Access to affordable health care is a right, not a privilege.

Welcome to your first debate. As it stands your definitions arise to absurdity with your resolution, in essence transforming it into: Access to affordable health care is a right, not a right. As such your definitions fail to properly detail the positions on either side of your argument, so I will take it that you are pro-state welfarist (from your argument), that the government should intervene in regards to health care and that you sought someone to take the opposing stance. You have indicated the moral nature of rights, as is correct, rights are a moral concept and a definition of rights belongs within that framework. So let's clear up a bit of mess: Privilege vs. Rights. In a discussion of rights, equivocation seems to be a ready trap many fall into. Privilege in this context, refer to those actions where claims are not to the contrary of it - no reason, not to perform an action. It inadequately captures the opposing stance of a welfare advocate (it does not adequately detail what rights are), so lets drop that from the discussion. This isn't going to be an abuse of the resolution - your own definition of a privilege does not detail adequate demarcation of a concept of rights in opposition to your stance and the concept of rights in relation to privilege, is an equivocation if used in the same context as the moral concept of rights. http://plato.stanford.edu... So what are rights? Rights are a concept, a moral one. If I have rights, then they exist as a concept, not as something I keep in my pocket. Since you evoke the founding fathers later (and to shortcut that argument), their concept of rights was based upon this same Aristotelean concept - so, rights then, are the concept (moral) of principles guiding an individuals action in relation to others. More specifically they are negative, by which, rights detail freedom of action in social contexts. For example, a right to life means the freedom to pursue an action free from interference, and in corollary, non-interference in another's right to that same freedom. Property, is the corollary of a right to life, like life also negative, meaning not free to obtain property, but what property one has is ones own, free from those who would seek to interfere with it without consent (including ones own body). Liberty then, is essentially a redundancy to the prior two, the freedom of freedom. See, rights, properly defined, should have non-contradictory implementation. In other words, for a proper concept of rights, their implementation should give rise to no contradictions and this is where your argument fails. A right to life, under your definition, is a positive right, it is a claim on something to someone. A right to this life, under your premises, is a cost to another's life, an automatic claim, that interferes and prohibits some aspect of another's life. Your position, is in contradiction with its implementation - and to briefly cover your U.N. claim, if implemented, easily in violation of article 4. Let's explore what you are really saying. A right to health care, is an admission that force is required to provide health care for others. See the cost of health care needs to arise from somewhere, and as such, you are enslaving others production, to pay for it. Not so? Please try not paying taxes, see how it is enforced. What else is required for such a 'right'? The the efforts of medical practitioners, doctors, nurses, researchers, engineers etc. Their services can be offered, in exchange for value or, under your equivocated right, they can be forced to. What sort of force? The government of course. Do these professionals then not count as individuals with rights? Should we enforce all those able to maintain this 'right' to life you seek? You have no viable 'cut-off,' no viable premise that maintains this position. The individual in need of a kidney has a right to anyones? Such a right exists in your premise, even taking the healthy kidney by force - it is no different to the other types of force you approve, all approbate the concept of individual rights. If I am shot on the street, I have a right to your car to get me to hospital, and so on it goes. See by advocating a positive right to health care you are advocating the enslavement of others to provide it. == "The unalienable right to "life" is futile without one's health." Right to life means the freedom to pursue ones life as one wishes, not to be alive. A train runs me over it violated my right to life? Nature violates my rights via cell degradation? No. It's an absurd stance on rights to take. "See the Modern Hippocratic oath; "prevention is preferable to cure."" Fantastic; eat well, exercise properly, wear sunscreen etc. It is not the governments role, nor mine, to dictate how you should look after your body. If you value it, take the steps to maintain it. "Access to affordable health care is not pure commerce, such as a product or commodity that is bought and sold. Human life is at stake. Do we measure the value of a human life only in dollars and cents?" Why not? That is precisely what you are asking, you are pricing one life above another, ones freedom above another's, you cost it through the method of how you seek to achieve it, taxes. As for the pricing mechanisms of Health Care, it is a bit beyond the scope and remaining character limits of this debate, however government intervention is precisely what raises this price. See http://www.theobjectivestandard.com... for an indepth look. == "I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind-yet what is it they expect to depend on when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of the victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it-and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn't." - Atlas Shrugged.