Quote:
Originally Posted by IsiliRunite
First and foremost, I do not believe that health care is a fundamental human right. I understand that health care is an important part of being alive, and that life is a fundamental human right. While these views seem somewhat contradictory, putting health care in line with other crucial-for-life resources such as food, water, and shelter reveals that health care does not warrant a federal government bureau to ensure its availability to all humans; plenty of Americans go to bed malnourished and unsheltered each night. Perhaps the desire for universal health care stems from citizens who live decently well aside from health care, because health care is an unreasonably priced commodity that is necessary for life, or maybe these citizens who campaign for universal health care don't empathize enough with the fact that a lot of people go to bed on the side of the road each night and consequently have not thought about creating government agencies to end the practice that does not immediately affect them in addition to overpriced health care. I do agree that health care is very unreasonably priced...
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I think its right to ask health care supporters what the difference is between food/shelter and health care. All are essential to life. And yet food/shelter has never been strictly guaranteed by the constitution and therefore legally government sponsored, so why would health care be sponsored?
The problem with this thinking, as Sean pointed out, is varied....
1. not because its costly for the middle class and they only care about their own, its pricey for everyone. even people who can't eat. We would see the same push to regulate and centrally administer food if that became a problem for everyone underneath the richest 2%
2. We actually do guarantee essential resources through public water works, roads, red cross, national guard. Is not protection from danger, infrastructure and roads just as essential to life? And yet we see the government at play already in these areas. So we can think of health care as a bread line. Or we can see it as one's own personal katrina. So we have emergency services for natural disasters by city. My question is what is the difference between someone who lives in new orleans facing a cat 5 hurricane and someone diagnosed with acute adult onset leukemia, who never drank or smoked?
3. The constitution is a legal document. Not a bible of ethics. That means while it does not legally allow for progressive measures to defeat social ills, it does not strictly disallow the possibility. Which means strict constitutionalists risk seeming like the type to walk past a stabbing victim without calling 911 because he's/she's not legally bound to do so. What I'm saying is the human condition is not perfectly encapsulated in the Constitution and its folly to shoe horn our intellect into it.
4. Like it or not, government programs work to clean up the mess caused by markets that have become imbalanced. Its just a fact that Roosevelt's progressive policies of government subsidies and progressive programs defeated run away deflation and unemployment. We have similarly bleak circumstances in HMO based health care.
So while I agree with your essay philosophically, because like I said, I'm dealing with universal health care right now, and its a real problem up here in Canada. And I do have a lot of beliefs in the libertarian corner.
But opponents have got to do better than talk about the abstracts of freedom and the constitution and move forward to actually talk about a practical implementation of reform.
So I'm asking you, how do we reform the current situation, by actually covering people's health care without universal health care?