The “Right” to Health Care in America

By MIKE MAGEE I’ve been working on a Spring lecture for President’s College at the University of Hartford titled, “The Constitution and Your ‘Right to Health Care’ in America.”  My description reads, “This lecture explores the recent political history and legal controversy surrounding attempts to establish universal health coverage in America. “Is health care a right?” viewed within the context of the Bill of Rights and especially the 9th and 10th Amendments?” Self-described libertarian-conservative John R. Graham, a health policy analyst in the Trump administration’s HHS, writing on the topic in 2010 stated that, “As a non-lawyer, my understanding is very simple: The Ninth Amendment states that ‘the enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.’ So, if you claim a ‘right to health care,’ there’s nothing in the Constitution that denies your claim. Indeed, libertarians and conservatives should be more willing to concede a ‘right to health care,’ because once it’s defined as a right, the entire weight of the Constitution comes down against federal (and perhaps even state) control.” This bit of semantics crash-lands with common sense, as it did in my own state in 1965 when the Supreme Court in a 7 to 2 decision (Griswold v. Connecticut) dismantled an 1873 Comstock Law that prohibited marr...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Policy Source Type: blogs