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Healthcare should be considered a right to all of a country's citizens

To your point that healthcare is a service: You are not wrong, but just because a service is required to guarantee a right, does not mean that right is void of its value. To guarantee the right to free speech, people employ the service of police officers to protect them when they may be attacked during a protest or a rally. To guarantee the right to privacy, people must use a service. On Internet traffic, for example, people will sometimes employ VPNs so that their traffic can not be intercepted. Just like any other service, people pay the owner of the VPN for its use. To your point about the car mechanic: No one is in danger of losing their life when they have a car that doesn't run. They are just put in an unfortunate situation that does not allow them to travel long distances. In a case of a heart attack, for example, that person will certainly die without proper healthcare. Or for a different example, someone with cancer will die, very slowly, if they do not receive the proper healthcare. It is not a question of if they will die, but when. Although they may require a service to live, that service is still put in place to guarantee their human rights. I don't see why a service is automatically disqualified from being a human right. What about the right to a fair and speedy trial? That seems like a service to me - it involves many people working, for monetary gain, as judges, police officers, and lawyers. Just because a lawyer may provide a "service" to its client, doesn't mean that client doesn't have the right to a lawyer. To your point about On Internet traffic, for example, people will sometimes employ VPNs so that their traffic can not be intercepted. Just like any other service, people pay the owner of the VPN for its use. To your point about the car mechanic: No one is in danger of losing their life when they have a car that doesn't run. They are just put in an unfortunate situation that does not allow them to travel long distances. In a case of a heart attack, for example, that person will certainly die without proper healthcare. Or for a different example, someone with cancer will die, very slowly, if they do not receive the proper healthcare. It is not a question of if they will die, but when. Although they may require a service to live, that service is still put in place to guarantee their human rights. I don't see why a service is automatically disqualified from being a human right. What about the right to a fair and speedy trial? That seems like a service to me - it involves many people working, for monetary gain, as judges, police officers, and lawyers. Just because a lawyer may provide a "service" to its client, doesn't mean that client doesn't have the right to a lawyer. To your point about universal healthcare being lower quality than private healthcare: We do not need to abolish the private healthcare system. I am not calling for the abolition of the private healthcare system, although I do despise it. I am calling for a healthcare system that guarantees healthcare to anyone who needs it. This would, of course, include mostly poor and middle class people. However, these people would still be free to pay for insurance or medical services on the private market should they so desire. I am trying to avoid giving an unfair advantage to the wealthy when it comes to healthcare, and a right to healthcare is the first step in doing so. A man should not go into crippling debt because he had a stroke. It is absurd that in a country as rich as America, people should be thrown into life ruining debt and bankruptcy because of an unforeseen medical cost. Let us assume that the quality of healthcare is vastly inferior in countries with a right to healthcare. Those countries with universal healthcare have overall healthier citizens that those countries who primarily use a private system. Those countries with universal healthcare have less people die each year from preventable and treatable conditions, injuries, and diseases. Those countries with universal healthcare have a less poverty, due in no small part to the burden of paying for obscenely expensive healthcare lifted off of the lower class. Would the quality be less in certain cases - perhaps, but overall, the health of the nation would improve drastically.