Pitting Dr. Hyde, Dr. Hyde, Dr. Hyde?

[Liberal]

@mhendo

Actually, if there’s one thing i’ll say for libertarians, it’s that they tend to be consistent. Most libertarians i know would be happy to turn education over to the free market.

Or put another way, we’d be happy to turn decisions about education over to parents.

And yet, no matter how you choose to explain it, you will be just as dead when you are refused treatment due to your inability to pay. And, much as you infuriate me at times, that’s not an outcome that i consider morally or ethically acceptable in an incredibly wealthy society.

I certainly don’t think it’s morally acceptable. If I were the doctor, I would choose to help whenever I could. And I would hope that my doctor would choose the same. But voluntarily. The problem with making a moral duty into a civic one is that someone else later on, with a very different moral viewpoint, might well cite your precedent to justify his own pet cause. Instead of health care, it might be eternal salvation.

[Guy_Betty]

@elucidator

Soylent Green isn’t people, Soylent Green is poor people. Very, very different.

Word.

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

I don’t see it so much as health care being a right of the individual, but a question of what we as a society value. Are we members of a society who share benefits from being a part of that society, or are we individuals who have just happened to land in proximity to one another? I think it’s obvious that, in America (and elsewhere of course, but I’m being specific for the sake of the libertarians), we are a society and not an aggregation of individuals arising by happenstance. I believe that one of the obligations we have as a society is to preserve as best we can the well-being of all the members of our society.

@Liberal

I certainly don’t think it’s morally acceptable. If I were the doctor, I would choose to help whenever I could. And I would hope that my doctor would choose the same. But voluntarily. The problem with making a moral duty into a civic one is that someone else later on, with a very different moral viewpoint, might well cite your precedent to justify his own pet cause. Instead of health care, it might be eternal salvation.

That’s fine. Any individual doctor practicing outside of the community can choose to do what he likes. I have no problem with that.

Any doctor using or participating in shared community resources (such as a hospital) for his or her own direct benefit should be compelled to conform to civic duties and moral principles.

[mhendo]

@Liberal

I certainly don’t think it’s morally acceptable. If I were the doctor, I would choose to help whenever I could. And I would hope that my doctor would choose the same. But voluntarily. The problem with making a moral duty into a civic one is that someone else later on, with a very different moral viewpoint, might well cite your precedent to justify his own pet cause. Instead of health care, it might be eternal salvation.

Personally, i would prefer that people’s lives didn’t hang in the balance based on the hope that their doctor would act in a morally acceptable way, “whenever [s/he] could.”

I recognize that we don’t agree about these things, and i wasn’t expecting to convince you of my position, but i must say that if you view access to basic medical services as a “pet cause,” then we probably don’t have much civic or moral common ground.

[storyteller0910]

@Liberal

I think maybe it’s a glass half-full/half-empty thing. As I see it, the reason I can’t be treated isn’t that I don’t have the money to pay but that I don’t have the right to steal.

But “stealing” isn’t an absolute concept. Stealing is whatever the prevailing rules and laws say it is. If I own a store, and I put little bowls of hard candy on the counter and tell my employees that they are to be distributed to anyone who wants them, free of charge, and you come into my store and take one, are you stealing from me?

[John_Mace]

I often disagree with Martin Hyde, as he’s way too much of a social conservative for my tastes. But in this case, I think he’s right-- from his moral perspective. It’s a perfectly valid moral stance to believe that someone else doesn’t have the right to dip into your pocket for medical care. Some people might think they do, and if they can defend that morally, good for them.

We may decide, as a democratic country, that we want to provide a certain level of medical care for all our citizens. But that’s a policy decision, and not a moral decision. If your morality requires you to provide medical care for everyone, then no one is stopping you. If most people in this country feel the same way, then what’s the problem? Why isn’t it just happening by itself. Well, the answer must be that many people don’t really believe that. My guess is that those people are hoping to get something for themselves out of it.

