The Problem with the Libertarian View of Universal Health Care

Last updated on: May 14, 2019 at 12:08 am by Mark Shea

The Problem with the Libertarian View of Universal Health Care 2019-05-06T17:53:21-07:00 Mark Shea

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…is perfectly illustrated by the testimony of this dying man to Congress that GoFundMe is not a health care plan.

The core evil of the Libertarian’s war on universal health care is that it lies that taking a few pennies from my paycheck “robs me of the chance to be generous”. No. It does not.

Health care is not “charity”. Health care is justice. It is the corollary of our right to life. If, as prolife people endlessly insist, babies have a right to be born and it is the obligation of the state to defend human life as the guardian of Justice, then it is equally the duty of the state to help preserve human life as the guardian of Justice.

The Libertarian “plan” is that a family whose four year old girl has leukemia must beg and scrape on GoFundMe in the hope that they will be lucky enough to afford treatment. It says that the *real* purpose of Christian charity is not that the needy person get the help they need, but that the greedy narcissist pretending to obey Jesus get to feel generous. It has no actual interest in the needs of the sick. It is only interested in the feelings of the so-called “charitable Christian” who gets to pretend he cares while also getting to make life and death judgment calls against people he deems the Deserving or Undeserving Poor.

Just the other day, I had a total stranger in these comboxes tell me that there was no way in hell he was going to contribute to any diabetes care for the likes of me, since I’m fat and therefore deserve to have diabetes. He knows nothing of my medical history, nor of my genetics, nor of my efforts at weight loss. But his verdict was final: rather than lift a finger to help, he would rather people like me die. That is the *real* mindset of Libertarian hatred of universal health care. They get to cling to their money, feel like St. Francis for occasionally giving five bucks when the mood takes them, and hand down death sentences to sick people they believe have it coming.

Universal health care is, according the Church, as much a right as the right to life, because it is the inevitable corollary of the Right to Life. It is justice, and the proper function of the State is to ensure Justice, not to leave justice in the hands of vigilantes who take it upon themselves to dispense life and death according to their prejudices.

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