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In speaking about "human rights", it is important to note the vast philosophical difference that exists between the Anglo-American political tradition, and the Continental European tradition, both of which are products of their respective enlightenments.
The Anglo-American tradition traces its roots back to Locke via the Puritan tradition. Jefferson boiled this down in the Declaration by saying that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.
The European tradition looks more towards Rousseau and the Philosophes, who were far more rationalist and secularist than the English enlightenment philosophers. They believed that equality is embedded in human nature, and that human rights devolve from the popular will. As the state was seen to be the manifestation of the popular will through the social contract of the state and the people, ultimately, human rights originate with and are defined by the state. What the state bestows, the state can withdraw--and, in the European liberal tradition, that is legitimate as long as the state is a reflection of the popular will.
Thus, when the Church speaks of inherent human "rights", it does so within the context of the European political tradition, and it is understood by most Europeans--as well as by most Anglo-American leftists--as assigning certain duties and obligations to the state.
The unfortunate side effect of that mis-interpretation is the state assumption of responsibility for care of the individual not only undermines personal responsibility, it displaces individual charity. Which is an oxymoron--charity, caritas, agape--is necessarily individual in nature. Corporate entities, whether private organizations or government agencies, cannot love, and love is the essence of charity. The object of the Church must be to encourage charity, which means convincing every individual person to do for the least among us what he would do for Christ.
Government programs are no substitute, and in fact, work against charity in two ways. First, by absorbing surplus income, it reduces the amount people have to give. Second, and more insidiously, they let the individual off the hook. He thinks, "I pay all these taxes to the government, and then the government provides the poor with health care, housing, food, clothing and "other essential social services" (somebody please tell me what those are!), therefore I have done my part.
This attitude is borne out by an examination of private giving in the United States and in Europe. Americans at all income levels give far more to charity than do Europeans. This includes foreign aid, where the United States is regularly castigated for its relatively low (as a percent of GDP) government foreign aid budget. But when private donations are included, the U.S. rises to the head of the pack in both absolute and relative terms.
The same effect is seen in domestic charity, where the United States far outpaces its more socialized (and higher taxed) betters, particularly in the Catholic south of Europe (though Scandinavia is no paragon of private giving, either).
Here in the United States, we see the same phenomenon on the state level: states with higher taxes and more extensive social welfare programs also see less private charity, both in absolute and relative terms, and across all income groups.
The conclusion is inescapable: government welfare programs drive out private charity and charitable giving; the more of the former the less of the latter. As the Church should be encouraging the individual person to develop a deeper sense of charity, when the Church extols certain things as rights, and at least implies that the government has an obligation to provide them, it works counter to its own purpose, including the principle of subsidiarity.
The Church also has to remember that "he who pays the piper gets to call the tune". When the Church accedes to the government being provider of social welfare, it looses both the right and the ability to demand what services are provided and how. If there is government controlled universal health care in the United States, Catholic institutions will be required to provide abortions and contraceptives, "gender reassignment" surgery, in vitro fertilization and a host of other procedures it finds morally repugnant. And it will have only two choices--to compromise fatally its moral principles, or to get out of the business of providing health services, period. In Massachusetts, we saw the Church get out of the adoption business because of state meddling. If Obamacare goes through in anything like its present form, within two decades, there will be no Catholic hospitals in the United States of America.
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There are some serious issues to be faced in most western democracies where there has been a gradual eating away of the basic morals that guided the people. National health systems being used as a front to bring in other agenda items and push churches and others into complying, or getting out of the health business all together. Quoting Protestant former presidents with deepy engrained Protestant views of God and the world is not helpful. Catholics have a wealth of Papal documents to draw from and should be dipping there for inspiration. 
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Joined: Jan 2007
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I'll take the real believing and practicing Protestants over the secularists any day of the week.
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Joined: Aug 2004
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Here is a good start:
Tort reform (over 100 billion in frivalous lawsuites a year filed).
Allow people to shop nationwide for coverage like auto insurance. This creates much larger competition.
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Joined: Jul 2005
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Thank you. I could not have said it better myself. At least not in so few words.  Alexandr
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One could add health savings accounts and deductability of premiums for individuals, to begin eliminating the middleman and making individuals responsible for their own health care.
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Also, at this point, simply registering for Medicare all the people who qualify for it would substantially reduce the number of people in America without health insurance--and not require any changes to existing law whatsoever.
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The only reason the government wants to take it over is control and power. There are many other solutions to make it better, but they (all the lawyers in DC running this country) want to ignore all that.
Remember, Satan is a deceiver and a lier. Luke warm, luke warm, beware the middle road.
