Does the right to medical care entail that government itself must provide medical services? Or only that it provide citizens with the means to purchase such services? Must it provide them to all citizens, or only to those otherwise unable to afford them? What level of government is supposed to do this – municipal, state, or federal? Does it require government to force some individuals to become medical doctors, nurses, and the like so that the services can be provided? (They don’t grow on trees, after all.) Or is government involvement really necessary here at all? ...
Now the Church definitely rejects the radical libertarian position that government can never, even in principle, justly intervene to help even the neediest citizens to acquire services of this sort. Catholic social teaching affirms the principle of solidarity, according to which we have, by nature, positive obligations to one another that we did not consent to and that the state as a natural institution can in principle step in to assist us in fulfilling when necessary. But the Church also firmly rejects the leftist tendency to regard governmental action as the preferred or even the only appropriate means of fulfilling our obligations to others. And she firmly rejects too the egalitarian tendency to regard our obligations as extending to all other human beings in an equal way. Contrary to what the libertarian supposes, the individual is not the basic unit of society; contrary to what socialists, communitarians, and many liberals suppose, “society” or “the community” as a whole is not the basic unit either. The family is the basic unit, and it is to our family members that our obligations are the strongest and most direct, with positive obligations to other human beings, though deriving from natural law rather than consent, becoming less strong and less direct the further they are from the family. ...
This approach is enshrined in another central principle of Catholic social teaching, the principle of subsidiarity, according to which the needs of individuals, families, and local communities ought as a matter of justice to be met as far as possible by those individuals, families, and communities themselves. ...
There can be no question, then, that while the Church allows that government can legitimately intervene in economic life and in other ways come to the assistance of those in need, she also teaches that there is a presumption in justice against such intervention, a presumption which can be overridden only when such intervention is strictly necessary, only to the extent necessary, and only on the part of those governmental institutions which are as close as possible to those receiving the aid in question.
It's a lengthy post, but I recommend you read the whole thing for yourself.
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