There cannot be a “right” for one person that puts an obligation on another person.

There cannot be a “right” for everyone that puts an obligation on some people.

A “right” to health care imposes an obligation on medical practitioners.

Yet the Democratic candidates for the November 2020 presidential election believe that medical treatment is a “human right”.

That old Communist from way back, Bernie Sanders – elected to the Senate as an Independent but running for the presidency as a Democrat – explicitly insists that it is.

Dr. Kevin Pham writes at the Daily Signal:

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was recently on comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show to discuss … his vision for health care in America.

He calls his plan “Medicare for All”.

In one interesting statement, Sanders described the rollout of his plan: “I want to expand Medicare to include dental care, hearing aids, and eyeglasses, and then what I want to do is lower the eligibility age the first year from 65 down to 55, then to 45, then to 35, then we cover everybody.”

Cover? Covered by insurance? No. “Free” health care for all would not be paid for through a system of insurance. It would be paid for through taxes. Doctors, nurses, paramedics, all health care workers would be employees of the government.

The plan, Dr. Pham points out, is more accurately called “Medicaid for All”.

[It] would cost over $30 trillion in the next 10 years in ideal conditions …

So probably very much more …

… but still require physicians and providers to take a pay cut of up to 40% and continue working with the same productivity.

And of course a great many more of them would be needed.

Physicians are already heavily burdened with their workload. In the 2018 Physicians Foundation survey, up to 80% of physicians reported working at their maximum capacity or beyond.

In the same survey, about 15% of physicians reported limiting the number of Medicaid patients they see and an additional 16% did not see Medicaid patients at all.

Of these physicians who do not see Medicaid patients, or limit the number they see, over a third are in primary care, exactly the kind of physicians we need in greater numbers.

[But] … a combination of administrative burdens, delays in processing claims, and low reimbursement rates make it difficult to justify seeing many Medicaid patients.

As Medicaid and Medicare both drastically underpay relative to private health insurance, hospitals and providers have to charge private insurance more to make up the difference.

Under Bernie Sanders’s scheme (and Elizabeth Warren’s vague and colossally expensive plan), there would no private insurance and “the whole system would crumble”.

Providers who participate in Medicaid must accept the government-mandated prices for services and deal with oftentimes long delays in receiving reimbursement that is below the cost of practice. 

Study hard for years at great expense only to earn a pittance? (Oh, I nearly forgot – higher education will also be “free” in that it will be paid for by taxation. Your pathetic little income will be taxed at so high a rate that you’ll be left with nothing but a little pocket-money.)

You would have to be a fanatical philanthropist, or even a masochist, to enter the medical profession under such conditions.

And we haven’t even touched on all the miseries a tax-payer funded national health service inevitably brings to patients – the long waits, the rationing, the overcrowding, the death panels …