National Healthcare in Your Opinion,

¶ … National Healthcare

In your opinion, is health care for United States citizens a right or a privilege?

National healthcare for American citizens is not a fundamental right in the sense of other constitutional rights or recognized rights of national citizenship. On the other hand, quality healthcare is not a privilege either, in that - unlike privileges such as a license to operate a motor vehicle on public roads - access to healthcare is not regulated or restricted by the government; healthcare, like any other commodity, is available to anyone who can afford its price.

However, the cost of healthcare increased so much in the last decades of the 20th century that record numbers of Americans can afford neither long-term health insurance nor the costs of acute medical treatments, which must be borne by healthcare institutions themselves, as well as by all Americans who do pay for health insurance, because premium costs reflect the high price of medical care and materials priced by providers to recoup some of the costs of their services to the uninsured and underinsured individuals to whom they must furnish essential care regardless of their ability to pay for those services.