Proven: The ‘Right to Health Care’ Leads to Denial of Care

As government health-care budgets inevitably spiral out of control, hospitals find themselves with insufficient resources, so a centralized health-care bureaucracy tries to control costs by making sure patients are granted or denied care according to predetermined rules drafted by a medical rationing board. Britain has one, the National Institutes for Health and Clinical Excellence, known by the Orwellian acronym NICE—and President Obama wants to create a similar board in the US to provide "guidance" about which treatments are "cost-effective" and should be allowed.

In such a system, the patient has little or no control precisely because he is not the one paying the bills, so no one has to listen to him. That's what happens when people surrender their actual right to health-care, the right to contract for it privately with doctors and insurance companies, in exchange for an illusory "right" to whatever care the government chooses to provide—or withhold. JWR