Moths: Is health care a right? You bet it is.

In a recent letter, Gordon Miller takes issue with Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, Martha Laning, who said, “People have the right to health care” (“Who pays? We do,” Letters, Oct. 23).

Miller says this is not the case. If he means some absolute or God-given right, he is correct. We don’t have the right to health care. Nor to a lawyer, or a fair trial. Nor to worship as we please. Nor to vote, much less to protest against the government. We don’t have the right to walk down the street without getting mugged, raped or murdered.

There is no such thing as an absolute or God-given right. We only have the rights that we agree to bestow on everyone through our laws.

As it turns out, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act dictates that no one with an acute condition requiring urgent treatment may be turned away from any health care facility that is capable of providing that treatment. So, according to our laws, people do have a right to health care (at least emergency care).

Yes, of course, we do have to pay for it. But we’re willing to do that, because of all of the things that we could possibly spend money on, nothing is more important than health care. Certainly not when you’re having a heart attack. Or appendicitis. Or a complicated delivery. Or a leaking abdominal aortic aneurysm. Or when you rupture your middle meningeal artery in a car accident.

Even if you just have a small speck of metal stuck to the surface of your eyeball, while you’re waiting for the doctor to come in and get that thing out of there, there’s nothing more important than health care.

If, in their astonishing recklessness, greed and shortsightedness, our leaders do away with EMTALA and any similar laws, including some of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, I will need Miller to come to work with me to help me decide which patients with any of the above conditions I should start turning away from my emergency room.

Bruce Moths is a physician who lives in New Berlin.