[Liberal]

@mhendo

I recognize that we don’t agree about these things, and i wasn’t expecting to convince you of my position, but i must say that if you view access to basic medical services as a “pet cause,” then we probably don’t have much civic or moral common ground.

Actually, I think we do. I did agree with you on the moral basis. The reason I called it a “pet cause” is because that’s what the next moralist may well call it. He may think that eternal salvation is far more important than temporal health. And he will have a precedent to cite. “They do this for the body, why shouldn’t we do it for the soul!”. Your reasoning — that it’s the right thing to do and therefore should be mandatory — is *exactly * the same as his.

[John_Mace]

@Liberal

Actually, I think we do. I did agree with you on the moral basis. The reason I called it a “pet cause” is because that’s what the next moralist may well call it. He may think that eternal salvation is far more important than temporal health. And he will have a precedent to cite. “They do this for the body, why shouldn’t we do it for the soul!”. Your reasoning — that it’s the right thing to do and therefore should be mandatory — is *exactly * the same as his.

While I agree that the reasoning is the same, the chance of this actually happening in the real world of the USA is vanishingly small. I believe your fear is rooted in the slippery slope fallacy, and that this is an instance when it is a fallacy (no evidence of such a slippery slope exists). Maybe a better example could be found…

[Sarahfeena]

@storyteller0910

But “stealing” isn’t an absolute concept. Stealing is whatever the prevailing rules and laws say it is. If I own a store, and I put little bowls of hard candy on the counter and tell my employees that they are to be distributed to anyone who wants them, free of charge, and you come into my store and take one, are you stealing from me?

No, in that case, not, because you have made an individual decision that this is a service you want to provide. If the government made a law that ALL store owners MUST put out the little bowl of candy, regardless of the store owner’s opinion, then a much better case could be made that the store owner is being robbed.

[Liberal]

@John Mace

While I agree that the reasoning is the same, the chance of this actually happening in the real world of the USA is vanishingly small. I believe your fear is rooted in the slippery slope fallacy, and that this is an instance when it is a fallacy (no evidence of such a slippery slope exists). Maybe a better example could be found…

Legislative definition of marriage as between one man and one woman. It’s the “right way” to look at marriage.

[John_Mace]

@Liberal

Legislative definition of marriage as between one man and one woman. It’s the “right way” to look at marriage.

Much better example, since it’s actually happening. No future slippery slope to imagine there.

Others would be: It’s morally wrong to desecrate the flag. or… We have a right to demand that creationism be taught alongside of evolution. or… It’s morally wrong for teenage girls to obtain abortions without parental consent.

All of those things are based on what most Americans think is morally correct. Should we then Pit anyone who doesn’t want them translated into law? I don’t think so.

[Martin_Hyde]

I think it should be clarified that I never spoke about rights in the post in question, if I had, it’d open up a much more interesting discussion.

I do not think that a fundamental right is the right to health care. Nor do I think it is an essential humanitarian service. I think it is a very important one, and I think anyone who contributes to charities that gives it away for free is doing a great thing. I’ve donated a good amount of money to such charities in my lifetime.

I don’t see it as anything else other than a simple difference of opinion on how we define basic humanitarian service. I think the basics are: food, water, and shelter.

Is humanitarian service important? Definitely so, but I simply disagree that it is a basic humanitarian service that government is obligated to provide.

Anyone is obviously free to pit me for any reason, I have around 4,000 posts here and I can certainly say that I’m not proud of all of them nor are all of them even posts I would defend. However in this case, I was simply expressing my opinion that I disagreed that health care was a basic humanitarian service. I never said I don’t think it is important, nor did I ever say I didn’t want every one to get health care.

I’d love it if every one in the world was able to afford quality medical care. I’d love it if a lot of things in this world were better than they are now, but those are dreams and nothing more.

@Richard Parker

One of the problems is that Martin says that you have a right to get your bleeding stopped, but nothing more. What is the principled distinction between a right to sutures and a right to chemotherapy?

