Our Irrelevant Right to Health Care

Abstract

From the advance publicity for Mortal Peril: Our Inalienable Right to Healthcare?, one might suppose the book would offer a closely reasoned argument for a market-based health care system with minimum government involvement and maximum deference to individual autonomy. While Epstein does advocate such a system, he fails to provide the reasoned argument. The book actually presents a collection of topics that seem to have been chosen because Epstein has strong views about them, not because taken together they yield a coherent view of health policy. To make matters worse, the discussion of each topic is a confusing mixture of broad generalizations, often unsupported by argument or data, and narrow analyses of specific laws, court cases, and regulations.