Imagine to yourself the following situation. You have graduated college and are in the process of looking for a job. You have had some hard times and are struggling to pay the bills from your student loans and the bills in general. You are working part-time in a few positions trying to scrape by day to day. Of course, putting food on the table has been a primary concern, and health insurance has been the last thing on your mind. Unexpectedly, you fall into a serious illness and are rushed to the nearest private hospital for emergency treatment.

You are received by the hospital and treated initially, but unfortunately you do not have insurance and have no way of paying the bills for all the treatments you have received. The hospital finds out about your inability to pay, and you are quietly dismissed out the back door, still suffering from serious illness and in very bad shape.

This kind of thing is never supposed to happen anywhere, especially in the United States, where we are supposed to have the best health care system in the world. According to www.emtala.com, under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), passed in 1986, no one is supposed to be dismissed or transferred from any hospital because of an inability to pay or their status as Medicare or Medicaid patients.

Despite this act, there still are cases of patient-dumping and illegal treatment refusals that occur every year. In many cases, those individuals affected are the homeless and the elderly. The most amazing fact of all is that I had never heard of this act or its purpose before researching this subject for a job I have in the history department. Furthermore, I had no idea that this kind of heartless treatment refusal had been going on since the beginning of the century and, in many ways, still continues today.

So this kind of practice occurring in the United States brings us to a fundamental question: Should people have a right to health care regardless if they are able to pay for it or not?

The concept of the welfare state, as it’s popularly understood, incorporates a certain minimal right to have some kind of basic treatment for all of the qualifying, tax-paying citizens of this nation. As with any issue, there are proponents of each side. Some argue that health care is a right of people of this country and that regardless of one’s ability to pay, they should have access to the best care available. On the opposite side are those that define health care as a privilege for those who are financially capable of entering into a private contract with a health care provider for their services.

On one side, there is a moral argument that the health of individuals in this nation is equally valuable, regardless of their economic standing. Similarly, people in other industries have the option of entering into a contract with any individual regardless of their interests or economic or social class, so therefore, individuals in the health care industry have similar rights.

Ultimately, the view becomes one of evaluating not health care in general but the methodology and ideology behind the American health care system. We live in a nation that defines itself as adhering to capitalism. Under that premise, the health care industry serves a useful purpose in providing a service to the general public, yet its primary purpose is to turn a profit from its services. Therefore, corporate and private interests in the bottom line come before any individual’s or the public good.

So this is where the big problem comes about. Are the people of this nation willing to sacrifice the private gain for the public good? Should the population of this nation be able to grant health care as a right to all people? If they are, then we should be willing to end the private control of the health care system and democratically socialize it. The concepts of private control of health care and individuals having a right to health care are diametrically opposed to each other.

There is a good article that shows how foreign the concept of socialized health care is to someone who cannot break out of the mind frame of individuality and capitalist ideology. The article, “Is There A Right To Health Care?” by David Kelley, can be found on The Objectivist Center Web site at www.ios.org/pubs/Article3.asp and demonstrates perfectly the argument against socialized health care.

Fundamentally, the mindframe is very rigidly set in individualism and business-like mentality. What we as a society need to ask ourselves is if this is the kind of society we want to live in? Do we want to take the chance that the next person denied care could be us or our children? This topic is one that affects all of us and is one that we all must consider. We must decide how we want to live. I know that I would easily give up a portion of my tax money to go to social health care rather than to the guns and bombs that we use to kill others.

Then again, no one ever asked me how I wanted my tax dollars spent & some idiot in Congress did that. Think about it.