5 ms·

Of course they do, and this is why medicare for all is a great idea. It strikes me as rather perverse that health care is largely a for-profit business and that

Of course they do, and this is why medicare for all is a great idea. It strikes me as rather perverse that health care is largely a for-profit business and that even non-profits (like systems associated with religions) are all about cutting corners and maximizing revenues. It seems logicl to me that health care be a right.

rednerrus 6y ago
This is the really insidious part: They don't have to cut corners. The government covers the majority of the sickest people. The average US citizen pays into the private pool for the majority of their healthy life and then gets handed off to the government to cover them when they get expensive. It's literally a ripoff.
chmod600 6y ago
I don't think the language of "rights" makes sense here. It conflates things like free speech or religion, which are self-serve rights, with something someone else must provide. Rights as in the Bill of Rights can be sued over endlessly in the courts. But the courts aren't a good place to sort out resource allocations, like doctor with patient. Imagine one person suing to be a pateint of a particular doctor (perhaps a specialist with uncommonly-good outcomes). Or someone suing for frequent helicopter ambulence rides from their remote cabin in the woods. These may be interesting questions to settle, but the language of "rights" is unhelpful.
- xxpor 6y ago
  The bill of rights includes the right to an attorney. That's a resource allocation.
  - centimeter 6y ago
    > The bill of rights includes the right to an attorney. You can't just show up whenever and get an attorney. You only get an attorney when the government is prosecuting you.
  - chmod600 6y ago
    That can be seen as just part of the burden of charging you with a crime: the state needs to provide you with a judge, jury, and counsel. Amd it's not the greatest example of rights-in-action if you ask me. Often such counsel is overloaded and just tries to negotiate a plea deal rather than provide a robust defense.
    - xxpor 6y ago
      I'm not saying we do a good job of it in practice, but it is a positive right in the BOR.
      - chmod600 6y ago
        The BOR ends up constantly in the courts. Do we want our medical system to be created by the courts?
        paulmd 6y ago
        The solution to that is acting positively to create a system that we think is strong enough to withstand challenges in the courts. You don't have to wait until the courts strike down your public-defender system for being wholly inadequate, for example, you can properly fund the system in the first place and then the courts won't be legislating it. "standard of care" is the term that comes to mind. And yes, like all human systems there will be disagreements about what that standard should be, and some system for resolving those, and in a handful of cases people will receive unfavorable outcomes. The point is to act to minimize those outcomes and provide high-quality care to as many people as possible. The alternative is having those arguments with your insurance company, and you will lose. The death panels exist, they always have, and they are held in a building with "Aetna" on the side.
        chmod600 6y ago
        If "acting positively" means "work it out in the legislature", then we agree. But the language of rights starts to push this responsibility into the courts (at least in the US). I am not saying there will be no arguments. I'm just saying we shouldn't hammer out the details of a medical system in the courts.
  - thepasswordis 6y ago
    If you are trying to convince people to have the government gatekeep their healthcare, then I don't thinkt he attorney's provided by the "right to an attorney" are something you should mention.
    - xxpor 6y ago
      I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything in this case other than OP's point doesn't make sense.
- topkai22 6y ago
  There is a large on going literature regarding the distinction of “positive and negative rights” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights) Personally I’m with you- generally speaking “positive rights” do not carry the same weight as negative rights and need a different term (I propose “really good ideas”) but people with our viewpoint have been losing that battle for a long time.
  - xxpor 6y ago
    Because ultimately all rights are just made up. They're only what sufficient amounts of people agree to. They're all just really good ideas.
    - splintercell 6y ago
      Rights aren't made up is a founding principle of America, every immigrant who naturalizes has to agree and uphold this principle of rights being natural.
      - jquery 6y ago
        This. Might as well start saying well all men created equal is obviously BS so we need to stop acting like it’s true. Our founders thought it to be a very useful frame to start with the idea of natural rights versus really good ideas.
