Author Topic: My Problem with Universal Health Care  (Read 919 times)

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Alia

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Re: My Problem with Universal Health Care
« on: September 21, 2009, 08:24:57 pm »
I don't agree with your assertion that to want people to have access to healthiness is to believe it to be a right. I have always drawn the distinction between rights and publicly provided services.

A right is something you have, that a dictator can take away from you. Such as your life, your property, your freedom, your ability to speak, ect. That is the basis of the bill of rights in this country. To protect people from other people, and from the government. Not to protect people from themselves or from nature. This I believe is primarily their responsibility.

If Life is a right, then so is Health. In an Alia-style fascist dictatorship, the dictator makes the disctinction between the inferior genes and their hapless bearer. One must be wiped out; the other should not be punished. As long as the latter is behaving responsibly, and is in fact a victim of his own body, the State will pick up the slack, provided the person agrees to be sterilised. If Technology advances far enough, they would even be allowed to have children as long as their gametes go through a process that assures the disorder is not passed on.

I have no problem with Health being a right for those that are responsible enough to earn it; I have a problem with the alternative, with people dying of heart problems at 45 while cigarette smokers who drink and drug outlast them, even if they die more slowly and painfully when the time comes. Protecting people from Nature is a part of creating a world where instead of chaos and randomness, we have rewards for responsibility and punishments for bad behaviour. This replaces helplessness and apathy with a healthy dose of drive, pride and deserving in accomplishment, and confidense for the broad masses. I think that's worth it, because Humans need it. In the Past, this need was filled by gods who were either punishing you or rewarding you, depending upon your behaviour. Without these gods, without the false assurance of fairness they provide, hopelessness takes over. One of the only benefits of a large government is that it can provide this fairness, only real, instead of false.


I also see a fundamental flaw with your proposed system. If you cut compensation to doctors, less will aspire to be doctors. The fewer doctors there are, the longer the wait time will be to see them. This is why you can't fix prices. The same holds true of any commodity. if you say grain can only be a certain price, then people will stop growing it and chose another more profitable crop.

Managing the economy in this way will only guarantee that for every sector you regulate, others will expand, and that one will contract. This will create shortages in some places, and unneeded surpluses in others.

For your system to work, you would need to be able to force a certain number of people to become doctors. And that would require radically changing our system of government.

I don't think so, the "force" is already there, and the State would simply have to take everyone who needs a job and put them through the system I outlined. If they aren't perfect, so what? They can still learn. Standards are kept artificially high to inflate the price of medical care and the profits of doctors. I'm talking about tearing down this artificial wall, not making more.

Your thought about Capitalism is very true. But remember, Capitalism is not the fairness it seems to be. Bound up in it, it has all the price-fixing, absence of competition, and control of the economy which I can tell you despise. Only, in Capitalism, instead of fixing prices so they don't go higher, Trusts fix them so they stay artificially high. Instead of denying competion with State-run control, big companies work together to crush upstarts with their greater financial power and keep their pockets fat.

You should forget words like Capitalism and Socialism, and more importantly, their associations. Capitalism is not any more neccesarilly associated with free competition than Socialism is, except in the rare case when Capitaism is newborn and only if everyone starts on a decently level playing field.

It's just a matter of where the control comes from.