Argument: Premise of insurance mandates, that health care is a right, is false

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Paul Hsieh. “Mandatory Health Insurance: Wrong for Massachusetts, Wrong for America”. The Objective Standard. Fall 2008: “At the most fundamental level, the flaw underlying the Massachusetts plan (and all other forms of socialized medicine) is the premise that health care is a ‘right,’ that it must somehow be guaranteed by the government. This premise is false. […] As mentioned earlier, health insurance is a commodity, a good created by businessmen for trade in the marketplace. A right, on the other hand, is not a good created by businessmen, but a principle sanctioning an individual’s legitimate freedom of action. A right is something that other people are morally obliged to grant to an individual—namely: the freedom to act on his own judgment. To treat health insurance (or health care) as a right is to treat a commodity produced by businessmen as something to which everyone is entitled; it is to treat the producers of health insurance as slaves of the collective.”