      - xxpor 6y ago
        Yeah, they said they're "endowed by the creator". Well there's no creator other than physics and chemistry. What now?
    - shock-value 6y ago
      The way I look at it is some rights are good ideas, some are bad ideas, and some are nonsensical and unworkable ideas (regardless of whether they would be good or bad in an idealized world). Health care as a right is the last of those.
- ppseafield 6y ago
  A right to vote has to be provided. Right to an attorney is something that might haveto to be provided. Right to a jury by one's peers has to be provided. Right to appeal has to be provided. Even protests generally require permits, which have to be provided. You have the right to be treated equally based on your gender or race, which, if it is provided to one, has to be provided to all. There are many rights which create the burden of work not only for the government but also for things like public businesses.
  - shock-value 6y ago
    All of the things you mentioned are in the spirit of "if this thing is available, everyone must have fair access to it". If there is to be a vote, everyone (of age) must be able to participate. If you are to be tried, you must have representation, a jury of peers, and possibility of appeals (alternative being that case against you is dropped). If protest permitting is instituted, they must be provided fairly and expeditiously. Equal treatment is another type of right and even more different than a hypothetical "right to health care". The issue with health care is that it might not be available (depending on if you are in a remote area, public health circumstances e.g. strains due to a pandemic, limited specialized equipment, etc.). So a "right" to utilize it is unrealistic. At best you can posit a "right to non-discrimination of access to health care on the basis of X,Y,Z" where X,Y,Z can be such things as "gender, race, age, etc." or more politically contentiously "preexisting conditions, enrollment in insurance, ability to pay, etc". To be clear I also favor public universal health insurance of some kind. But I also think that considering that health care is or could be a "right" is kind of ridiculous.
    - vlovich123 6y ago
      > "if this thing is available, everyone must have fair access to it" Ok sounds. Good. Medical treatment is an available service. Everyone should have fair access, no? > The issue with health care is that it might not be available (depending on if you are in a remote area, public health circumstances e.g. strains due to a pandemic, limited specialized equipment, etc.). So a "right" to utilize it is unrealistic. At best you can posit a "right to non-discrimination of access to health care on the basis of X,Y,Z" where X,Y,Z can be such things as "gender, race, age, etc." or more politically contentiously "preexisting conditions, enrollment in insurance, ability to pay, etc". To me this reads like pretty creative mental gymnastics to try to exclude universal health care from the original premise. If you're in a remote area, your access to treatment may be of a different quality/difficulty to obtain but everyone in your area will have the same difficulty. > At best you can posit a "right to non-discrimination of access to health care on the basis of X,Y,Z" where X,Y,Z can be such things as "gender, race, age, etc." or more politically contentiously "preexisting conditions, enrollment in insurance, ability to pay, etc". That's kind of how voting rights are today but they certainly weren't always. We don't argue as much about the poll tax or various "poll exams" anymore, but banning them at the time was "politically contentious". Something being "politically contentious" is not a good argument for or against doing something as it's really easy to generate controversy (look at the modern news landscape).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- MAGZine 6y ago
  every human has a right to be healthy. However it is provided is fine. We, as a society, have the means to provide this. Just because we've set up a system that profits off of people being sick should not invalidate people's right to be healthy. That's our doing. I also find claiming some things are "self-serve rights," to be hilarious. People going to court over constituional violations. Is that self serve? Rights, especially the ones you mention are only "free," or "self-serve," as long as all parties agree to provide them for free. If someone decides that they want to discriminate against your religion, they can do so, and it is up to you to seek remedy. So how is that self-serve? It isn't. No right is. Things are being provided for you which we, as a society, have agreed are essential. How health is not apart of that is beyond me.
baron816 6y ago
> health care be a right If something is a “right”, it doesn’t imply the government should just take care of everything and it should be totally socialized. One might consider “clothing” a right, but I don’t think we’d want the government to control what we wear. I agree that government should ensure universal healthcare, and maybe a single payer system would be the correct model (though other countries have had better results with partially market driven approaches). But my belief there is based on the fact that humans aren’t currently able to make good decisions about their own health care, and government panels probably would be able to make better decisions regarding public health.
