[mattmaroon]

You have the right to live as long as you want to, you just don’t have the right to make me pay for it. Those are two very different things, both ethically and practically. (I am, as I said, pro public health care anyway.)

You are correct that police and attorneys for the indigent are a couple positive rights. I didn’t mean we don’t have any. We just don’t have a culture of them.

[mattmaroon]

Put another way, something that didn’t even exist 100 yrs ago can’t be framed as a right. Saying I have a right to an iPhone is the same as saying I have a right to health insurance.

[StockHuman]

The right to a gadget and the right to health are incomparable on a number of levels. Even besides that, women’s suffrage is less than a century old in most places, and just about in the rest. Gay rights are even younger. Health, women and gays have all existed since the dawn of time; the “when” in codifying rights has never really correlated with historical prevalence, only societal development.