Rights are positive assertions.  You have the right to free speech until someone comes along and kicks your head in for saying something they don't like.  That's how rights work.

Maybe the correct frame isn't whether or not access to healthcare should or should not be legally codified as a right, but rather whether or not it's moral to deny someone access to care because they have been priced out of the market.  In this frame, we can easily note several things, not the least of which is that the existing market features prices that are well beyond marginal cost + markup.

Of course, there are other issues surrounding the healthcare debate that squarely fall into the realm of currently codified rights.  For instance, if I purchase health insurance in good faith, shouldn't I have the right to make a claim on it when I get sick without being summarily denied access to the fulfillment of the contract for which I have paid in good faith, such a denial of my contract also making it impossible for me to purchase insurance from any other provider in the future?  In this instance, we're talking about what my rights as a citizen contract holder should be.

However, I think that the word "right" in this case is really thrown out there to mean that it is demonstrably true that every other developed nation in the world is able to afford to provide access for all its citizens.  Given that we are many times more wealthy than any other nation on Earth, why do our citizens deserve any less, whether we term this a right or not?  If we look at it in this way, I think that we see that it is reasonable to consider it a right because access can indeed be universal.

In fact, this puts the lie to the complaint that healthcare is dependent on finite resources, which exclude it from being a right.  We assert rights to life, liberty and property.  All three of these can be said to be finite.  Life most certainly is.  Liberty, while somewhat more abstract, still has its limits.  Real property is absolutely finite.  Yet we make positive assertions to the rights of all three.

At the end of the day, this all that rights are.  The real debate is about the moral values that lead us to make these assertions.

Larry, something doesn't have to be "constitutional" to be a bona-fide right. In fact, I believe the U.S. Bill of Rights spells out that the rights it enumerates aren't an exclusive list.

I mentioned in a recent post the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Eleanor Roosevelt steered through the UN General Assembly. It states in part (Art. 25): "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care."

So the United States has for six decades recognized such a right on the international stage. What it hasn't done is ratify the covenant accepting that provision as a matter of international law. The handful of other holdouts includes Saudi Arabia and Burma.

The priority obviously has to be making health care accessible to all, not signing on to some treaty that pays lip service to the concept. But I'm with Eleanor here: medical care is a basic human right, just like education. Every government has to define the limits of what it can provide, and the method of doing so. But all the world's citizens are owed access to a working health-care system.