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The only reason the government wants to take it over is control and power. That's what governments do. That's why the Founders gave us a Constitution that makes it very difficult to get anything done. When you hear that the government is not doing anything about something, give thanks.
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Here is the latest information (August 18) info from the USCCB Pro-Life Secretariat: Date: August 18, 2009 To: Diocesan Pro-Life / Respect Life Directors
From: Richard Doerflinger
Re: Efforts on Health Care Reform
Dear Director,
Members of Congress will return to Washington after Labor Day, and resume consideration of proposals for health care reform. This August recess may afford many opportunities to discuss with your elected representatives our support for health care reform that respects and supports the life and dignity of all, from conception to natural death.
The attached materials have been provided to all bishops to assist them during this time. One is a memo from Bishop William Murphy, Chairman of the USCCB Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, recommending activities during this recess; the other is a "target list" of representatives who we hope will receive special attention, due to their importance in the congressional process or their need for further encouragement on one or more aspects of our message on health care. We hope these materials are helpful to you as well during this time of opportunity.
As many of you know, our public materials on this issue as well as some new items (videos, a "Q and A," etc.) have been collected together on a special web page, www.usccb.org/healthcare/. [usccb.org] We hope this will help you to educate Catholics and others on the bishops' position; new items will be added on a regular basis.
The legislative situation remains very fluid. The chief House proposal, HR 3200, received literally dozens of amendments in committee just before the recess which we are analyzing; the Senate Health committee's bill has still not been published in committee-approved form; the Senate Finance Committee, which is trying to produce a bipartisan bill, has not yet released a draft. Two features of HR 3200 that received a good deal of public debate -- the inclusion of a government-run "public health insurance plan" to compete with private plans nationwide (which as approved by committee would have provided for mandated abortion coverage), and a provision for counseling on "advance care planning" for Medicare patients -- will likely not be part of the Senate Finance bill. We will try to keep you informed of new developments as they occur.
Misleading claims are being made by various groups both supporting and opposing different bills, which in any case keep changing. Our primary focus should be on urging that reform legislation reflect the bishops' criteria for positive and legitimate health care reform, as outlined in Bishop Murphy's memo and our letters to Congress.
Thank you again for your continuing and dedicated efforts to advance respect for all human life! From the action alert page mentioned above is the following info which provide a quick easy link so that you can share your own comments with your Senators and Representative; the link channel your comments to the right office through your zip code. Its simple and easy. Does our Constitutional form of government still work? If you don't send your opinion then we are giving up without a fight! Please respond. ACTION: Contact Members through e-mail, phone calls or FAX letters. E-mails can be sent through NCHLA’s Grassroots Action Center—please click here http://actions.nchla.org/Core.aspx?Screen=compose2&SessionID=$AID=970:SITEID=-1:VV_CULTURE=en-us:APP=GAC:ISSUEID=18830$] Call the U.S. Capitol switchboard at: 202-224-3121, or call the local offices of your Representative and Senators. Full contact info can be found on Members’ web sites at www.house.gov [ house.gov] and www.senate.gov. [ senate.gov.] The link doesn't appear correctly, so please cut and paste this address into your browser: http://actions.nchla.org/Core.aspx?Screen=compose2&SessionID=$AID=970:SITEID=-1:VV_CULTURE=en-us:APP=GAC:ISSUEID=18830$ Fr. Deacon Paul Boboige Pro-Life Coordinator Archeparchy of Pittsburgh
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Another bishop weighs in with a slightly different perspective from his USCCB confreres. Bishop Walter R. Nickless of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sioux City writes that No Health Care Reform is Better Than the Wrong Health Care Reform [ scdiocese.org] . Among other things, Bishop Nickless rightly points out that it is not the purview of the Church to prescribe the type of health care reform that should be implemented: HEALTH CARE REFORM The current national debate about health care reform should concern all of us. There is much at stake in this political struggle, and also much confusion and inaccurate information being thrown around. My brother bishops have described some clear “goal-posts” to mark out what is acceptable reform, and what must be rejected. First and most important, the Church will not accept any legislation that mandates coverage, public or private, for abortion, euthanasia, or embryonic stem-cell research. We refuse to be made complicit in these evils, which frankly contradict what “health care” should mean. We refuse to allow our own parish, school, and diocesan health insurance plans to be forced to include these evils. As a corollary of this, we insist equally on adequate protection of individual rights of conscience for patients and health care providers not to be made complicit in these evils. A so-called reform that imposes these evils on us would be far worse than keeping the health care system we now have. Second, the Catholic Church does not teach that “health care” as such, without distinction, is a natural right. The “natural right” of health care is the divine bounty of food, water, and air without which all of us quickly die. This bounty comes from God directly. None of us own it, and none of us can