- gknoy 6y ago
  > One might consider “clothing” a right, but I don’t think we’d want the government to control what we wear. I think it would be _pretty awesome_ if freely available durable (and warm) clothing were made available to people that needed it (homeless, foster kids, etc), much the way my taxes help subsidize peoples' food costs. There's a big difference between saying, "You have to wear this", and "We'll all pay so that people who need it can get shoes/socks/pants/jacket X times per year if needed".
  - baron816 6y ago
    I don’t think that would be awesome at all. Could you imagine a committee trying do decide what clothes are acceptable. All sorts of “buy American” clauses thrown in. Each Congressional district would have to have its own factory to produce one part of the outfit. How about we have the Gov set up a negative income tax so that if you can afford clothes, you can go buy some. Or if you don’t need new clothes, you can spend that money somewhere else. Healthcare isn’t driven by want or choice. Government committees can look at data to figure out how to distribute resources. And we don’t want more healthcare like we want more clothes.
    - MAGZine 6y ago
      Where I grew up, clothing for children was tax deductible. It was essential, so a system was put in place to serve the need. I'm not sure why you ended up in a metaphorical pit of despair over one imagined doomsday-scenario implementation.
dionian 6y ago
I think we can all agree that if resources were infinite there would be no need to think about charging for anything
arminiusreturns 6y ago
People really need to learm the difference between negative and positive rights.
spaetzleesser 6y ago
If only the democrats had had a little courage and ran a candidate that embraced Medicare for All. I think with Biden not embracing it they have lost a great opportunity for many years. It would be the most straightforward way to universal health care. The systems are all there, it has shown that it works and people want it. Now Biden is talking about a nebulous “public option” which won’t go anywhere. What a waste.
john_moscow 6y ago
The unspoken thing is that current Medicare is only sustainable because the hospitals are allowed to recover the costs by charging whatever they can get away with to uncovered people. If everyone is covered, quite a lot of money will have to come from elsewhere and it's not like seriously raising taxes to source it would get very popular.
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  US healthcare is totally overpriced. I don’t believe for a single second that they are losing money on Medicare. Maybe in some areas but not on average.
- paulmd 6y ago
  US healthcare spending is already far higher than anywhere else in the world. It's not a "quantity" problem, it's an "allocation" problem. Too much is allocated to various middlemen for profit, and generally too much is wasted on care that does not produce good returns in terms of quality-adjusted years-of-life. For example, too much is spent on the elderly and sick, and not enough on maintaining the healthy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita#/media/File:OECD_health_expenditure_per_capita_by_country.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
srswtf123 6y ago
For-profit healthcare ought to be a crime against humanity. It certainly feels like it is.
- jquery 6y ago
  Resource allocation is hard. Profit isn’t the problem. Access is. We should be spending more on healthcare as a country, not less. Guaranteed health care for everyone regardless of income level can still happen in a regulated for-profit system. USA federal government is just in general shitty at execution. I didn’t get any stimulus checks. My unemployment I was supposed to get went to some other address I never inputted into the arcane-af website I had to use to register for unemployment. A traffic ticket that should’ve only cost me $29 ended up costing $468 because the government messed up and I didn’t want to risk getting covid going to court to protest and there was no way to appeal online. I would dread these same people in charge of my health care without at least the option of switching providers. All that happened in the past 6 months. If our government could start getting the basics right I’d trust them with my healthcare. Maybe MfA is a great idea but it should be expanded slowly, the way Biden has suggested.
