Last week’s health-care summit left a large impression, despite having largely failed in achieving its original goal. Though the summit was meant to provide both sides with a very public opportunity to express their opinions, it was recognized by pundits on both ends of the political spectrum as more of a theatrical stunt. However, more importantly, the summit resurrected the debate on whether or not health care should be a right.

The left seems to have this goal in mind. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, made an important statement to that effect in January: “What this bill does is we finally take that step. As our leader said earlier, we take that step from health care as a privilege to health care as an inalienable right of every single American citizen.”

The above statement highlights two points: one, that a goal of the legislation should be to create the right to health care in the United States, and two, that there currently is no such right. Many wonder why health care is not a right when it seems very basic to most of us. Such beliefs about health care, however, do not line up with those rights as set forth at the founding of America.

The Declaration of Independence states the principles upon which revolution was predicated, specifically the belief that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The Bill of Rights, consequently, was geared toward restricting government and protecting those rights as possessed by individuals. Essentially, this asserted that the government has no authority to interfere with rights given to man by God.

Such views were eventually challenged. Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan that the ideal state was one in which the government gave the people rights in order to protect them from chaos and hardship, but he also suggested that the state should replace the role of God in society by providing material comforts for the people.

Ideas like these slowly gained traction elsewhere in the world, but were not observed in the United States until the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt in particular proposed in his 1944 State of the Union address a second bill of rights that included the right to a home, a job, education, recreation, protection from unfair competition or monopolies and adequate medical care.

The critical thought process behind these moves can be summarized by statements made by Barack Obama on WBEZ-FM radio on Jan. 18, 2001: “the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted.” Unlike the original bill of rights, the second bill of rights was not designed to protect a citizen’s basic rights from the government, but rather to create new ones that would actually require government intervention in order to guarantee them.

The ideas behind the latter run contrary to the original philosophy of the United States that man possesses his own rights. Given those basic rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, other comforts such as health care can be safely sought after. The creation of “new rights,” however, usurps the authority of man in this process.

Not only does the government assume the duty of God by assigning new rights to man, following the Founders’ logic, but it must then assume the duty of guaranteeing them as well. Such “rights” would necessarily and inevitably increase the role that government has in an individual’s life in order to balance those new rights against his or her other inalienable rights — and in doing so, fundamentally alienate them.

This moves away from a society directed by the individual and the community to a society directed by the government, exactly what Thomas Jefferson and so many other Founders sought to avoid.

Health-care reform in its current state is not a movement to increase insurance coverage, though its external viewpoint may seem to suggest that goal. At its most basic, it is a movement toward the creation of the false right to health care and a massive government invasion into private life. Voters have recognized this, and almost all public opinion polls demonstrate a round rejection of Democrats’ proposals as a result. As the health-care summit demonstrated, Republican pundits have a number of anti-government-interventionist ideas that could help with insurance reform as well as cost reduction — that could easily replace the progressive program proposed by Democrats.

Whether or not alternative reform proposals will actually be considered is a whole separate issue altogether. But hopefully, Congress will remember that any proposed reforms must uphold, not infringe upon, our inalienable rights.

David Giffin is a College senior from Charleston, Ill.