It’s time to guarantee healthcare to all Americans as a human right

These things are absolutely considered human rights everywhere in the modern world... except the United States.

Only in the US would a new word be needed, because Americans can't wrap their heads around the premise of human life having value beyond its transactional value under capitalism, or of governments having any kind of social obligation to provide for the welfare of their citizens.

Saying we as a society need to create bills, taxes and infrastructure to guarantee these things is equivalent to considering them rights. That's what rights are - things governments have to allow and provide for. Just like the right to keep and bear arms requires accepting gun violence, more work for EMTs and law enforcement, legal infrastructure and any number of negative societal costs. But Americans are willing to tolerate mass shootings becoming so commonplace you can't even remember the latest one because shooting people is as fundamental to Americans as the law of gravity, it's a right granted by God, it just is.

Yet feeding people? Housing people? Access to medical care? Education? Women can't even get an abortion in the case of rape, incest or fetal death in nearly a dozen states, because even bodily autonomy and privacy are up for grabs now. Suggest that Americans deserve any of these things and a lot of them get nervous and reach for their revolvers. But Americans should want these things. The richest country in the world should want to be willing to pay the cost of a society worth living in. We should want our government to be effective at something more than violence. The country that built Hoover Dam and created the Manhattan Project and put a man on the moon should be eager to put resources towards improving the quality of life all of its citizens.

But we aren't willing, and the implication that we need new language to even discuss it is depressing as hell.

Negative rights are things you're entitled to do.

Positive rights are what you're entitled to.

I’m curious about this. My response to this statement is “So what?”

Aside from the implicit assumption that “entire generations of people” would never bother to learn how society functions if the word “right” were used in a more relaxed sense when it comes to healthcare, what harm comes to society if citizens are comfortable considering healthcare to be a right?

I use the phrase “what harm comes” in the present tense because many people that live in countries with socialized medicine happily call healthcare a right. What harm are they undergoing presently?

It then says Russia is an oligarchy and that there's "no real difference" between it and the U.S. That's an insane claim.

What you or the op ed would need to do is to demonstrate evidence of specific things people want that aren't being done and why they're not being done, with the reason why tied to some oligarchic repression of the masses.

I don't know of a single thing that comes close to that in the U.S. The fact is that the country is bitterly divided, and the evidence of that division (and a sign that it is indeed a democracy -- otherwise, the ruling oligarchy would just do want it wants despite the divisions) is gridlock. Healthcare is complicated, and no one wants their taxes to go up. Even still, the Affordable Care Act passed (and then people tried to repeal it over and over and are probably still trying to). The rich have influence everywhere, even in China, but that's the last thing steering U.S. policy. You have elites like Zuckerberg dragged out before Congress and people like Shkreli imprisoned.