Health Insurance = Citizenship?

Upon reading The Inactivity Principle, Gerard Magliocca's post on the Concurring Opinions blog, the debate with myself regarding the legitimacy of a "mandate" forcing citizens to acquire Health Insurance was reignited. A very novel issue raised by this post was truly thought provoking: "Is health care a core element of citizenship?"
Magliocca asks if forcing citizens to purchase Health Insurance is similar enough to "drafting" citizens into jury duty or military service. Since the latter two activities are "core elements of citzenship," the government may legitimately force citizens to participate. Should Health Care be considered in the same vein?

I believe the key difference between military and jury duties and a health insurance mandate is in the case of the first two, the government is drafting you into ACTION, and they PAY YOU for your services. A health insurance mandate simply forces a private individual to pay a private corporation. How can this be Constitutional?

Well, one could argue that governments already "force" us to pay private, for-profit insurance companies before we are able to register our automobiles (which we have to do) if we want to drive. Again, the government is not forcing anyone to drive (and driving is a privilege, not a right). It seems in the case of the Health Insurance mandate, the government really is infringing on my liberty to NOT purchase something I do not want.

So, this leads me to a not-so-novel question: Is Health Care a privilege or a right? It seems like the Obama administration is trying to say "Health Care is a Right...therefore you HAVE to pay an insurance company...but you are free to choose which insurance company you want to pay."

The "free market" status quo in health care clearly isn't working. A) the market cannot regulate a "right," only a government can do that. B) if you don't think health care is a right, the market is still not working because the costs go up and the quality of the product (care) is going down. There is too much demand. The market is supposed to address that so.

A too-oft used comparison is to postal service, where private and public options exist and create competition. But that's already the system we have now. We have Medicaid (the equivalent of the Post Office) and we have a plethora of private insurance companies (the equivalent of FedEx, UPS, and DHL). Also, just like with postal service, the private companies are earning billions of dollars in profits and the government-run option is hemorrhaging money.

What about Universal Health Care? Why not just tax people, which governments legitimately may, instead of forcing them to pay an insurance company, and then have the government provide universal free health care? It shouldn't be so people can choose their doctors. That isn't what liberty is about. The clear answer is we don't want the already dysfunctional Medicaid system to be the ONLY system. We cannot afford it.

What we can afford, what governments can do to promote competition, is end the monopolies a select few insurance companies enjoy within a State. The system we have now allows one or two mega corporations to charge ludicrous amounts of money and insure a relatively few, while Medicaid and Non-Profits struggle to provide decent coverage for the rest of us.

My conclusion to my question is: health care is not a core component of citizenship. It is simply a right of the citizens. And the governments role should be to create the market environment conducive to providing all Americans with that right. The first step to that is to lower the barriers of entry into the health insurance business, allow more for-profit and not-for-profit insurance companies to compete for customers, and by increasing the supply, take care of the demand and quality. The first step is really that simple.