The following is a response I wrote on Facebook to this video, or more specifically just the first 13 seconds of it, because that's as far as I could get before I lost my ability to take him seriously...
Yes, I would absolutely and intensely argue that Rand Paul's "healthcare as human right = slavery" argument is not only wrong, it is pure grade-A bullshit. I know some libertarians, and they as individuals don't seem like selfish bastards utterly devoid of empathy or basic human decency, but boy, the standard libertarian arguments sure make them sound like they are.
Nobody I've ever heard who wants to treat healthcare as a basic human right says that doctors shouldn't be paid. Nobody says that doctors should be forced to work for free. Education is treated in America as a basic right that everyone has access to, and yet we don't force teachers to work for free, we don't come to their homes and conscript them. No one's saying that doctors should be enslaved, they're just saying that there should be a model in place where the payment for these services need not always come from the victim of the medical issue, because that person will not always have the ability to pay, but they should still have the ability to receive treatment (because healthcare is a basic human right).
That might mean that the government regulates how much hospitals or pharmaceutical companies can charge for goods and services; it might be that people in the medical industry can't make as much PROFIT, but it doesn't (in any model I've ever heard of) mean that physicians would be forced to work for free. So when Rand Paul says "that means you believe in slavery," what I hear him saying is, "if I'm not making six figures a year, then I might as well be out on a plantation getting whipped if I don't work hard enough." That's why I say that their arguments make them sound like they lack empathy or basic human decency. The idea of universal healthcare and slavery are not even remotely similar.
