3 ms·

Contrarian argument regarding point 2: I find it weird and misguided how people think that using coercion to force people into buying healthcare is somehow acc

by zarro 7y ago

Contrarian argument regarding point 2: I find it weird and misguided how people think that using coercion to force people into buying healthcare is somehow acceptable. To those that think it will make the cost of healthcare more expensive for the rest of us, I think that is a dubious assertion, in fact I think it will get much cheaper. The presumption that they are in contentious debate with is the necessity that different people have to get different tiers of service based on how much they pay. It makes all the sense in the world when you compare it to any other business. You wouldn't expect for someone who paid $1M to get the same level of treatment as someone who paid $100. People would buy insurance according to different tier levels of quality and risk profile, with their being astronomically high costs of insurance for old wealthy rich people, who in their desire to prolong life will incentivize creation of new modes of treatment to cure themselves (Which in the short run the development of which will help them, but in the long run, everyone, as after it gets discovered and scaled it will get cheaper). People would also buy cheaper level of tiers, from which naturally the quality of treatment, and queues will get lower/longer. You will also have people that don't buy insurance, and this should be their prerogative to do, as it would be the healthcare providers prerogative to decide whether to provide them with free treatment (they are not slaves, they are not obligated to provide a free service, and what makes the people that don't pay more important or a higher priority than those that willingly pay and fund these services). I'm not saying that this is the BEST solution, I'm saying that this is BETTER than anything else proposed which leads to things like the "cobra effect" in which you make the initial problem way worse by the implemented solution, than by what it would have been without it.

lotsofpulp 7y ago
>It makes all the sense in the world when you compare it to any other business. You wouldn't expect for someone who paid $1M to get the same level of treatment as someone who paid $100. Currently, society does not find it acceptable for someone to die from a heart attack if they cannot pay for healthcare. And people already get different levels of care.
- zarro 7y ago
  I don't see how you can justify without using a double standard the idea that its okay to use coercion to take advantage of a minority to enforce an idea of "acceptable" that they might not agree with.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    It's not a double standard, I'm claiming that the way society works right now, people don't have complete freedom. Hospitals don't have the freedom to turn people away, even people don't have the freedom to refuse healthcare, so obviously something has to give from the side receiving the product/service (healthcare). It's similar to having to pay taxes for the myriad reasons. You can't opt out of roads and water and other infrastructure. If voters came out and changed the requirement for hospitals to provide healthcare, or let people forego healthcare, then we can perhaps treat healthcare like any other business.
  - zarro 7y ago
    I think the way that it works in America at least is that you have a minority of rich and healthy people and a majority that does not have much money and is not super healthy. Our democracy is suppose to be limited, in that the government is not suppose to use its monopoly of coercion to enforce the majority decision on the minority. So to get around this the voters forced the hospitals to treat them, even if the question "what if you can't pay for it" was left tacitly unanswered. The hospitals of course can't afford to pay for this bill either so they give the government an invoice for it, and the governments only way of paying that invoice is by increasing taxes. Which is a conundrum of where we are at. Of course the majority (if its poor and sick) is going to pick the path of least resistance - which is to vote short term to get a subsidy from the healthy and rich (instead of pursuing to long term path toward developing skills to provide valuable services so that you could get rich and afford valuable services, such as healthcare, not to mention living life in a way to minimize chance of getting sick/ill in the first place.) But in the end this sort of "take from the rich and minority" mentality just leads to the dissolution of thevalue that they create, and unfortunately only after they are gone, to the dissolution of the principle architects of that mentality.

by zarro 7y ago

lotsofpulp 7y ago

>It makes all the sense in the world when you compare it to any other business. You wouldn't expect for someone who paid $1M to get the same level of treatment as someone who paid $100. Currently, society does not find it acceptable for someone to die from a heart attack if they cannot pay for healthcare. And people already get different levels of care.

zarro 7y ago
I don't see how you can justify without using a double standard the idea that its okay to use coercion to take advantage of a minority to enforce an idea of "acceptable" that they might not agree with.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  It's not a double standard, I'm claiming that the way society works right now, people don't have complete freedom. Hospitals don't have the freedom to turn people away, even people don't have the freedom to refuse healthcare, so obviously something has to give from the side receiving the product/service (healthcare). It's similar to having to pay taxes for the myriad reasons. You can't opt out of roads and water and other infrastructure. If voters came out and changed the requirement for hospitals to provide healthcare, or let people forego healthcare, then we can perhaps treat healthcare like any other business.
- zarro 7y ago
  I think the way that it works in America at least is that you have a minority of rich and healthy people and a majority that does not have much money and is not super healthy. Our democracy is suppose to be limited, in that the government is not suppose to use its monopoly of coercion to enforce the majority decision on the minority. So to get around this the voters forced the hospitals to treat them, even if the question "what if you can't pay for it" was left tacitly unanswered. The hospitals of course can't afford to pay for this bill either so they give the government an invoice for it, and the governments only way of paying that invoice is by increasing taxes. Which is a conundrum of where we are at. Of course the majority (if its poor and sick) is going to pick the path of least resistance - which is to vote short term to get a subsidy from the healthy and rich (instead of pursuing to long term path toward developing skills to provide valuable services so that you could get rich and afford valuable services, such as healthcare, not to mention living life in a way to minimize chance of getting sick/ill in the first place.) But in the end this sort of "take from the rich and minority" mentality just leads to the dissolution of thevalue that they create, and unfortunately only after they are gone, to the dissolution of the principle architects of that mentality.