So, how's that swine flu treatin' ya? (UPDATED)

(UPDATE #1): Comment of the Day

In response to B-Daddy’s post on the profit motive in healthcare which we link to below, Foxfier said the following:

Thing that annoys the CRUD out of me in the "healthcare is a right" argument:
how the heck do YOU have a right to SOMEONE ELSE'S work?

She claims the idea for that came from either us or B-Daddy so perhaps we will have to give B-Daddy credit because we never really looked at health care as a right in those terms before and Foxfier is spot-on.

Once you start declaring goods and services as rights, you are automatically putting an imposition on someone’s livelihood.

People will enter the medical field for a variety of reasons to varying degrees. But we guarantee you that if after 8 years of medical school and the incumbent expenses and then the years of internships and residencies after that; if there is not a big ol’ house in the hills and several nice cars in the driveway at the end of that tunnel, you are going to see a whole lot less doctors and the ones you will see, will be of inferior quality. Nothing personal, just another immutable fact of economics.

(here endeth the update)

For all the talk about rising costs, a big part of the reason that health care is consuming a larger share of spending is that we have chosen this through a somewhat free-market process. We spend less on other things, like food and clothing, because they don't require high tech, and more on something we care about, like surviving swine flu. How is this bad?

The profit motive. It’s something statists simply refuse to acknowledge. Try capping reimbursements to doctors or prices on pharmaseuticals and watch both services and advancements in medical technology evaporate like water on asphalt in the middle of August. That’s not disinformation. That’s an immuatable law of economics. B-Daddy has more here.