If you answered "b" you might be Kentucky Republican Senate nominee Rand Paul.

In a November 7, 1999 letter to the editor published in the Bowling Green, Kentucky Daily News, U.S. Senate hopeful Rand Paul argued,

From a Judeo-Christian point-of-view, individuals should be their brother's keeper.... Religious and ethical guidelines, however, are distinct and separate from the concept of rights....

If you argue for the rights to concrete items such as health care, you must then argue that you have the right to an individual's labor. If you maintain a right to a service, you must then obligate other individuals to provide that service.. The labor of health care ranges from that of the orderlies, the nurses, the doctors, the administrators, to the shareholders.

If you argue that healthcare providers alone are not expected to pay for everyone's health care, then whom? The taxpayers? But who are the taxpayers? They are your neighbors. If you maintain a right to healthcare or housing, you must argue that your belief, which you call a "right," is sufficient to send armed tax collectors to your neighbors house to expropriate that "right."

As individuals we should argue for providing health care or housing to the needy, as a religious or ethical exhortation. But the moment we invoke the coercive power of government to provide a economic item, we must acknowledge that our religious creed is now to be imposed on disbelievers by the force of law.

Rand Paul's position seems not to have changed over the course of the last decade. As the Courier-Journal reported in a story titled Rand Paul has long history of controversial views, in a December 2nd, 2002 appearance on Kentucky Educational Television's Kentucky Tonight Paul stated, "We need to get insurance out of the way and let the consumer interact with their doctor the way they did basically before World War II." What did he mean, how would this work out in practice ?

Rand Paul's  January 29, 1999 appearance on Kentucky Tonight provided some possible answers: the Republican Senate candidate seems favor Nevada GOP primary contender Sue Lowden's bartering chickens for health care approach.

So, per Rand Paul's and Sue Lowden's shared vision, the price of health care and doctor's visits might be chickens, sheep, goats, cows, iPods and laptops,  jewelry, cash, gold teeth, spare kidneys... The full list would be long. If the health care emergency was especially pressing (a brain aneurysm or heart attack, or a young child hit by a car) payment for services rendered might be the house, or at least the family car  -  or whatever ready cash or fungible goods might be on hand to cajole hospitals or doctors into providing necessary or life-saving medical procedures.

As Paul told Kentucky Tonight viewers on January 1999,

"If you go to the doctor, you don't pay directly for your doctor's services, your insurance company pays for it. ... So the price goes up indiscriminately because nobody is there to barter down the price. What we need is higher-deductible plans, people paying more cash as they go into the doctor, and then what we'll have is the prices will level off."

The assertion that publicly provided health care, because it is based at some level on the government redistribution of wealth, is coercive, an act of violence even, is neither right nor wrong - it's simply a political and philosophical position. But it's worth considering the prospect that if Rand Paul's putative health care model were enacted, we'd see Leukemia victims, women in labor, or parents of injured children, desperately dragging in tow fungible personal possessions, or car and house titles, along in ambulances, to wind up haggling, even as death encroached, over the alleged worth of the goods with medical personnel who would of course hold the ultimate trump card - give up the loot, at a steep discount, accept our terms... or else.

Of course, the overwhelming majority of Americans who work in the health care profession would find such a system morally abhorrent to the extreme. Yet Rand Paul seems to find it eminently reasonable and sensible. Why ? As Alternet's Adele Stan has suggested, curious minds might look to the Constitution Party.