Part 5: Health care — a right?

Editor's note: This is the fifth in a five-part series.

Contrary to popular belief and Utah's conservative political bent, an overwhelming majority of Utahns consider having access to basic health care as much a right of citizenship as access to a basic education.

More than 80 percent of Utahns said in a new Deseret News/KSL-TV survey that basic care is a right — 59 percent said definitely, while 22 percent said probably. Only 16 percent said it definitely or probably isn't a right.

"This kind of survey question is rare — I don't know of another one — and the results come as a bit of a shock," said Art Caplan, a bioethics pioneer who is keeping close tabs on the course of health-care reform nationwide. "To my eye (the results) clearly indicate there is a lot of sentiment for change in health care among Utahns," said Caplan, who is currently the most widely cited ethics expert by health-care reformers who are figuring out not just what to do but what is the right thing to do.

"Whether health care is a right is the root question of this whole debate, but no one's really talking about it," Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Deseret News.

Putting the question of basic health-care access on the same footing as access to a basic education "puts it in the correct context," he said. "Is having a healthy society as important to us as having an educated one? This is the heart of the reform debate. This is the toughest public policy question our era will face, and it all comes down to this one moral question."

Health care simply isn't a right, never was and never will be, from the framers of the Constitution to today's society that sprang from it, Sen. Orrin Hatch told the Deseret News editorial board recently.

"Framing it as a moral question is simply wrong because health care does not occur naturally and is not self-evident," said Hatch, a member of the Senate Finance Committee who voted Tuesday against advancing a health-care reform bill for floor debate. The committee approved the bill, however.

"It's a choice. It's the freedom of health care and a kind of personal medical liberty," Hatch added.

Making care a right doesn't mean it's a government entitlement, as it is often regarded by conservatives, Caplan said. "No one is saying anything must happen at all. But if we as a society could just agree on just that much in this debate, a lot of the dissonance surrounding reform would dissipate and we could clarify exactly what reform ought to be."