Liberty For All

by Rachel Mills

The rights of an American are (or used to be) Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of property. That means the right not to be killed, the right not to be messed with, and the right to try to acquire stuff. To further specify what they believed our rights to be, the founding fathers added a few addenda, namely the bill of rights, which all kind of spring from the first basic three. You have a right to believe how you want, speak your mind, and so does the press. You have a right to pack heat. You don’t have to be a bed and breakfast for the military, et cetera. Oh, and just in case we left any rights out, doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

The Ninth Amendment. We’ve monkeyed with just about all the other amendments giving you rights. Declaring your rights, rather. From gun laws, to FCC limiting speech, gun control laws ranging all over the spectrum as if its from the bill of privileges, juries tampered with utterly until they actually believe they are an instrument of the government, instead of the people and therefore a CHECK on government laws. (How do you think the ante-bellum North was free? No jury would enforce slave laws up there. We could end the drug war the same way. But that’s for another day.)

Interestingly enough, we’ve had problems with that 9th amendment too because it gives us a loophole to imagine new rights. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind the right to privacy that Roe V. Wade established with it, but what I’m concerned about now are the entitlements we’ve fabricated for ourselves recently. Such as a right to an education and quality healthcare. Prescription drugs. Housing. Food. So what’s wrong with those? Let’s deal with healthcare, by way of example. A sense of entitlement to healthcare turns doctors into community slaves, doesn’t it? Oh, come on, you say. Slaves?

Consider the cost of healthcare which rises WITH programs designed to spread out the cost and make healthcare equal and equally accessible by all. Doctors have gone from house calls in buggies and accepting partial payment in chickens and potatoes to mountains of paperwork, 3,200 different insurance codes to justify their decisions and a 20% overhead cost just to collect payment. Add on top of that insane malpractice insurance premiums that can be up to and over $200,000 a year.

Why?

Because juries like to give out jackpots to sympathetic patients. After all, they had a right to decent healthcare. But doctors have no right to make mistakes or be human. No right to want to actually profit from their trade, which they have an increasingly hard time doing after paying back school loans, insurance policies and paperwork costs. They are forced to whip through office visits in 12 minutes flat, and in that time go over cancer risk, lifestyle, patient history, blah blah blah and if they don’t get it all in there and something preventable happens to you, guess what - you have a right to sue. Fewer patients means fewer claims they can submit to insurance companies, and as costs rise, more claims must be submitted, and more patients must be seen every day. If they are uninsured or unable to pay, its not like a hospital can deny them treatment. Patients have rights. And as the rest of the system absorbs those costs, the less affordable it becomes for more and more people. But that’s OK if you can’t pay. You have an entitlement. What are doctors entitled to? Apparently they’re not even entitled to leave their profession if it becomes unbearable.

It’s no fun to be a slave. It’s no fun to be a doctor anymore. You used to go into that profession to help people, now it’s all about insurance codes and mountains of paperwork and a different faceless bundle of symptoms every 12 minutes. No wonder med school applications are in steady decline.

What are your rights? Anything you don’t have to enslave others for. Anything that comes from the sweat of another is not your right. Even if they are a brilliant doctor. Or a teacher. You don’t have rights to them. No one is your slave. That is why you have the sacred right to pursuit of property - so that you can have stuff to barter with for the doctor’s and the teacher’s services. That is why you work so hard - so your kids can have a good education and good healthcare. These are *benefits* of a progressive society, not entitlements. But when we treat benefits like entitlements, all we do is create demanding consumers with confusion, shortages and resentment on both sides. Honor the doctor, don’t enslave him.

Don’t let the Ninth amendment blind you to the Fourteenth amendment.

Originally published in Liberty For All April 10, 2004.