I am NOT a republican, a tea partier, a libertarian, or a Ron Paul supporter by any means.
However, in general, I agree with this position. I don’t know how you enforce it or regulate it. But given all available information, if you consciously choose to undertake a given risk, you should be responsible for the consequences. I believe it’s the same whether it’s drugs, skydiving, health insurance, etc.
I’m not sure what the shock is. Ron Paul is known to be a outlier, probably closer to a pure Libertarian rather than a main stream Republican. But what he said doesn’t seem to be that shocking.
The happy shouts from the Tea Partiers that we should just let the hypothetical patient in the given example die was very disturbing, and Ron Paul’s statement that we never had to turn away patients when the charity came from churches was a sick lie.
There isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with it, per se, but it essentially boils down to
“My money is more important than other people’s lives.”
If you can sleep on your moneybags comfortably at night with that kind of mantra, more power to you.
The real question you have to ask yourself is: What if we took it one step farther and instead of only having health insurance you had to have ‘fire insurance’ and ‘emergency rescue insurance’ to be guaranteed those services as well? Could you stand on your porch and watch your neighbor’s house burn down with his children inside and rationalize it as “Since he didn’t spring for fire insurance, he got what was coming to him” or if your family members were trapped in a car following a car accident, would you feel like it was [morally] right to have to call your local church to come help you cut them out of the car, even though the fire department rescued the occupants of the other vehicle, just because you couldn’t afford the ‘vehicular extraction rider’ on you emergency rescue insurance?
This is essentially what those that cheered at the debate believe. I’m not sure if it’s ignorance, naivety, sociopathy or selfishness that causes their beliefs, but it scares me.
“Welcome to America, I’ve got mine, so don’t f****** bother me.” Isn’t a motto I would choose for our country.
But that’s not really a practical position to take wrt to health care. Maybe you could argue we shouldn’t spend millions to cure some uninsured person who has stomach cancer, but what about when an unconscious person is wheeled into the ER with minutes to live. Do you really want to waste time seeing if they are insured? Do you really want to see the dead bodies of homeless people piled up in the streets during the cold winters? Even brushing aside the considerable ethical issues, its not something most people would be okay with in reality.
Apparently neither you nor Ron Paul are aware that hospitals and doctors will quite happily purse the uninsured for payment of services rendered, whether or not said people are insured or uninsured.
The only people who get free/charity treatment are those who truly can not pay the bills. Those same people can not be said to “choose” not to purchase health insurance, they simply can’t afford it.
Yes, hospitals are obligated to give treatment for immediately life-threatening problems. They are also able to pursue the patient for payment later. Is that really so unknown?
Aren’t there situations where relatively inexpensive early treatment would prevent costly damage to society later on? E.g. treating a poor man for a contagious disease “for free” is less expensive than the cost to society of letting him go around and infect other people.
Yea, there’s pretty decent public health arguments to not allowing the very sick to wander around untreated. We want people with TB to go the the hospital as soon as possible, for example. And you don’t want untreated ill people driving cars or buses or other jobs where loosing consciousness could lead to death and destruction.
But even if that wasn’t true, I think at the end of the day Americans just don’t agree with Paul. We’re not willing to allow the very sick to go untreated, even if its “their fault” they don’t have insurance.
What about the claim that churches had no trouble handling the problem of uninsured patients in the past, and could easily do so in the future? Are there any religious institutions or organizations out there that are supporting this idea-that the government should quit helping people in this manner because churches could handle the problem?
Between cheering for executions and cheering for sick uninsured people dying, the GOP would be well-served with independents (and certainly with disaffected liberals) if they kept the crowd participation to a minimum, I think.
Am I missing where the government is stepping in with free treatment for the wealthy? If you have money, you don’t qualify for Medicaid. If you choose to go to the hospital and aren’t insured, you will get a bill. Whether or not you pay it and risk the credit hit is up to you. While my company pays 100% of employee coverage, we can’t afford to extend the coverage to dependents. Many of my clerical employees that make less than 25K per year, don’t even qualify for free health care for their children. Who are these wealthy people that are getting treatment for free?
But don’t we say just this every single day? Is your money more important than the lives of people in your neighborhood? What about the people in your state? Your country? The world? How do you sleep at night knowing there are people dying all over the world who may otherwise have survived if they had your money?
No one here or anyplace else has said that the wealthy get free health care. Indeed, anyone who can afford insurance should buy it or be prepared to pay cash for services rendered, and that was part of the point of the health care reform law.
That said, however, people over 65 get Medicare, which is heavily subsidized by the government, and many keep their employer-sponsored insurance as a retirement benefit; this additional insurance often has the effect of reducing out-of-pocket expenses, such as deductibles and copays, to zero. (This is, of course, not including premiums, if there are any.) Medicare is, for the most part, not income-dependent, although you do have to qualify by working a certain number of quarters.
