Check the Basis for Rights

Melinda on the Stand to Reason blog points out a concern from the 2nd presidential debate: Senator Obama seems to be saying that health care should be a right for Americans because we can afford it. Here's that part from the transcript, so you can evaluate for yourself:

Brokaw: Quick discussion. Is health care in America a privilege, a right, or a responsibility? (McCain answered first: responsibility)
...Obama: Well, I think it should be a right for every American. In a country as wealthy as ours, for us to have people who are going bankrupt because they can't pay their medical bills -- for my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they're saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don't have to pay her treatment, there's something fundamentally wrong about that.

Melinda correctly points out the problem with declaring something a right apart from a constitutional basis (emphasis mine):

"The merits of national health care aside, it's the grounding of rights in our country that concerns me. Rights are ground in the Constitution, rights that the government is bound to respect. And those rights are in turn grounded explicitly in the objective source of God, which is why government is bound to respect individual rights. Once we move away from the Constitution as the grounding of rights, the government becomes the granter of those rights, and there is no external obligation then for the government to respect individual rights. And if a right is grounded in our nation's prosperity, does the right go away if the nation is no longer prosperous? Declaring rights apart from the Constitution makes those rights changeable. The government can grant and deny rights. Isn't that the despotism our Constitution was meant to protect citizens from?"