they could both agree that healthcare was a right - but still argue about whether or not to include it
Also at the risk of stirring up a political debate, let me say that a story in which Franklin and Jefferson agree that healthcare is a universal right, on akin to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would go very much against what we know their political thoughts and opinions to have been.
In modern times, we often talk of “rights” as those things, tangible or intangible, which everyone needs and which, just by common decency, everyone should have.
When the founding fathers wrote of our inalienable rights, however, they were referring not to things, or needs, but to those *freedoms* that everyone must have in order to live their lives as they see fit, free from encroachment by others. They saw each man as sovereign, with sovereignty over his own life.
We have long grown used to the idea of the federal government taxing the well-off in order to provide for the needs of the less well-off. This egalitarian concept, noble and benevolent as it sounds, would have been seen by both Franklin and Jefferson as a *violation* of that sovereign right of each man to keep and enjoy as he sees fit the fruits of his own labor. That any man could be said to have a “right” to have his personal needs met at another man’s expense through the confiscation of a portion of that man's property (i.e., his income) would have been seen by the founding fathers as a very clear case of encroachment, and as such would have been alien and antithetical to their understanding of individual rights.
