You’re bringin some good questions. I haven’t yet got a chance to welcome you and send you the linke for The Ultimate Beginner meta-thread for a comprehensive collection of relevant links and threads. I think you’ll find it really useful. (Also be sure to check out the welcome link there for forum tips and how-to’s).
eliotn did a pretty good job on the resources there. (That school teacher who wrote The Underground History of American Education was actually named New York City Teacher of the Year 3 years in a row…and Teacher of the Year for the entire state in the third year. Check him out here. Books are here.
He was featured in the documentary The War on Kids. Although it doesn’t focus on the history of education, I highly recommend it.
Even just the title of that article is idiocy. First of all, “water” isn’t a “right”. It’s a chemical substance. Second, people don’t even have a “right to water”. So it’s bad grammar and inaccurate. And to top it off, it’s equating a substance that literally falls out of the sky, with medical care. It was done before it started.
As for the history of health care, that first link eliotn provided is a good list. It’s included here along with a number of others. Here’s some highlights for the specific topic of the history of the industry:
100 Years of US Medical Fascism
Socialized Healthcare vs. The Laws of Economics
Compulsory Medical Care and the Welfare State [PDF]
I had a long discussion with a progressive type on the Mises Blog a while back. In this post I briefly touch on the education issue:
…do you honestly believe that education and teaching just wouldn’t take place [in a market free from government intervention]? [Education] would just cease to exist? People wouldn’t teach anyone anything and no one would learn anything? We’d all just stagnate and die out. Yes, because man was on Earth for tens of thousands of years never learning anything, up until just 150 years ago when public schools started to become popular.
And that’s basically the crux of it. The notion that without some coercive institution threatening people with guns and sanctions, everyone would just die out. It’s the same kind of thinking that leads to that ridiculous “day in the life” story. The same thing with major innovations. It’s all nonsense. Be sure to check out the responses in those two threads.