Another quick response to Rick ...

... but not from me.  Rather, from the same friend of MOJ whose comments I posted immediately below.  The reader is responding to Rick's most recent post (i.e., to Rick's "quick response to Michael").

Even here, I’m inclined to split some differences.  A thoughtful person could take the idea of a positive right to health care, as against the government, to provide much of the normative foundation, and some degree of guidance, for the more policy oriented debate about how best to address health care policy issues.

But I also think we can all agree that at some unspecified level of policy detail, focusing too intently on the idea of a right becomes preemptive and, on balance, unhelpful.  Unless one seriously wants to argue that someone’s right to health care itself takes some very precise form, and not some other slightly different form, under all the circumstances, including aggregate wealth, technological development, etc., that Rick mentions.  But it’s hard to believe that any such highly specified vision of the implementation or “cashing out” of the right really underlies the most genuinely moving and inspiring discussions of the right in question.