goodbye negative right. So even if Michael Moore's tactics (trying to take a boatload of sick Americans to Guantanamo Bay, for instance), leave you with a bad taste in your mouth, our government's failure to provide even the most basic human right to its citizens should leave a worse one.