Health care rights and responsibilities.

• Author: Suderman, Peter
• Position: Follow-Up

What happens when health care is thought to be a fundamental right? That's the question at the heart of David Kelley's January 1994 reason story, "The Rights Angle." Kelley's piece examined the large-scale health-care overhaul proposed under President Bill Clinton. Kelley came away worried.

The "plan in its present form involves a massive increase in government control over physicians, insurers, employers, and--last but certainly not least--the patients who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of the plan," he wrote. "Most people will be forced to obtain their health insurance through purchasing cooperatives: government-backed monopolies that collect payments from consumers and set the terms on which medical providers can offer their services." Meanwhile, health providers will "be prohibited from dealing with patients directly," forced instead to work through highly regulated cooperatives--essentially government-run middlemen.

Kelley argued that this upending of the health system was fundamentally the result of a single assumption--"that if people have medical needs which are not being met, it is society's responsibility to meet them."

The Clinton health plan didn't pass. But almost two decades later, under a different Democratic president, another large-scale health policy overhaul did.

For the most part, the debate over ObamaCare didn't explicitly deal with "the rights angle." ObamaCare's mandate was often...