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

"denial of care by private, for-profit insurers through pre-existing conditions and rescission, and the increasing costs of health care while wages are stagnating." Thanks, finally you admit where the source of your concerns lay, those who provide, and in corollary, the proposal to enforce how they may act. :) "The change from historically non-profit to for-profit insurance providers in the latter half of the 20th century is probably another factor that has affected the nature of access and delivery of care." Health care as a service is relatively new, as are competent doctors. The government has less incentive to produce competitive services if they control it, on the contrary precisely because they control it, the standards lower to maintain it. "As our government is based on the consent of the governed, please note that the U.S. Congress has recently passed one health care reform bill in the House of Representatives; the Senate is working on their version." i.e. the abuse of the minority - since I don't see them holding a National Referendum on the issue, point is moot. "Access to affordable health care is a right, not a privilege", is that access to affordable health care is a right belonging to all, not just to the privileged (some). I have based this conclusion on 1) the structural inherency that we possess inalienable, human rights and that our society was established, among other things, to promote the general welfare" Your notion of what rights are however is erroneous, based in what I'm not sure, something like entitlement - certainly not in relation to the concept of rights as laid down by those you seek to support your position - saying in essence, 'whoa they said rights,' doesn't ground your position in reality, you merely seek to approbate a concept for your own ends, ignoring what the concept is based upon, in essence committing the fallacy of the stolen concept. Certainly your position is not soundly based in any epistemological or ethical base you have detailed, you've just gone and found instances of the word 'right' and subsumed them as one construct upon which you demand action. See the issue of saying someone has a right to it, entails, by necessity, they can have it - which means any attempt to deny it is in violation of this concept. What you appear to fail to see is the derivative of this premise; if you purport rights as positive, one can claim on another - you by necessity enslave those required to produce whatever you are claiming. "health being a primary need that is required for people to become productive citizens" Health sure, health care no - which is patently false, see oh, the history of humanity before the modern occupation of competent doctors with general access. Desiring to be healthy =/= a right to health care. I need a house to sleep to stay healthy to work productively, so I have a right to a house, I need food to have energy to be productive, therefore I have a right to the contents of your fridge, and so on it goes. "the benefit to individuals and society as a whole" Contradiction, there is no whole, only individuals, and demanding the production of others to some end is clearly not in their best interests. Indeed, the harvesting of your organs would benefit more individuals, more than you the individual. When you work out why anyone should not maybe you will be getting somewhere. "this right being in the same category as the rights to education, police, and fire protection (none of whom are forced or enslaved to deliver their services), which all citizens currently have access to." There is no right to these either, all are services provided morally or immorally, private or tax funded (that is your force). None constitute as being a right, at best commonly desired services - and let us be clear, you have entirely ignored the discussion on what rights are, for whatever reason, which only serves to highlight the lack of founding you have in the concept, if unwilling to defend your stance on it outside of, these people wrote it here sometime. "His first sentence in his first round was an ad hominem argument" "As it stands your definitions arise to absurdity with your resolution" - nope, nothing noted about you at all. "shifting the attention from the argument to my ability to reason and know the difference between the definitions of a privilege and a right." "Privilege: noun; a right" YOU put privilege in the realm of rights, I supported that position - you failed to argue away what your own posted definition agrees with - which was I. So don't be blaming me for this, choose, research your definitions more adequately next time. "he neglected to provide another definition with a more reasonable interpretation of the proposition and thus, avoided the issue through simple evasion." Oh really? Did you ignore my paragraphs on rights in R1? Perhaps you missed my paragraph on what a privilege is in regards to rights? All were expounded definitions on what rights and privileges were. Perhaps you ignored the link too, supporting my position. R2 I agreed if you wanted me specifically, to label an argument as 'privileged' I would, and I gave it. You chose to ignore that too it seems. "used the fallacy of composition" Which is not in the class of definitional fallacies. Let's be clear again, wherever you posted your definitions from, you clearly didn't pay too much attention to how they related to your resolution. Again, R2 even if given your argument I defended it using privilege, an argument you chose to ignore. "in arguing that this was my definition. He chose to alter the topic of the debate, not once, but twice, by 1) changing my argument to one of a policy claim ("the government should intervene in regards to health care")" I didn't make policy arguments, I extended YOUR premises, to show you why your concept of positive rights fails in certain ways - part of that is showing you how such things are enacted. Which went to show *why* rights do not detail things like access to health care. "he "took the debate to challenge 'health care is a right' [...] In other words, my opponent accepted the given debate and then argued against other topics of his choosing, without regard to my stated claim." Nope, access to, is synonymous with right to here, again you fail to realise the implications of the words you use, words you defined in the arena of morality - your remaining applications of the word PER YOUR DEFINITION I dealt with (legal, prescriptive) multiple times, all you ignored, all that was left, in regards to the topic of health care was health care + right > moral, and this stance you have utterly failed to uphold - my own arguments on it, unrefuted and ignored. My opponent has failed utterly to support the notion of health care as a right. That access to health care should somehow (she purposefully evades the how) be available to all in some manner (also unclear). I defended my reading of her definitions, supported my interpretation. I gave an argument on privileges and rights, both were ignored. == :)