  - ArtDev 6y ago
    The president od my small local hospital is paid $985,000 per year. I looked it up. My local hospital also cuts lots of corners to save a buck. I know some nurses who work there. They understaff while they overcharge patients and play absurd games with billing. I think this is pretty normal in the US. The ratio of hospital beds to population is unusually small for a developed country. As soon as my kids are a little older, I am getting out of this country. I am healthy now but as I get older I get more concerned about getting caught in the US healthcare system.
    - jquery 6y ago
      > The president od my small local hospital is paid $985,000 per year. I looked it up. The CEO of a small local tech company is paid $10m per year. I looked it up. > “my local hospital doesn’t allocate resources right” Not surprising. Resource allocation is a difficult problem. Perhaps the hospital would be better off with limits on what they are allowed to pay people like you seem to be suggesting, but I doubt it. To me this is all fundamentally a sign the USA doesn’t spend enough on health care. I don’t have confidence price controls and nationalization will improve matters.

rednerrus 6y ago

This is the really insidious part: They don't have to cut corners. The government covers the majority of the sickest people. The average US citizen pays into the private pool for the majority of their healthy life and then gets handed off to the government to cover them when they get expensive. It's literally a ripoff.

chmod600 6y ago

I don't think the language of "rights" makes sense here. It conflates things like free speech or religion, which are self-serve rights, with something someone else must provide. Rights as in the Bill of Rights can be sued over endlessly in the courts. But the courts aren't a good place to sort out resource allocations, like doctor with patient. Imagine one person suing to be a pateint of a particular doctor (perhaps a specialist with uncommonly-good outcomes). Or someone suing for frequent helicopter ambulence rides from their remote cabin in the woods. These may be interesting questions to settle, but the language of "rights" is unhelpful.

xxpor 6y ago
The bill of rights includes the right to an attorney. That's a resource allocation.
- centimeter 6y ago
  > The bill of rights includes the right to an attorney. You can't just show up whenever and get an attorney. You only get an attorney when the government is prosecuting you.
- chmod600 6y ago
  That can be seen as just part of the burden of charging you with a crime: the state needs to provide you with a judge, jury, and counsel. Amd it's not the greatest example of rights-in-action if you ask me. Often such counsel is overloaded and just tries to negotiate a plea deal rather than provide a robust defense.
  - xxpor 6y ago
    I'm not saying we do a good job of it in practice, but it is a positive right in the BOR.
    - chmod600 6y ago
      The BOR ends up constantly in the courts. Do we want our medical system to be created by the courts?
      - paulmd 6y ago
        The solution to that is acting positively to create a system that we think is strong enough to withstand challenges in the courts. You don't have to wait until the courts strike down your public-defender system for being wholly inadequate, for example, you can properly fund the system in the first place and then the courts won't be legislating it. "standard of care" is the term that comes to mind. And yes, like all human systems there will be disagreements about what that standard should be, and some system for resolving those, and in a handful of cases people will receive unfavorable outcomes. The point is to act to minimize those outcomes and provide high-quality care to as many people as possible. The alternative is having those arguments with your insurance company, and you will lose. The death panels exist, they always have, and they are held in a building with "Aetna" on the side.
        chmod600 6y ago
        If "acting positively" means "work it out in the legislature", then we agree. But the language of rights starts to push this responsibility into the courts (at least in the US). I am not saying there will be no arguments. I'm just saying we shouldn't hammer out the details of a medical system in the courts.
- thepasswordis 6y ago
  If you are trying to convince people to have the government gatekeep their healthcare, then I don't thinkt he attorney's provided by the "right to an attorney" are something you should mention.
  - xxpor 6y ago
    I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything in this case other than OP's point doesn't make sense.
topkai22 6y ago
There is a large on going literature regarding the distinction of “positive and negative rights” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights) Personally I’m with you- generally speaking “positive rights” do not carry the same weight as negative rights and need a different term (I propose “really good ideas”) but people with our viewpoint have been losing that battle for a long time.
- xxpor 6y ago
  Because ultimately all rights are just made up. They're only what sufficient amounts of people agree to. They're all just really good ideas.
