Should it be the government’s responsibility that Joe Blow gets all the same health care as Joe Millionaire?
I don’t think I have ever heard anyone make this assertion.
I believe adequate healthcare should be available at a low cost, but yes I believe if Joe millionaire can afford better care he should go for it. I think the bottom line is a country can only afford what it can afford. If they put a system in place they cannot sustain everyone will suffer in the long run.
I think the government has the responsibility to provide the best medical care that a constrained budget can allow. It is impossible to expect it to provide the same care as Joe Millionare gets. But that doesn’t mean that you should only be entitled to a bandaide and a bottle of aspirin either. We don’t expect public schools to provide only the no-frills basics. The same expectation should apply to medical care.
I say the government should provide enough assistance to keep reasonable people from being so desparate they engage in dangerous/unethical/illegal behavior to cope with their situations. I just read an article about a family being charged for keeping their severely handicapped son in a cage. The boy was clean and well-fed by all accounts, so I’m guessing those parents weren’t restraining him out of malice, but out of desperation. Did they have access to services to help him control his behavior? Was there respite care available to them? If so, I say lock 'em up and teach 'em a lesson. But if there were no services available to them, whether because of long-waiting lines or whatever, then I don’t blame them for doing what they felt they had to do, assuming the child was out of control of course.
Poorly worded question (IMVHO) but let’s take the gist of it: does every patient who comes in have the right to House-like maximum care… MRIs for sprained shoulders, expensive preventive drugs for possible conditions, specialists for treatments most general practitioners could handle, etc.? That’s what ballooning medical costs here… no one is satisfied to have an experienced doctor send them home with minor treatment because their headache or rash COULD be some rare and unlikely serious condition… and if it is, the doctor and hospital will take it right up their malpractice insurance’s ass.
So no, I don’t think excess care should be paid for by general or social insurance, and doctors should have more latitude (in judgment and financial pressures) to use appropriate care instead of “cover every possibility and make the patient feel like a guest star on House” treatment. They can have that if they want to foot the bill, either directly or through supplemental insurance.
I support a safety net. Everyone gets some reasonable minimum, regardless of income. People with the means to afford it can get as much as they care to pay for on top of that.
I think we could basically apply this concept to money in general and get rid of all the other myriad entitlements and associated bureaucracy. Still might be good to have a UHC system in addition to cash handouts. But I don’t know what else we’d need to add to that list.
I agree with what you’re saying but that’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about patients dying because they couldn’t afford whatever procedure that has been proven to save people’s lives in the past.
This. The central purpose of welfare isn’t to make all health care equal, or redistribute wealth, or anything else. It’s to provide a social safety net so that there aren’t mutilated, diseased homeless people wandering around on our streets, or desperate people turning to crime just to survive. I’ve been to some really horrible countries and I’ve seen people in really horrible conditions, and it really drove home for me why America needs welfare, to include subsidized health care.
And it’s not going to go away. Our planet is hideously overpopulated, and as the population of the infirm elderly continues to grow we’re going to have to make some tough choices. A big part of that will be giving up priveleges we’ve become accustomed to for the good of the whole and submitting our personal freedoms and responsibilities to greater degrees of centralized planning. The idea of the Ayn Rand style sovereign citizen who should owe nothing to no one is becoming increasingly unrealistic, not because of moral issues but just simply because there aren’t enough resources left on the planet for every man to be an island. As much as I hate to say it, the growing pains we go through regarding socialized health care is probably just the tip of the iceberg.
I believe that is exactly what Amateur Barbarian is saying. i.e. People ought not die because they are not able to afford a life saving treatment.
So what are you really asking?
I agree with Amateur Barbarian.
Also, I’m not being cryptic, what I’m “really asking” is right there in my response to Amateur Barbarian. Maybe I just read Amateur Barbarian’s post differently than you did.
The analogy I see is health care should be like education. Everybody should be able to go to school. But that doesn’t mean everybody should be able to go to Harvard.
I strongly believe that everyone should get the medical treatment, including preventive and prophylactic treatments, they need for a healthy life.
However, there’s a minimax curve for treatment that I believe in recent decades has skewed to spending far too much on many individual cases, for every wrong reason there is - profit, fear of malpractice accusations, misinformed patient base, profit, profit and profit. This excess attention to headaches, sprains, and generalized non-illnesses comes at the expense of reasonable treatment for all, and any treatment for some segment.
Rhetorical question.
I think I feel the same as others here. Your OP seemed to be asking a different question.
Joe Blow shouldn’t gets all the same health care as Joe Millionaire. If Joe Millionaire wants to get a nose job to make himself look pretty, he can afford to pay for it and he can go ahead and do it. But I don’t see why the government should be paying for Joe Blow’s nose job if it’s just for aesthetic reasons.
Nope. I think I may have read your post differently than what you had intended.
My mistake. :o
No. In fact, there are circumstances in which we should deny care to those who receive taxpayer-funded health care in order to spend the money on other things. We need “death panels” and rationing, IOW.
And we are going to get them whether we admit it to ourselves, or not. It won’t make any difference where they come from, either insurance companies or from government bureaucrats.
Sooner rather than later, we are either going to say “No, we are going to let you die because we cannot afford to spend the money”, or we will go bankrupt and then we won’t have the money anyway.
Regards,
Shodan
Point taken. I articulated it poorly.
So let me try again: If dirt poor Joe needs a $200k procedure to save his life, should the government foot the bill?
I believe that a civilized society should set a baseline for necessary services available to its citizens and provide them, and I agree with the other developed nations of the world that health care should be one of those. (I’d also include public transportation, financed by gas taxes.)
i’m keep newspaper in my wallet just in case.
I’m sorry. I still feel like there’s a catch. Maybe it’s just me.
If Joe Dirt is homeless and has a heart condition and a $200K surgery will resolve it then, yes. If he has a bad ticker that can be fixed but he’s also a raging and unrepentant alcoholic then, no.
In the latter case, his last days should be made as comfortable as possible so he can die with whatever dignity he has left.