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You make this distinction as if it's obvious, but I'm not sure it is. If an 80 year old is blind, deaf, arthritic, has a gimpy knee, and then breaks his leg, what healthcare is he owed in our perfect society? Are we just going to fix his leg, and tell him, 'Rejoice! We have preserved your miniscule ability to pursue happiness'? Do we fix him back to the physical and mental condition of an athletic 18 year old as a kind of human baseline? Do we immediately fix any negative physical/mental damage as he's growing up, preventing him from becoming old and blind, but ignore the fact that he's genetically stupid and inclined to depressive melancholy?
That's exactly what I'm getting at. Whether your demands require actual magic or not depends strongly on exactly how you're going to define healthcare. If your proposition is 'in an ideal world, we should not refuse to fix people's obvious ailments as long as it doesn't cost us any meaningful amount of money or time to do so' then I'm right there with you, but you seemed to be aiming at a much more far-reaching proposal. I suppose even this limited proposal rules out darwinian 'the weak should perish to strengthen society' philosophies, if that's what you're going for?
I have quarantined this in a separate section because it would derail the conversation:
Quite so. How can we have an inalienable right (an absolute moral guarantee) not to be murdered if it happens all the time? Say that murdering people is immoral all you like, and I will agree with you. But I think lots of things are immoral: do I have an inalienable right not to be cheated on by my wife? To not have my colleagues speak languages I don't understand in the office? Is a black mark placed in the book of Mankind every time these things happen? From where I'm standing, you're using grandiose moral claims about the nature of the universe to back up your personal preference about how much it should cost to go to the doctor. This is exactly why the concept of 'rights' in last half-century has become so fraught: because everyone asserts their personal moral code as if it is an inalienable fact of the universe that never has to be compromised upon (how 'rights' is usually used in conversation and rhetoric).
As far as I'm concerned, the Declaration of Independence was written by revolutionaries high on their own supply: a fairly transparent attempt to claim that not wanting to repay the Crown for the money that was spent protecting them from hostile nations was a grand moral project, as if nobody else had ever thought that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were pretty nice as long as they didn't get in the way of anything more important. And indeed I note that the US government is quite happy to kill people, imprison them, or otherwise inhibit their pursuit of happiness in order to achieve goals that it thinks are more important.
Addendum: For example, even the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not obviously without complexity. If you believe, as I do, that what people (those flawed beings) do with their time is not necessarily what will make them happy in the long term, it seems entirely possible to deprive them of some of their liberty to ensure their right to pursue happiness. So I find it hard to see these three things as inalienable gifts I have been given by my creator. I am much more comfortable with the inalienable duty to Do Your Best, Do What I Told You To Do, and Don't Fuck It Up.
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