To think of health care as an entitlement, as President Obama does, is to think that all Americans somehow deserve to have health care given to us. But is that not absurd, and does it not tread heavily on our real rights? Health care is provided by people who choose to become doctors, nurses, therapists, and aides. What "right" do we have to force them to give us their services—anymore than they have a right to force us to give them our labor, whatever our job is? After all, if no one chooses to become a doctor, how could we demand to have a doctor's services given to us? Could we rightly force an unwilling person to become a doctor just so we could make her give us medical services? Of course not.
Opposed to the idea of rights as understood by Obama stand the natural rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence:
All human beings are born with [natural rights]—endowed with them by our Creator, as the Declaration of Independence says—not given them by any government. It doesn’t make sense to say all Americans "should" have or "should not" have the right to life, for example: we "do" have it, as do all other human beings, simply by virtue of being human beings. Government exists to protect our natural rights, not to grant them. And certain of these rights, like the right to life, no one on earth can give or take away: they are "unalienable."
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