People are drawing a line at a really weird place in this debate. We give education to those who can’t afford it. I think education is very very very important, but healthcare is moreso.
Who says you can’t do that in dozens and dozens and dozens of other countries? According to Freedom House there are about 92 liberal democracies on earth, with the US being one. We aren’t that special.
Besides, once a nation obtains middle income status it generally makes a move towards a universal health care system. So the concept that UHC is a fundamental human right seems nearly ingrained in human consciousness right up there with the right to vote and freedom from oppression.
I know exactly what it means.
He was arguing against UHC as a “right” that someone MUST provide if you can’t afford it. He was illustrating the absurdity of that by equating it with another right that is recognized as not requiring anyone to do anything for you. The point being that rights cannot compel someone to do something for you without compensation.
I do not contend that we should not give health care to anyone who needs it, if we can afford it. Just like universal education, universal health care would have positive benefits for society at large (assuming the way it’s provided and paid for doesn’t create more problems than it solves). I merely contend that it can’t be considered a “right” as in an “entitlement”, because rights are rights to be left alone. A right that says I must provide you with something, regardless of compensation, also says I must provide it, regardless of my ability to afford to without compensation. That is a passable definition of slavery.
Its more like an abstract principle of political theory exaggerated beyond all reason. I mean, really,* slavery*? Please.
That’s exactly right. Sell it to you. Not give it to you. Now you’re on the right track.
I didn’t take it that way–just the opposite. Wasn’t that exactly the point he was countering? But the point remains, UHC (as we know it) exists to provide at least some people something when they can’t afford it. Not so with the second amendment.
First of all, that is YOUR view of UHC, and how you rationalize your fear of it.
There are millions and millions of ways to fund UHC, but that’s not the point, the real point is the stupidity of this statement:
“[it] exists to provide at least some people something when they can’t afford it.”
Think about that statement for a second.
What does insurance do?
I have an insurance policy on my house, because if it burns to the ground I can not afford to replace it.
I have group based health insurance because if I need $500,000 worth of medical care, I can not afford it.
But in both cases, I’m going to be provided with something I can not afford. Where is that money coming from? You. They are stealing from your premiums to pay for my new house. (And keep in mind that for the most part if you want a mortgage you can’t opt out of home owners insurance.)
So the argument in this thread is that the government should not stop you from getting health care if you can afford it? That the government takes no positive role in providing it, but should make sure you are not denied health care by the government for its own reasons?
If so, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard a ‘right’ to health care expressed in that way. Usually it means that anyone who needs care will have it provided for them.
Which is it?
Hasn’t the free market made healthcare inaccessible to the average person? I know my grandparents and great aunts and uncles were dirt poor, but they talk about doctors making housecalls and such when they were kids, and there is no way they had insurance. No possible way. They were sharecroppers in the best of times. My grandpa got so sick once he had to live in a hospital and then a rehab facility for a couple months. I’ll have to ask around between who’s left to confirm, but I’m guessing they somehow paid for it or it was free; they weren’t they type to accept handouts.
Free market? Is the government more or less involved in the health care industry today than it was in your grandfather’s early days?
No idea. I may be unique in that I actually wasn’t alive in my grandfather’s early days.
More.
We don’t have a free market in health care in this country. That is not to say that we should, but the idea that the free market has failed in this area is not founded in reality.
Actually, you have it backwards.
When ever it is suggested that health care (or UHC) should be a right, we elicit the following response from the anti-UHC crowd: “A fundamental birthright? You have the right that someone must give you something if you don’t have it? Really?”
Well, I’m trying to call bullshit on that argument. If I told you that I wanted to make gun ownership a fundamental right, would you say, “A fundamental birthright? You have the right that someone must give you something if you don’t have it? Really?”
Stratocaster’s resistance to making UHC a right hinges on his belief that it would entitle people to health care, and that entitlement means people getting things for free.
If that stance is correct, it would imply that the right to gun ownership would entitle me to a gun. I think I’ve shown pretty clearly that is ridiculous.