If the “wealthy” person is a veteran, s/he is also eligible for health care through the VA. The VA does means test beneficiaries, but if the veteran has a service-connected disability of (IIRC) 50% or higher, there is no out-of-pocket cost for care. Finally, if the veteran retired from the military, s/he is eligible for Tricare for Life, which has a very low premium and the potential for no out-of-pocket costs. (You would think that these would be relatively uncontroversial, considering that they’re part of the compensation package for military service. But I had some numbnuts tell me that he doesn’t pay taxes so veterans can have fancy prostheses and stuff.) But these are benefits extended regardless of income level, and I know several people who take advantage of these benefits even though they can afford private insurance and out-of-pocket expenses because it’s less expensive and because they’ve earned it.
Your co-workers may still be eligible for reduced-cost insurance through your state’s CHIP program. (IIRC, you’re in Florida, right?)
Society – and by that I mean everyone in society, liberal and conservative – will not accept a situation in which hospitals simply refuse to treat critically ill people just because they cannot afford treatment. Nobody wants to see dead bodies in the streets. Ron Paul may say what he wants but when reality hits, emergency cases will still get care. It would be intolerable to everybody any other way.
And then of course, as has been said in this thread, after the treatment the hospital does send a bill, followed up if necessary by collectors. The people who are not insured but who have some money do not get off scot free.
But during the actual emergency is not the time to decide whether or not to provide medical care.
Choose not to have health insurance? If you are laid off, it would require almost your entire check. Eating and keeping a roof over your head is a pretty good idea too. That is the decision people with little money have to make every day. They hope they get lucky and stay healthy . They forego doctor and dental visits. They can not afford them.
Nobody is apt to simply choose a risk that could risk their physical and financial health if they had options.
Even people on Medicare have to decide if they can afford health care. It pays 80 percent. If you get a 1000 dollar test, you have to come up with 200 bucks. That is a lot of money on Social Security. The average check is about 1100 bucks . Pay car , put gas in car, pay utilities and buy food, and then a doctors bill can be crippling. A serious illness is beyond your financial ability to maintain your financial health. You will go bankrupt.
Medicare also costs 100 bucks a month. it is not free. Every doctors visit costs 20 percent. When you are struggling, it can keep you from going to the doctor.
If you go to emergency, they can refuse to treat you unless you are very sick. Then they only have to stabilize you, then it is out the door. You will also get a bill.
The answer is obviously no (personally), we do give money [via taxes] that helps to save lives as much as we can manage. I’m only one person in a neighborhood of thousands, one man in a city of millions and 1/6.5 billionth of the human beings on this planet. Realistically we can only do so much. These people are actively cheering that we should do less. I can recognize that I could save someone’s life by driving around with the jaws of life all day looking for people trapped in their cars, but it’s cheaper, safer and more effective to hire professionals to do it, if everybody chipped in. If you don’t think we should have a societal system for caring for a man in a coma, explain why you should have one for cutting people out of cars.
Maybe it’s just a moral philosophy of mine, but when I’m on my deathbed, I won’t judge the success of my life on how many people I held ‘acountable’ for their choices or the number of zeros in my bank account, so I won’t act like that while I’m alive.
I just can’t wrap my head around the cognitive dissonance that exists when a country that claims to be 80% christian, the idea of creating a society of haves and have-nots, where the have-nots are happily left to die; is being held up as a way of correcting what is ‘wrong’ with our country. What part of “treat your neighbor like you would want to be treated” don’t they understand? I know Paul said this and he’s not from the religious right, but Bachmann and Perry are smoking the same stash.
Bolding mine.
Yeah, I “conciously chose” to be without health insurance. Why? Because no insurance company would “chose” to cover me. I COULD NOT get private health insurance, at any cost. Period.
I finally got insurance through work (two previous employers did not offer health insurance at all), waited through the pre-existing lockout period and ended up in ICU and the hospital 2 weeks later.
I got lucky. Damned lucky.
So, before you go blaming others for not living up to their responsibilities in procuring health insurance, you really should be aware that a whole hell of a lot of the time, it simply isn’t possible.
What libertarians all over the world are espousing is that there should be some personal responsibility attached to the “free shit” you crave.
Drug tests/Means testing for welfare/Medicare/Caid
Un-employment
Healthcare
Most people I know don’t mind chucking in a few bucks out of their own pocket to help people actually in need. When the people of need become reliant on that money however, it poses a problem.
When the people are constantly needing/wanting more, it poses a problem.
As has been stated before, we need to have a safety net, not a hammock. Entirely too many people never get off of the government teet, that is what I find unacceptable. Do something different.
That would be because it’s actually impossible for them (or some like them) to get off it. Somebody needs to pick the lettuce, somebody needs to drive the trash truck, somebody needs to unload the ships. These jobs will never be paid enough to cover the retardedly high American health care bills, and will always involve more health risks than a desk job. The truck driver might somehow climb the social ladder, but the truck’s still gonna be there for someone else to drive. There will always be a bottom to the barrel.
Of course, society could mandate employers to pay these bottom jobs more, or provide them with insurance, pensions and whatnot out of their own budget. But then you the consumer would have to pay more for these services that you need, too. Either way, you’re out the money.