This is why it is important to note I did not mention rights in the Great Debate thread in question. I do not think you have a right to even emergency medical care. It’s just simply my opinion that it is something that should be provided. There are things that are not rights that I believe should be provided. For example I think well-paved roads should be provided, and I feel I it’s a reasonable thing to expect since my tax dollars at both the gas pump and other areas are paying for said roads. I feel I’m entitled to a certain level of service as a “paying customer” and I’m even okay with the fact that when it comes to taxes people are charged based on ability to pay.

I am not a big proponent of natural rights because I do not believe that humans have any special rights simply by the virtue of being human. I believe we have certain clearly stated and clearly enumerated constitutional rights and certain rights that exist outside of the constitution in our legal system, but I don’t view those as naturally existing rights simply because we are human.

Take the right to property. I think it’s an incredibly important constitutional/legal right, but how is it a natural right? Before we organized ourselves into societies with rules and regulations property was whatever you could hold on to, in our natural state we have no greater right to property ownership than say, a lion does to an antelope it kills. Sure, the lion killed the antelope, but if a bunch of hyenas fight said lion off, they get to eat it. Essentially we only have what rights we can defend with force, or that society can defend for us with force.

I do believe there are four fundamental rights that people need in order to be happy and that societies need to protect in order to promote a sound society with a vibrant economy, those would be:

1. The right to freely hold and express opinions

2. The right to own and keep property.

3. The right to life

4. The right to liberty

Those are what I view as the fundamental rights that a society needs to be willing to fight for in order to create a good society. I don’t believe a fundamental right can be something like, “you have the right to be given medical care.” Fundamental rights are passive ones, dealing with what you should be protected from not what you should be given. No one should take your property without cause (including the government), no one should kill you (including the government) except in self defense, no one should deprive you of liberty and government should only have said right with cause, and government should not be allowed to suppress your opinion.

[Little_Plastic_Ninja]

Yeah, I’ve been kind of boned by the current system.

See, I have two kidneys. For several years, they both had large stones in them. This meant that at random times, certainly at least once or twice a month, I would be bedridden with crippling pain and vomiting for at least one day, possibly a week at a time.

As you might imagine, it was hard for me to hold down a job like this. So I couldn’t get good health insurance so I could find out what was going wrong and get it fixed – and it was a potentially life threatening issue, considering what happens when you have very limited kidney function.

My church had no way to help me – they mostly help the homeless. I don’t know of any charities I could have contacted to help me find out what my problem was and get it fixed. I did not have $2000 in hand to get my MRI and talk to the necessary doctors, and I certainly did not have the $17,000 it ended up costing me to get the procedure on one kidney. One. Not both. And not guaranteed to be the only surgery I needed on that kidney, either.

So, in your infinite wisdom, should I be just screwed over if I have no immediate weay to fix a life threatening problem? Should I have waited until I went into full renal failure and cost the hospital hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring me back from the brink? Should they have removed the stones then, or should they have thrown me back out onto the street with two golfball sized stones in my body and hope that I would somehow get better?

I don’t want my health to be subject to market forces controlled by wealthy insurance company owners that by their presence encourage ever-higher charges from doctors and hospitals under the “if they’ll pay it then we’ll charge it” theory.

[Martin_Hyde]

@Little Plastic Ninja

Yeah, I’ve been kind of boned by the current system.

See, I have two kidneys. For several years, they both had large stones in them. This meant that at random times, certainly at least once or twice a month, I would be bedridden with crippling pain and vomiting for at least one day, possibly a week at a time.

As you might imagine, it was hard for me to hold down a job like this. So I couldn’t get good health insurance so I could find out what was going wrong and get it fixed – and it was a potentially life threatening issue, considering what happens when you have very limited kidney function.

My church had no way to help me – they mostly help the homeless. I don’t know of any charities I could have contacted to help me find out what my problem was and get it fixed. I did not have $2000 in hand to get my MRI and talk to the necessary doctors, and I certainly did not have the $17,000 it ended up costing me to get the procedure on one kidney. One. Not both. And not guaranteed to be the only surgery I needed on that kidney, either.

