[update below] British physician Theodore Dalrymple weighs in on government healthcare and “the right to health care” in a new Wall Street Journal piece. A few choice passages:

Where does the right to health e from? Did it exist in, say, 250 B.C., or in A.D. 1750? If it did, how was it that our ancestors, who were no less intelligent than we, pletely to notice it?

…

When the supposed right to health care is widely recognized, as in the United Kingdom, it tends to reduce moral imagination. Whenever I deny the existence of a right to health care to a Briton who asserts it, he replies, “So you think it is all right for people to be left to die in the street?”

When I then ask my interlocutor whether he can think of any reason why people should not be left to die in the street, other than that they have a right to health care, he is generally reduced to silence. He cannot think of one.

…

Not coincidentally, the U.K. is by far the most unpleasant country in which to be ill in the Western world. Even Greeks living in Britain return home for medical treatment if they are physically able to do so.

The government-run health-care system—which in the U.K. is believed to be the necessary institutional corollary to an inalienable right to health care—has pauperized the entire population. This is not to say that in every last case the treatment is bad: A pauper may be well or badly treated, according to the inclination, temperament and abilities of those providing the treatment. But a pauper must accept what he is given.

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After 60 years of universal health care, free at the point of usage and funded by taxation, inequalities between the richest and poorest sections of the population have not been reduced. But Britain does have the dirtiest, most broken-down hospitals in Europe.

[update] Also, later today we’ll be posting the first part of a conversation our multimedia manager, Marc Vander Maas, had with Kevin Schmiesing and physician Donald Condit on healthcare reform. Schmiesing is an Acton research fellow and has posted regularly on health care topics here on the PowerBlog. Condit is the author of Acton’s new monograph, A Prescription for Health Care Reform.