So Mr. Grooms complains (Boomer With Attitude: "Badly needed repairs," Jan. 24) that the United States is the only industrialized nation that doesn't treat healthcare as a "right"? Well, as tenuous as our constitutional rights have become, and as socialized as our healthcare system already is, what he complains about I consider a glimmer of hope.

To advocate socialized healthcare fails on two grounds: moral and economic. Its moral failure can be seen by comparing "a right to healthcare" to real rights, such as speech or religion. Such rights only protect my right to speak and act according to my own conscience; they impose nothing on others, except to refrain from using force to intervene. In contrast, false rights advocated by socialists require that others not only permit my actions, but actually fund them. In other words, advocating a "right to healthcare" is actually advocating the right to enslave.

Economically, the fatal flaw of socialized healthcare is its fantasy that the law of supply and demand can be ignored. To create an unlimited supply of healthcare requires an unlimited price, a burden that no class of taxpayers can sustain. As a result, socialized healthcare systems always turn to rationing. Does Mr. Grooms really want some bureaucrat to tell us that Granny must die because her cardiac needs are too low in priority? Or perhaps he will like this scenario: Your father has a tumor that will kill him within six months, so we will schedule him for surgery two years from Friday. Both situations happen under the Canadian and other nationalized healthcare services. And perhaps he should talk to a few veterans about their VA healthcare.

-- Christopher Cole, Huntersville