The appeal of the public option then, is it essentially deputizes hospitals as public agents, who work to protect our options, as do the police and firemen. They all have the same signals, its not a particularly far grasp, and they are all intuitively “rights.”

In any case, the majority of the world has moved to some form of public health care, and the most prosperous companies in the world are now located in those companies. If the US does not adopt public health care, then the brightest and most competent people are going to move to those countries. After all, why locate a company in a country where you have to pay for health care for your employees, when you can easily locate it in one of the many countries where it is paid for through taxes. It’s simply more efficient.

As far as the morality goes, no civilized person would tolerate denying life-saving care to someone who is ill, and no one who has studied human history or economics would ever claim, with a straight face, that all people end up rich and that there is no poverty in the world.

I feel sorry for the people who don’t support public and citizen-based health care. They are not going to be able to afford to avail themselves of the advantages of modern health technology, which is extremely expensive. But then, evolution will come into play. These people will die, and eventually everyone will be descended from those intelligent to understand modern finance.

Another issue is that the libertarians and others who oppose modern health care, apparently do not believe in democracy. You certainly are entitled to your opinion, but you definitely are a small minority at this point. If you believe in democracy you have to accept the decision of the majority, which is to move away from employer-based care to citizen-based systems.

An individual has a right not to be left to suffer from a disease, injury, or condition when there is sufficient knowledge and materiel available to alleviate that suffering.

That sounds about half-way between a negative and a positive right to me.

Naturally someone has to have this knowledge and provide this materiel in addition to administering the actual care to apply them. In my understanding this is where the economic question comes in: society should find a way to reward this behaviour above and beyond any philanthropic gratification the provider feels. In fact given that the knowledge and materials involved might be hard-won then society should probably reward the provider quite well. Still I don’t think there’s much point in getting this secondary economic question mixed up with the first one, which is how to describe a “right to health care”.