@birdland33, I agree completely, and I’ve said exactly the same thing for years: Rights are things that you have by virtue of being alive; no one has to give or pay for anything for you. Goods are things that are essential to live or nice to have, but things that someone has to make, mine, farm, produce, manufacture or in some other way provide for you—and which must be paid for.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a government providing goods, as long as we identify them as such. Governments provide schools, roads, police and fire protection, a system of laws and courts to adjudicate them. Those are all public goods. (We can and do differ on the balance between which “essential goods” should be provided by government and which by private enterprise or individuals for themselves. But we recognize most public goods as just that.)
Even food, which is more essential to our lives than health care is left mainly to private enterprise and individuals. You can avoid going to doctors for years and years; skip meals for a week and you’ll be in dire straits. If we ever adopt the lunatic idea that “food is a right”, then heaven help us if we also determine that it’s “too important to be left to the market” to provide. (I agree that we do provide government food aid to some individuals all the time and to some parts of the country as disaster relief. I’m talking about “most of us, most of the time”.)
If we adopt the idea that health care is a “right”, then it follows that everyone should have health care—regardless of whether they do anything to earn it or pay for it in any way. A “right” can’t be withheld.
As long as we recognize that health care is a public good and is not a right, then I have no problem with discussing how much or how little government should be involved. (I generally argue against “government issue” from the pragmatic standpoint that government generally fucks up everything it touches.) We live in a republican democracy, more or less, so I have to go along with the majority rule on this, but I do try to help educate the fence-sitters that, “gosh, aren’t supermarkets cool, compared to the way the Soviet Union used to ‘provide’ for its citizens?”