An Open Response to BYU Prof Randy Bott

BYU religion professor Randy Bott has an editorial in BYU’s Daily Universe this week. He asks: What is a right?

His answer: Whatever it is, it isn’t health care.

Professor Bott begins by confessing that he takes a “narrow view of ‘rights.’”[1] According to Bott, “a ‘right’ is something that is granted mortals by God.” Unfortunately, that is not a very helpful definition. What rights, specifically, does God grant? (And which does he not?)

Professor Bott never expressly states that he is addressing the health care debate. In fact, he goes out of his way to avoid politics: “I will let others argue the political definitions and ramifications,” he says. But I don’t know how to interpret his second paragraph as anything but a statement on the health care debate. He quotes former LDS Church president Joseph F. Smith as follows:

Men and women ought not to be willing to receive charity unless they are compelled to do so to keep from suffering ... It is a bad thing for men to think the world owes them a living, and all they have to do is to beg or steal to get it. When it comes to this class of people I am very much of the mind expressed once by Dr. Johnson, when a beggar came to him and asked alms and insisted that the doctor should be generous in helping him, “for,” said he, “doctor, you know that I must live.” But the doctor said, “I don’t see the least necessity for it.” When a man becomes a parasite, living upon the charity of his friends, I confess it is hard to see the necessity for him to live. He is no good to anyone. I speak this way only of such as are able-bodied, such as have their faculties and can devote these to some industry, to some useful labor. I don’t refer to the cripple, to those who are enfeebled by age, because I look at them in an entirely different light; there is a necessity for them to live, and there is a necessity for us to assist such, but there is no great need in this world for men and women who are able to work and will not work” (Conference Report April 1898, pp 48-49).

I’m going to set aside the issue of whether President Smith’s anecdote conforms with the scriptural injunctions to “not suffer that the beggar putteth up his petition to you in vain, and turn him out to perish,” and to refrain from saying that “[t]he man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him of my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishments are just” (Mosiah 4:16-17). I’m also going to disregard the presumptuous inference that Dr. Johnson, President Smith, Randy Bott, me, or any other fallible human being is qualified to judge who the “parasites” are.

While it’s simply implausible to interpret Professor Bott’s remarks as referring to anything but the health care debate[2], it appears that his understanding of it is rather uninformed. Contrary to his assertion, the proposed health care reforms would not create a legal right to health care in the same sense that one has a right to freedom of speech, to marry, to practice one’s religion, and so forth. Rather, the “rights” rhetoric reflects the moral view that people—hard-working people—should not have to lose their home or enter bankruptcy in order to receive life-saving treatments, but should be able to purchase affordable and reliable health insurance.

Randy Bott’s “sweat of the brow” argument is particularly off-base in the health care debate. Even under our current health care system, when someone contracts a serious illness, the cost of his treatment frequently exceeds the amount of money that he has paid into the system. (That’s the whole point of insurance: to guard against unexpected, exorbitant expenses that one cannot pay for out-of-pocket.) In other words, the patient receives more than the “sweat of his brow” would justify, thanks to the subsidies of other policy holders—the sweat of their brows, so to speak. Unfortunately, however, for each dollar of “sweat” that we pay into these companies, a significant portion is put toward lining executives’ pockets or covering inefficient administrative expenses, many of which are associated with a fundamentally antisocial activity: figuring out how to deny insurance claims.

Bott’s argument is misguided for another reason: those who are currently uninsured, those who have insurance but are not adequately covered, and those who are insured but cannot afford their premiums and copays, are not “parasites.” They are not “idle” people who believe that they are “entitled to certain privileges” or that “the world owes [them] a living.” In large part, they are ordinary, hard-working Americans who nonetheless are suffering under the weight of a broken system.[3] The problem is simply that no matter how hard they work, it will never be enough. Health care premiums are rising several times faster than wages.

Professor Bott apparently does not appreciate that, as a result of the health care system’s inefficiencies, many have already been forced to accept his solution: “expecting little or nothing.” (His words.)[4]

But this isn’t about politics, remember. As Professor Bott reminds us, it’s about our souls: “I marvel that so many who fought so valiantly in the war in the pre-earth life for the privilege of ‘work[ing] out your own salvation with fear and trembling’ (see Philippians 2:12) seem so willing to turn over to the government or anyone else the growth that come from fulfilling God’s program of growth toward exaltation through work.”

Professor Bott misses the point. The problem is that our health care system already has too much “fear and trembling.” We need less—not more—suffering.

---

[1] The scare quotes on “right” are an apparent necessity. Four out of the six times Bott uses the word, he does so with unnecessary quotation marks.

[2] The other current focal point of rights rhetoric is the LGBT movement. For some reason, I doubt that Bott would apply his “sweat of the brow,” you-get-what-you-earn approach in that context. God knows the LGBT community has worked hard to secure equal rights.

[3] Professor Bott apparently anticipated this argument, and responds as follows: “How restricting and debilitating the belief that you are a helpless puppet being yanked around by some evil puppeteer and strictly at the mercy of a cruel, uncaring world.”

[4] Did Professor Bott advise the GOP on its alternative health care proposal?