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> you are hurting no one but yourself, and it is a stretch to say otherwise. Not that we should be providing government healthcare anyway. educate me here. bu
by itake 10y ago
> you are hurting no one but yourself, and it is a stretch to say otherwise. Not that we should be providing government healthcare anyway.
educate me here. but ignoring government healthcare, wouldn't private healthcare companies have higher costs for health conscious members if many of their members are making poor health decisions?
if someone chooses to smoke cigarettes and ends up getting lung cancer, I don't feel great about paying for their lung transplant even with private healthcare.
- lend000 10y agoYou're not. It's factored into their rates to the best of the insurance company's ability. Come on, this is HN...
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoOkay, if you want to be like that, then: The money these people spend on insurance could have been better spent elsewhere in the economy.
- lend000 10y agoAnd this is where I make a hard cutoff between what is expected for the social good and what is clearly infringing on individual rights. There is no perfect legal framework that knows how to balance individual freedoms with impacts to the "social good," so the heuristic I typically use is: if you are directly and provably infringing on someone else's rights (e.g. you can prove a factory is outputting a negative form of pollution, CO2), then it should be legally addressed. If it's an indirect concern like the above (how direct something is is also arbitrary, sure, so it comes down to being reasonable) which also assumes that the economy has a right to a person's money, then I would generally say leave it alone. Reasonable?