So, in your infinite wisdom, should I be just screwed over if I have no immediate weay to fix a life threatening problem? Should I have waited until I went into full renal failure and cost the hospital hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring me back from the brink? Should they have removed the stones then, or should they have thrown me back out onto the street with two golfball sized stones in my body and hope that I would somehow get better?

I don’t want my health to be subject to market forces controlled by wealthy insurance company owners that by their presence encourage ever-higher charges from doctors and hospitals under the “if they’ll pay it then we’ll charge it” theory.

If you couldn’t afford it and did not have insurance, how did you manage to get the problem fixed?

[Larry_Borgia]

That’s the problem with charities: They only really help the destitute. Now there’s nothing wrong with helping the destitute, it’s a noble thing to do, but the people who are screwed by America’s ruinous health care system aren’t the destitute, they’re middle-class, sometimes farily well off people who just can’t afford to plop down X amount of dollars for whatever medical care they desperately need right now. A friend of mine is a well off professional woman who owns her own condo and who is having a terrible time finding a doctor to perform an operation that may save her life, but which she cannot afford, and her insurance doesn’t want her to have, at least not before both her and her doctor jump through an ungodly amount of hoops.

[Larry_Borgia]

@Liberal

Or put another way, we’d be happy to turn decisions about education over to parents.

I certainly don’t think it’s morally acceptable. If I were the doctor, I would choose to help whenever I could. And I would hope that my doctor would choose the same. But voluntarily. The problem with making a moral duty into a civic one is that someone else later on, with a very different moral viewpoint, might well cite your precedent to justify his own pet cause. Instead of health care, it might be eternal salvation.

Would you apply the same logic to first responders? Is requiring fire-fighters to put out any fire they are called to coercion and thus a really bad thing? After all, unlike doctors, there’s a very good chance a fire-fighter will be killed in the line of duty.

[elucidator]

Careful! You’re challenging a man who has access to the feared and dreaded Verdana font, AKA, the Font of Wisdom. Tread softly.

[Martin_Hyde]

@John Mace

We may decide, as a democratic country, that we want to provide a certain level of medical care for all our citizens. But that’s a policy decision, and not a moral decision. If your morality requires you to provide medical care for everyone, then no one is stopping you. If most people in this country feel the same way, then what’s the problem? Why isn’t it just happening by itself. Well, the answer must be that many people don’t really believe that. My guess is that those people are hoping to get something for themselves out of it.

The reason is that if you happen to get covered by one of the good plans, it’s a great system. You get way more tests ran on you and a higher level of care than is available in countries with fully socialized medicine (unless you go private.) There’s a reason that American health care costs are way higher per person and people are fooling themselves if they think it is because of the inefficiency of insurance companies or medical practitioners, it’s because Americans in general have come to demand a lot of thoroughness and even demand procedures that wouldn’t be done under the government’s bill in many countries.

Most Americans have some form of health care, so it’s hard to convince them degrade their quality of care just to help the people who don’t have any.

There’s all kinds of horror stories about HMOs/health insurance companies but by and large a significant enough portion of Americans feels they are in better hands with private corporations than with government that we’ve not seen serious support politically for totally socialized medicine.

[Liberal]

I agree with Larry about the system. But we may disagree about what exactly has made the health care system ruinous. In my opinion, it has been the partnership between business and government in which they have exchanged favors. Every health insurance and health care tycoon has at least one senator in his pocket. And ex-politicians who dealt generously with them in the form of favorable legislation are assured of job security well into retirement. That’s what robber baron capitalism is all about, and it’s alive and well in the USA.

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

@elucidator

Careful! You’re challenging a man who has access to the feared and dreaded Verdana font, AKA, the Font of Wisdom. Tread softly.

In this case, wouldn’t Wingdings be more appropriate?