UHC is applied differently in every country that has it, there is no one single UHC entity. It is a concept, like the right to gun ownership, that gets applied to the political system. There are countries where the government provides a riffle to men of a certain age, but the US does not.
If you wanted to apply the concept that “UHC is a right” to the current health care system in the US it could be as easy as regulation of the PRIVATE health insurance industry, to make it universal.
Right now, for the most part, the only people that can get a group health plan are those employed by a company offering a group health plan.
To me, that looks like a system of segregation. Only people belonging to a certain club have access to health care. And access to that club is restricted to a select group of individuals.
The anti-UHC side loves to paint the issue as “providing something you didn’t earn.” But there are actually hard working Americans, with plenty of money, who are unable to get health insurance.
I don’t want health care to be free, and I don’t want it to be "free because someone else paid for it. Let’s try to get that straight.
What I want is for health care to be affordable, and accessible. My group plan only costs $800 a year, which to me seems EXTREMELY affordable. But it is NOT accessible. Only the select group of people at my company can buy in.
I also need to point out that my $800 a year premium is going to provide me with something I can not afford (did not earn). Why? Because that is what insurance does. It pools a lot of small premiums and then provides a few big payouts.
It’s the definition of Universal Health Care.
It converts an unpredictable cost into a predictable cost.
That’s not how insurance works. The purpose of insurance is not to transfer money from one person to another - this only occurs accidentally, or if someone isn’t doing their job when setting the price of coverage. The purpose is to smooth out the costs over time, so that if your expected lifetime expenses will be $1,000,000, you pay this at a rate of $20,000 per year instead of having it all pop up at once. Some people will unexpectedly have higher costs than predicted and some will unexpectedly have lower costs than predicted, but that doesn’t change the goal.
If you can’t be bothered to learn about the subject, you don’t have anything to contribute to the discussion.
I feel legislation should be bound to the professionals in this land who take this oath, so that it backs them up financially and ethically, by providing care that is reasonably accessible to those that cannot do so themselves. Because certain technologies, methods and skills that have been devised and taught by such individuals who take the oath to save, extend, and lessen the suffering of any life, the federal government should deem such care a civil right (not merely goods and services) and therefore paid by the population through taxation (or other similar means).
I’m not convinced the two are in a direct causal relationship.
It seems to me that market forces (competition, inflation, pricing coalitions, etc) are how we got to where we are today. Unless you can show that government control is somehow how we got here, it’s irrelevant which time period had more government control.
It seems obvious to me that our market has priced us out of healthcare, but if you can explain how a market with less regulation would work better, I’m all ears.
It’s funny, you say that as if you have “learned” about UHC. There is a word for this sort of behavior but Bricker won’t let me use it.
It would be really helpful if you accepted that you don’t actually know anything about UHC, reject the lies that your handlers told you, and consider the things people with experience tell you.
UHC is not one single entity that you pull out of a box. The system they have in Japan would be unrecognizable to a Canadian. The system in Britain is different than the one in France.
So when Rush Limbaugh tries to lump Canada and France in the same example, he’s wrong.
If it helps, try to imagine describing democracy to someone in North Korea. Is it the same in every democratic country? Australia has fine for people that don’t vote, Canada doesn’t. UHC is just like that, a concept that gets applied and provides a slightly better system than a totalitarian regime.
Far as I’m concerned, the variety of nations that UHC applies to is another indicator of its basic value. Entirely different cultures, entirely different definitions of health, etc. and in all these cases, the same approach works. Indicates to me that there is a fundamental efficiency at work here that transcends cultural differences and approaches.
How can it be obvious that “our free market” did anything since “our free market” doesn’t exist? If I said it’s obvious that our barter system in health care is what is the problem, would you just accept that we have a barter system? You asked the question “Hasn’t the free market made healthcare inaccessible to the average person?” I’m simply pointing out that we don’t have a free market in health care, so that can’t have been the problem.
You waxed nostalgic about the past, and I pointed out that we had more of a free market in the past. That certainly doesn’t prove that moving more in the direction of the free market would recreate those conditions, but it certainly seems to odd to blame something that was more descriptive of the desired situation than is true for the (now) undesired situation.