group simply because he wants them and desperately needs them.  The very
fact that he needs these services so desperately is the proof that he
had better respect the freedom, the integrity, and the rights of the
people who provide them.

You have a right to work, not to rob others of the fruits of their
work, not to turn others into sacrificial, rightless animals laboring to
fulfill your needs.

Some of you may ask here:  But can people afford health care on their
own?  Even leaving aside the present government-inflated medical prices,
the answer is:  Certainly people can afford it.  Where do you think the
money is coming from *right now* to pay for it all -- where does the
government get its fabled unlimited money?  Government is not a
productive organization; it has no source of wealth other than
confiscation of the citizens' wealth, through taxation, deficit
financing or the like.

But, you may say, isn't it the "rich" who are really paying the costs
of medical care now -- the rich, not the broad bulk of the people?  As
has been proved time and again, there are not enough rich anywhere to
make a dent in the government's costs; it is the vast middle class in
the U.S. that is the only source of the kind of money that national
programs like government health care require.  A simple example of this
is the fact that the Clinton Administration's new program rests squarely
on the backs not of Big Business, but of small businessmen who are
struggling in today's economy merely to stay alive and in existence.
Under any socialized program, it is the "little people" who do most of
the paying for it -- under the senseless pretext that "the people" can't
afford such and such, so the government must take over.  If the people
of a country *truly* couldn't afford a certain service -- as e.g. in
Somalia -- neither, for that very reason, could any government in that
country afford it, either.

*Some* people can't afford medical care in the U.S.  But they are
necessarily a small minority in a free or even semi-free country.  If
they were the majority, the country would be an utter bankrupt and could
not even think of a national medical program.  As to this small
minority, in a free country they have to rely solely on private,
voluntary charity.  Yes, charity, the kindness of the doctors or of the
better off -- charity, not right, i.e. not their right to the lives or
work of others.  And such charity, I may say, was always forthcoming in
the past in America.  The advocates of Medicaid and Medicare under LBJ
did not claim that the poor or old in the '60's got bad care; they
claimed that it was an affront for anyone to have to depend on charity.

But the fact is:  You don't abolish charity by calling it something
else.  If a person is getting health care for *nothing*, simply because
he is breathing, he is still getting charity, whether or not President
Clinton calls it a "right."  To call it a Right when the recipient did
not earn it is merely to compound the evil.  It is charity still --
though now extorted by criminal tactics of force, while hiding under a
dishonest name.

As with any good or service that is provided by some specific group
of men, if you try to make its possession by all a right, you thereby
enslave the providers of the service, wreck the service, and end up
depriving the very consumers you are supposed to be helping.  To call
"medical care" a right will merely enslave the doctors and thus destroy
the quality of medical care in this country, as socialized medicine has
done around the world, wherever it has been tried, including Canada (I
was born in Canada and I know a bit about that system first hand).

I would like to clarify the point about socialized medicine enslaving
the doctors.  Let me quote here from an article I wrote a few years ago:
"Medicine: The Death of a Profession." [*The Voice of Reason: Essays in
Objectivist Thought,* NAL Books, c 1988 by the Estate of Ayn Rand and
Leonard Peikoff.]

"In medicine, above all, the mind must be left free.  Medical
treatment involves countless variables and options that must be taken
into account, weighed, and summed up by the doctor's mind and
subconscious.  Your life depends on the private, inner essence of the
doctor's function: it depends on the input that enters his brain, and on
the processing such input receives from him.  What is being thrust now
into the equation?  It is not only objective medical facts any longer.
Today, in one form or another, the following also has to enter that
brain: 'The DRG administrator [in effect, the hospital or HMO man trying
to control costs] will raise hell if I operate, but the malpractice

--- FleetStreet 1.19+