Free healthcare is a human right

The argument

The argument proceeds from the status of health as a precondition for everything else to a claim about what governments are obliged to provide. Without good health, we cannot survive. Health is not one good among others that a person might trade against the rest; it is the condition on which the enjoyment of any other good depends. Someone who is seriously ill cannot work, learn, participate, or exercise any of the freedoms a society may formally guarantee them. Rights that presuppose a functioning person are worth little to a person who has been denied the means of remaining one. From this, proponents hold that we all have the right to enjoy good health. But a right to health that does not extend to the means of securing it is a right in name only, since nobody can treat their own illness. The right therefore has to reach the care itself, which is why free healthcare should be a basic right granted to all rather than a service distributed according to ability to pay. This is not presented as a novel claim. The right to free healthcare was laid out clearly in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the World Health Assembly Resolution, which places it among the entitlements the international community has already recognised rather than among contested proposals. What follows is an obligation rather than an aspiration. If healthcare is a basic necessity for survival on this earth and a recognised right, the government has the obligation to provide healthcare free at the point of use, since any charge levied at that point is a condition placed on a right that is not supposed to carry conditions.

Context

The right to good health is a basic human right. Human rights should be afforded to the public for free. It would be absurd to charge someone for the air they breathe, so why should we charge for healthcare?

Premises

Counter-arguments

Just because we need something to survive doesn’t mean it should be free. We don’t charge for air, but we do charge for water and food. These are necessary for basic survival. They are not luxuries. But they cost money to produce, therefore, someone has to pay. That someone should be the person that benefits from it; the consumer.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Not everything necessary to human existence is provided for free.