EDITORIAL - One of the biggest questions of the day is health care - why are people being denied this most basic human right, what to do about those who cannot afford it, why are so many uninsured in this greatest nation on Earth, why are costs skyrocketing, and not if, but when, should we turn over health care to our federal nanny. It makes for tragic reading; but, is that because we are in such a tragic state, or could it be because the easiest way to pull off the single greatest income and power grab by the federal government in our nation's history might require that we all buy into the tragedy, hook, line and sinker? With all things political aided and abetted by the media, I go with the latter, but let's see what we are being fed, and then ask some questions.

The first question is central to the entire debate - is health care a right? Dr. Walter Williams wrote a wonderful article asking this very question, and the column details quite well what a right is, and why health care is not one.

To paraphrase, a right is something we all enjoy equally, and the exercising of that right does not depend on or infringe upon the rights of someone else. As Dr. Williams points out, the right to speech does not impose upon anyone else. I can speak freely without it costing anyone anything. Health care, however, has a cost, and if I do not shoulder it, someone else must. The bottom line is if one person must pay for the benefit, while another person receives that benefit, it is not a right, but an entitlement. If you do a word search within the US Constitution, the word "entitlement" does not appear a single time. So how is this new "right" being conjured from the ether?

The most likely source for the "right" to health care stems from the comparison to other industrialized nations who have socialized health care for their citizens. The rationale here is that because the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Canada have national health care, then it must be a right, and our country is woefully behind the enlightenment curve, as we are so primitive to still leave it to the free market - mostly. If those nations do it, the logic goes, then why don't we?

Does a government-declared "right" make it truly a right, or have they beaten us down so much that we now implicitly classify entitlements as rights, and we must never, ever look behind the curtain at whose freedoms we abridge to pay for these "rights" that we conjure? No, the government is trying to sell an entitlement, and they use the Orwellian speech of other nations to make you feel guilty, as if by disagreeing with them, you would deny someone this fundamental liberty.

Paint it with whatever sympathetic brush necessary, but that will not change the nature of income redistribution by government order. The socialized health care proponent now steps in and may actually stipulate to health care being an entitlement, and Canada, the UK, France and Germany all manage to have that entitlement, so why don't we?

In two words or less, the answer to that is "tax burden." Examining the tax burden of the US in comparison to Canada, UK, France and Germany is a fine way to illuminate the concept of entitlement. Going back to the Dr. Williams article, the government can only spend what money they receive. Government revenue is taxes. The total tax burden of the United States in relation to the total income is roughly 32%. The average tax burden of the UK is 42%, Canada is 47%, Germany is 50.7% and France is 51%.

So these countries all have "free" health care, but with all of them having lower percentages of defense spending versus GDP than the United States, it would appear that free health care costs quite a bit, or at least contributes more to tax burdens that either approach or exceed more than half the national income. Not surprisingly, all of the countries listed have GDP growth that averages lower than the US almost every single year. Now I am typically the first one to ask whether a set of statistics is corollary being confused with causation, so for this moment, I will say that the coincidence of industrialized nations that have socialized health care and far higher national tax burdens than the US is not entirely caused by what their health care costs, but I am pretty sure it contributes to those taxes.

At this point, it is fair to say that free health care is an entitlement, it is not free, and it will increase the total tax burden of the United States, thus costing America more in the form of taxes. I have read many discussions, editorials, opinions, and even scholarly articles from the proponents' side that all boil down to "so what, we'll just shift that burden onto the rich, who have more than enough to pay for it." That isn't a denial that free health care is an entitlement, but rather a sophomoric justification for the cost. Because the government, aided and abetted by their allies in the media, are attempting a rather massive expansion, they deflect the nature of the issue by describing how the people, whom they have made you loathe and be jealous of, will be forced to pay for the fact that there are little children in this world without a decent PPO Option C in-network health plan. The part left out, of course, is the cost to you, and if it is mentioned, it will be couched in terms of "yes, but that evil rich person over yonder is paying more, so that should make it all better."

Such standard class warfare rhetoric being employed at every possible turn should be expected, since it has proved effective in the past, starting with the 16th Amendment and growing ever since. These occasional power grabs by the government come with a price tag, and like good sales folk, our government gives you a spoonful of molasses to help swallow the snake oil.

That leads to the next set of questions for part two of this article - how much does "free" cost, and who gets to pay?