They also want to say housing a a basic human right.
I dont think just because you are in the US the government is required to give you a place to live in any darn place you say you want to live.
That’s different.
If your house is on fire the neighbors COULD catch on fire so that becomes a community issue. Also as a homeowner my taxes go to pay for the fire department.
If you’re sick, your neighbors might get sick. If you’re injured, and you still need to work to earn enough to treat it, you could be more likely to injure someone else by working with an injury. So it’s still the same concept. And as a citizen, your taxes could go to pay for health care.
What if the community cannot cover all of the basic needs? How can you ration “basic human needs” if everybody approaches the problem believing they have an inalienable, natural human right to satisfy their “basic needs”?
~Max
What if there’s no fire department nearby? That happens sometimes. It’s not a good reason to get rid of the concept of publicly funded firefighting.
As a matter of ethics, do you believe that when a life is at stake, resources are better allocated as a matter of need or as a matter of ability to pay?
I don’t see this as a healthcare specific question. In my opinion, if a poor person is being held up a gunpoint, and a rich person is having their house egged, the police should respond to the person whose life it at risk, regardless of how much more the rich person may pay in taxes (or is able to contribute to the PBA or whatever).
Not Shodan, but I will concede that there should be certain “positive” rights. It does not follow that there are or even should be any “positive” human rights. I am of the opinion that “positive” rights can only emerge by contract.
You and I have a different understanding of the “negative” right to life. The right to life, being a natural right, is not violated when one dies of natural causes. We would not say that a hurricane violates one’s right to liberty; nor do we say that a dark cloud violates one’s right to pursue happiness. So we do not say that a terminal illness violates one’s right to life. For those who endow the unborn with human rights, they do not describe a natural miscarriage as a violation of the unborn child’s right to life.
The right to life, to me, means that others should not deprive you of life (kill you). Although the right is described as inalienable, there is (in my jurisdiction) an exception to the right to life, the right to self-defense, which basically says that if it comes down to my life or your life, I can justly deprive you of your life.
It follows that enforcing the “negative” right to life means enforcing the duty imposed by that right. You prevent people from depriving others of their lives.
How you get from that to healthcare, at least within my framework, I’m not sure. Perhaps you were talking about euthanasia? I could see law enforcement cracking down on euthanasia as an effort to enforce the human right to life. I think my first impression is much more likely - we probably have different ideas of what is meant by a right to life.
~Max
Good point. As I admitted in the most recent post, certain “positive” rights should and do exist. But they aren’t natural or human rights. One is not entitled to coverage from a fire department on account of being a human being.
~Max
Who cares what we call it? We treat it like it’s a right for every American (and indeed everyone who lives in America). Why not do the same for health care?
This is a difficult question because it is so general. As a matter of ethics, resources are best allocated as a matter of need. But to look at healthcare in particular, if for example a doctor spent all day every day treating the most needy patients (good deontological ethics), it may end up being that society loses because the doctor operates at a loss and goes out of business (bad consequential ethics).
I am not a fan of consequentialism so I agree that the doctor should treat the most needy patients, society be damned if they can’t find some way to make doctoring sustainable. But if you were to approach this from another perspective, “a matter of need” may in fact take into account the patient’s wealth, the doctor’s financial situation, etc.
As explained above, I agree with you.
~Max
Isn’t that the central theme of this thread? Whether to call certain ethical positions “natural human rights” instead of “socialism”, etc?
~Max
I’m not saying it’s the argument to use to win Americans over, I’m saying it’s the state Americans need to be brought round to.
And i’m saying that needs to change.
But I think there’s an answer at hand that solves a great part of the question of doctors getting to stay in business. We don’t really worry about fire departments and police departments getting enough business to keep their doors open… of course there are exceptions where a state or city has to make budget cuts, but as a general matter, public safety organization are very well insulated from the whims of the market.
Each year, it gets harder and harder for me to explain the logic behind the U.S. healthcare model by any other way than “The rich people seem to like it.”
There is no natural human right to an education, mail, fire fighting, or police. Natural human rights has a meaning and it is not “Things the government should do”.
If you define natural human rights as things the government should do then the argument is we should reframe health care as something the government should provide instead of something the government should provide.
dup
That’s a great follow-up post, Ravenman. I think you are itching for a debate on the merits of socialized medicine (no connotation implied), but I don’t have a strong enough opinion on that topic to debate as anything but a skeptic. I also think such a debate should have its own thread.
~Max
The demand for fire-fighting services is not continuously rising.
Regards,
Shodan
Not yet…
Single payer health care isn’t socialism. Framing it that way would be incorrect, as well as stupid, as actual socialism is pretty much a failed experiment. Western European nations aren’t socialist. Actual socialist nations are generally economic hell holes, with the one exception being China…which is a dystonian hell hole of a different type. Oh, and they don’t have universal health care either, so it doesn’t really fit.
If you want to get single payer health care in the US, IMHO you need to frame it from an economic perspective. IOW, what’s it actually going to cost, both the transition and in the end. Be precise. Give the cost to benefits ratios and an ROI if there actually is one. Don’t try and deceive. Don’t try and say ‘look everyone else has it’. Most Americans (including me) don’t care what ‘everyone else has’. What I care about is how it will work HERE. What it will cost, HERE. And what the cost to benefits will be HERE.
I think a case can be made, if someone is willing to do the grunt work of looking at the current aggregated costs and negative impacts of our current system, and put those in terms of what an actual future system would be IN THE US, along with what the transition would look like and what the costs for that transition would be. It’s not going to be nearly as simplistic as many single payer or UHC advocates make it out to be. That said, I think that once we get through the pain of a change over, it will be a better system for everyone moving forward, even if I don’t think the costs will be that much different to the users.
A couple of points:
First, people need to learn the definition of “socialism”. Government services and safety nets are not inherently “socialism”. Conservatives use the term “socialism” to evoke images of corrupt, kleptocratic command economies like the USSR and Venezuela so that rubes won’t vote in their own interest. They tend to gloss over countries like Canada, the Netherlands or the UK.
Throwing around terms like “natural rights” clouds the issue as it implies that people have some inherent entitlement to a particular service. They don’t. But because we live in a civilized society, we as a society have come to an agreement that certain services like law enforcement, education, fire departments, national defense, roads and other infrastructure should be available to all people and funded through pooled resources (i.e. taxes).
So the question really is this - if a poor person injures themselves, what minimum level of care should they expect? Should they just be left to die in the street until the local publicly funded sanitation service comes to take away their remains?