What if people aren’t poor but have pre-existing conditions such that no insurance company will touch them.
The vast majority of people don’t actually use their insurance for anything but fairly minor stuff. Health insurance isn’t about keeping the majority (health people) happy its about helping the unlucky minority who actually need it. This is why I laugh/cry whenever I see someone complain that the government is going to ration care. I’d much rather have the government ration the care than the current situation where the people doing the rationing have a vested interest in denying you care.
Let’s throw a few numbers around, shall we? So we can abandon the notion that the only way to take care of the sob-story, small and rare %, corner-of-the-chart special cases is to launch a massive government program that manages 1/6th of our economy via a bureaucratic mess in Washington.
Medicare and the state equivalents cost about $1 trillion per year, taken from our taxes.
I’d estimate that about 50 million people in the United States could use some help financing their health insurance.
That works out to about $20,000 for every man, woman and child who actually could use some help.
Cut that number by a factor of 4 and give every person who needs it $5,000 per year in cash, or a voucher, to pay for health insurance. You can now cut the taxes that pay for those programs by 75 percent. That just freed up $750 billion for other more productive purposes.
As mentioned in the previous posts, pursue aggressive tort reform and massive deregulation of the industry. There is no reason for the federal government to get involved at all. Shut down all of the federal (and state, if they so choose) bureaucracies that deal with Medicaid and its ilk.
You’re done. Unless you want to tweak the numbers above, slightly up or down.
The ACA doesn’t affect 65% of the population at all, because they have group health insurance through their employers. And the rest would get insurance from private insurance companies, and be treated by private doctors and hospitals. So no, it would not throw 1/6 of the economy under the control of Washington bureaucrats.
It may seem odd to some people but the SCOTUS rules on the constitutionality of issues. Church is where you go for moral guidance. Or MTV, whatever floats your boat.
Food is even more important. Without it, health insurance won’t even matter. Where’s the constitutional right to food?
If food were priced out of reach for 50 million Americans and if we paid more than twice as much for food that was much, much less nutritious than the vast majority of industrialized nations, the government would step in.
Food is something the market governs prices on, the market is utterly unable to make paying someone’s medical bills profitable if they are higher than his premiums.
The 70 million or so on medicare and/or medicaid are either old or disabled. The disabled are there
because their private insurance has dropped them. These are the least healthy, most expensive
(by far) people to pay for and private insurance pays for very few of them.
The right to food has its basis in either the general welfare clause or the other founding document, the declaration of independence, which declares (paraphrasing) if government fails to secure life, liberty and the capacity to pursue happiness for its citizens they have a right to dissolve government.
Healthcare could also be viewed as a free speech issue. Having insurance priced out of reach for a significant minority of Americans is a levy on their free speech given that they have lower lifespans than those with healthcare and thus on average are entitled to less free speech.
Um…the US government does step in to regulate the price of food and has done so for a long, long time. What do you think all those farm subsidies are about? Where do you think all that government cheese comes from?
First of all, the 50 million number is wildly inflated, even so, many uninsured make the choice to do so, not because they can’t afford it. Many are young and prefer to spend the money on beer, movies and video games.
Secondly, government intrusion in the marketplace jacks up the price like it does with everything else. While they subsidize some industries, the money comes from somewhere, it doesn’t grow on government trees.
But the main point was constitutional, there is no right to healthcare, food, housing, sex, etc. That’s why we shouldn’t be forced to into it.
That isn’t what the clause says or means, your paraphrase is way off base. There’s quite a history to look into, no decision has ever come down supporting that view, otherwise it grants the government to do anything it wants anytime and we would effectively be in a socialist state.
If they aren’t healthy they can’t speak up like they ought to? WTF?
No, it grants government the right to pass legislation that increases the general welfare of the population. This can be operationalised in terms of effect on average lifespan.
Here’s the actual text of the Declaration of Independence:
The preamble to the Constitution:
The general welfare claim comes up again in Article 1 Section 8 and was the basis of the US Congress passing a bill giving foreign aid to Haiti, after a debate between Madison and Boudinot (according to this vid). The constitutionality of spending for the general welfare was reinforced by Helvering v. Davis.
Edit:
No, if they don’t have access to insurance and have lower lifespans as a result, their capacity for free speech is curtailed.
I really hate this argument. It can use *anything *as a reason to not get insurance.
“They didn’t want to get insurance- they decided, instead, to spend it on food.”
“They didn’t want to get insurance- they decided, instead, to spend it on their father’s funeral.”
“They didn’t want to get insurance- they decided, instead, to spend it on hookers and blow in Tijuana.”
It could easily be argued that I chose to forgo heath insurance, when I was in my twenties, because I wanted to spend money on a replacement car and traveling back and forth between Austin (where I lived) and Houston (where my family lived). But the truth is that, until I was about 25, none of the jobs I worked even offered health insurance. Could I have bought it on my own? Of course- for a ridiculously exorbitant price.
I don’t think you could find anyone who made the conscious decision to gamble with their health and do without insurance because they preferred to spend that money on beer, movies, and video games. A more realistic description would be that they didn’t have access to healthcare insurance… and ended up spending that money on something else. Healthcare is, unfortunately, mostly tied to employment… and many young people don’t have jobs that offer it.
“If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress…. Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America.”
– James Madison, Letter to Edmund Pendleton, January 21, 1792
Give me a break. I was paying $175 a month until recently. None of the jobs I had offered it either. They didn’t offer food either but I figured out how to get some. Yes, we have a lot of victim thinkers these days but let’s not put everyone in that helpless basket.
Just so that we’re clear here, the Declaration of Independence has never been used as a basis for determining the constitutionality of legislation. It is not an operable document in this discussion, unless you are advocating violent overthrow of the government.
He argued something similar during the debate in the video I linked and his opinion was disregarded when Congress passed the law granting foreign aid to Haiti in 1792. We now have several examples of precedent (indirectly) determining that public schools rather than parochial ones are in the general welfare of citizens, including Scopes and Dover (or more directly through Everson v. Board of Education).
Edit: You’re right, the declaration of independence doesn’t determine the constitutionality of a bill, but it is informative when discussing the legitimacy of federal legislation.
Isn’t that my point? Although, I suspect that food (without regulation) wouldn’t get as out of whack as health care in this country, since no one suddenly needs 50x the amount of food to survive.
I’m guessing you got pretty shitty insurance for $175 a month as a singleton. But in any case: 1. Not everyone can get even shitty insurance for that little as a private individual. 2. Not everyone has $175 a month slack in their income. 3. If your insurance is shitty, you might very well have gone bankrupt anyway if you got sick.