Health Insurance is a Responsibility, Or is it a Right?

The presidential debate in Nashville, TN was boring and weirdly aggressive. When health insurance and health care was brought up, both candidates had quite different and sometimes interesting things to verbalize.

The moderator of the debate, Tom Brokaw of NBC News, asked each candidate whether they thought health care (and presumably health insurance) was a right, privilege, or a responsibility. Republican candidate John McCain, a U.S. Senator from Arizona, went first. Senator McCain said that health care was a responsibility.

This was not a surprising response, seeing as McCain's reform plan includes giving the consumer more health care options (like the individual health insurance tax credit) and encouraging more competition in the private health insurance market (by permitting Americans to buy plans across state lines.)

Senator Barack Obama, the Democrat from Illinois, gave a different answer. Senator Obama answered that health care was a right. It's consistent response from the Democratic candidate, as he believes that all Americans should have health insurance and access to health care. While he doesn't support or propose a universal health care mandate, he likes the idea of universal coverage.

So the two views we have here are that Senator McCain thinks health care should be up to the consumer. In other words, we should be responsible for our own health care and insurance. Our spin on this belief is that McCain thinks of health care as a commodity. The other view is that Obama thinks otherwise, that health care is a intrinsic right. His critics wonder if this is a ploy to universal health care.