One of the things that many foreigners, as well as some Americans, belittle the United States about is that there is no “free” socialized healthcare that the people have an explicit “guarantee” to, and further belittle the idea that ultimately we should expect people to be responsible for taking care of themselves.

Such people seem to assume that if the government says the people will receive “healthcare” for “free”, that people will get all the treatment they need in a timely manner, and that people in the United States without insurance are left to either die to go bankrupt.

The latest outrage is shock, shock I tell you, in stating the basic fact that mere demand will not spontaneously generate needed supply right this very second, and that hypothetically maybe we won’t have all the necessary medical equipment to treat everyone who needs it when they need it in all cases.

President Trump would not explicitly guarantee that anybody in the US who needs a ventilator to combat coronavirus would have access to one https://t.co/4Ma1hlR4vN — CNN (@CNN) March 28, 2020

Why doesn’t this prove that the free market system is a failure, and that a socialized alternative that “puts people ahead of profits” will and, unlike tat icky free market, have everything they need for all the people because the government explicitly guarantees it—because, after all, if the government guarantees a right to something, the that something will always be there? After all, Italy, France, and the U.K. all explicitly guarantee healthcare as a basic human right, and their promise of socialized healthcare magically makes it so, which is why everyone who needs all the proper medical treatment to fight Corona-chan are getting all the healthcare they were told they have an explicitly guaranteed right to, yes?

No.

In Italy, the elderly will be denied intensive care, with respirators denied for those aged sixty or over.

In France, in some areas, anyone over seventy-five will no longer be intubated, with the only help to the eldest involving helping those patients die.

And what about that vaunted paragon of free healthcare that guarantees the bestest of healthcare that the British are sooo lucky to have (for free!!1!)? Doctors will just write off patients that they don’t want to waste money on those who need it most, by restricting ventilators to those that the NHS deems to have a “reasonable certainty” of surviving. But then, the NHS considers it reasonable to torture kill children by dehydration/starvation.

And that’s is why government “explicitly guaranteeing” free stuff in the guise of a “human right” is such a scam. With socialized systems as in socialized healthcare, you a “right to healthcare” does not actually mean you have an actual right to actual healthcare; all it means is that you only have a “right” to whatever the government decides to let you have. That is not liberty or freedom; it is dependency and slavery.

Even actual fundamental liberties—which are independent of, and antecedent to government itself—are treated much like those “free stuff” rights, which the government can grant or not according to whatever whim it fancies, and either arbitrarily and capriciously limit, or even outright deny.

Your humble author would rather have the freedom to pay for my own healthcare and insurance, with all the freedom of others to help out charitably if necessary, rather than have an “explicit guarantee” to be told to f**k and die “for free!!1!”

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