morally withhold it from others. The remainder of health care is a political, not a natural, right, because it comes from our human efforts, creativity, and compassion. As a political right, health care should be apportioned according to need, not ability to pay or to benefit from the care. We reject the rationing of care. Those who are sickest should get the most care, regardless of age, status, or wealth. But how to do this is not self-evident. The decisions that we must collectively make about how to administer health care therefore fall under “prudential judgment.”Third, in that category of prudential judgment, the Catholic Church does not teach that government should directly provide health care. Unlike a prudential concern like national defense, for which government monopolization is objectively good – it both limits violence overall and prevents the obvious abuses to which private armies are susceptible – health care should not be subject to federal monopolization. Preserving patient choice (through a flourishing private sector) is the only way to prevent a health care monopoly from denying care arbitrarily, as we learned from HMOs in the recent past. While a government monopoly would not be motivated by profit, it would be motivated by such bureaucratic standards as quotas and defined “best procedures,” which are equally beyond the influence of most citizens. The proper role of the government is to regulate the private sector, in order to foster healthy competition and to curtail abuses. Therefore any legislation that undermines the viability of the private sector is suspect. Private, religious hospitals and nursing homes, in particular, should be protected, because these are the ones most vigorously offering actual health care to the poorest of the poor.The best way in practice to approach this balance of public and private roles is to spread the risks and costs of health care over the largest number of people. This is the principle underlying Medicaid and Medicare taxes, for example. But this principle assumes that the pool of taxable workers is sufficiently large, compared to those who draw the benefits, to be reasonably inexpensive and just. This assumption is at root a pro-life assumption! Indeed, we were a culture of life when such programs began. Only if we again foster a culture of life can we perpetuate the economic justice of taxing workers to pay health care for the poor. Without a growing population of youth, our growing population of retirees is outstripping our distribution systems. In a culture of death such as we have now, taxation to redistribute costs of medical care becomes both unjust and unsustainable.
Fourth, preventative care is a moral obligation of the individual to God and to his or her family and loved ones, not a right to be demanded from society. The gift of life comes only from God; to spurn that gift by seriously mistreating our own health is morally wrong. The most effective preventative care for most people is essentially free – good diet, moderate exercise, and sufficient sleep. But pre-natal and neo-natal care are examples of preventative care requiring medical expertise, and therefore cost; and this sort of care should be made available to all as far as possible. Within these limits, the Church has been advocating for decades that health care be made more accessible to all, especially to the poor. Will the current health care reform proposals achieve these goals? The current House reform bill, HR 3200, does not meet the first or the fourth standard. As Cardinal Justin Rigali has written for the USCCB Secretariat of Pro-life Activities, this bill circumvents the Hyde amendment (which prohibits federal funds from being used to pay for abortions) by drawing funding from new sources not covered by the Hyde amendment, and by creatively manipulating how federal funds covered by the Hyde amendment are accounted. It also provides a “public insurance option” without adequate limits, so that smaller employers especially will have a financial incentive to push all their employees into this public insurance. This will effectively prevent those employees from choosing any private insurance plans. This will saddle the working classes with additional taxes for inefficient and immoral entitlements. The Senate bill, HELP, is better than the House bill, as I understand it. It subsidizes care for the poor, rather than tending to monopolize care. But, it designates the limit of four times federal poverty level for the public insurance option, which still includes more than half of all workers. This would impinge on the vitality of the private sector. It also does not meet the first standard of explicitly excluding mandatory abortion coverage.I encourage all of you to make you voice heard to our representatives in Congress. Tell them what they need to hear from us: no health care reform is better than the wrong sort of health care reform. Insist that they not permit themselves to be railroaded into the current too-costly and pro-abortion health care proposals. Insist on their support for proposals that respect the life and dignity of every human person, especially the unborn. And above all, pray for them, and for our country. (Please see the website for the Iowa Catholic Conference at www.iowacatholicconference.org [ iowacatholicconference.org] and www.usccb.org/healthcare [ usccb.org] for more information)
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To say that "health care" is a natural right can lead to the belief that being healthy is a right.
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One frequently hears people saying that, though.
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Isn't it simply amazing that many of the same political people who claim health care as a "right" are opposed to the "right" to LIFE. 
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"One frequently hears people saying that, though."
Liberal arts should include philosophy. It is a shame that many of the major universities have been cutting back on their philosophy departments.
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