Letter: Healthcare a right, not a privilege

Editor,

What gives a doctor the right to decide who gets to live and who gets to die?

Here’s a clue: All these doctors who currently are not taking patients for life-saving clinical trials (such as wonderfully effective immunotherapy drugs for cancer) because their regular patients do pay as usual, but the patients in the trial do not. And so many American terminal cancer patients cannot find a doctor to perform said experimental therapy, and die.

Here’s another clue: All these American doctors who do not accept Medicare or Medicaid, and so the poor and desperate among us have little or no access to a doctor in timely fashion, and so die off, whereas the rich get to live another day.

The answer should be: Nothing gives the doctor such a right, such power, the right to play God as some doctors arrogantly claim they are doing.

But the answer is: What gives a doctor this unwarranted and dangerous right is capitalism.

This is why it is so important to enshrine into nationwide law that health care is a right, because so many times it comes down to the right to life, as in being kept alive by a socialist delivery system that takes the profit out of doctoring.

Arun Ahuja

UNM student