  - splintercell 6y ago
    Rights aren't made up is a founding principle of America, every immigrant who naturalizes has to agree and uphold this principle of rights being natural.
    - jquery 6y ago
      This. Might as well start saying well all men created equal is obviously BS so we need to stop acting like it’s true. Our founders thought it to be a very useful frame to start with the idea of natural rights versus really good ideas.
    - xxpor 6y ago
      Yeah, they said they're "endowed by the creator". Well there's no creator other than physics and chemistry. What now?
  - shock-value 6y ago
    The way I look at it is some rights are good ideas, some are bad ideas, and some are nonsensical and unworkable ideas (regardless of whether they would be good or bad in an idealized world). Health care as a right is the last of those.
ppseafield 6y ago
A right to vote has to be provided. Right to an attorney is something that might haveto to be provided. Right to a jury by one's peers has to be provided. Right to appeal has to be provided. Even protests generally require permits, which have to be provided. You have the right to be treated equally based on your gender or race, which, if it is provided to one, has to be provided to all. There are many rights which create the burden of work not only for the government but also for things like public businesses.
- shock-value 6y ago
  All of the things you mentioned are in the spirit of "if this thing is available, everyone must have fair access to it". If there is to be a vote, everyone (of age) must be able to participate. If you are to be tried, you must have representation, a jury of peers, and possibility of appeals (alternative being that case against you is dropped). If protest permitting is instituted, they must be provided fairly and expeditiously. Equal treatment is another type of right and even more different than a hypothetical "right to health care". The issue with health care is that it might not be available (depending on if you are in a remote area, public health circumstances e.g. strains due to a pandemic, limited specialized equipment, etc.). So a "right" to utilize it is unrealistic. At best you can posit a "right to non-discrimination of access to health care on the basis of X,Y,Z" where X,Y,Z can be such things as "gender, race, age, etc." or more politically contentiously "preexisting conditions, enrollment in insurance, ability to pay, etc". To be clear I also favor public universal health insurance of some kind. But I also think that considering that health care is or could be a "right" is kind of ridiculous.
  - vlovich123 6y ago
    > "if this thing is available, everyone must have fair access to it" Ok sounds. Good. Medical treatment is an available service. Everyone should have fair access, no? > The issue with health care is that it might not be available (depending on if you are in a remote area, public health circumstances e.g. strains due to a pandemic, limited specialized equipment, etc.). So a "right" to utilize it is unrealistic. At best you can posit a "right to non-discrimination of access to health care on the basis of X,Y,Z" where X,Y,Z can be such things as "gender, race, age, etc." or more politically contentiously "preexisting conditions, enrollment in insurance, ability to pay, etc". To me this reads like pretty creative mental gymnastics to try to exclude universal health care from the original premise. If you're in a remote area, your access to treatment may be of a different quality/difficulty to obtain but everyone in your area will have the same difficulty. > At best you can posit a "right to non-discrimination of access to health care on the basis of X,Y,Z" where X,Y,Z can be such things as "gender, race, age, etc." or more politically contentiously "preexisting conditions, enrollment in insurance, ability to pay, etc". That's kind of how voting rights are today but they certainly weren't always. We don't argue as much about the poll tax or various "poll exams" anymore, but banning them at the time was "politically contentious". Something being "politically contentious" is not a good argument for or against doing something as it's really easy to generate controversy (look at the modern news landscape).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
MAGZine 6y ago
every human has a right to be healthy. However it is provided is fine. We, as a society, have the means to provide this. Just because we've set up a system that profits off of people being sick should not invalidate people's right to be healthy. That's our doing. I also find claiming some things are "self-serve rights," to be hilarious. People going to court over constituional violations. Is that self serve? Rights, especially the ones you mention are only "free," or "self-serve," as long as all parties agree to provide them for free. If someone decides that they want to discriminate against your religion, they can do so, and it is up to you to seek remedy. So how is that self-serve? It isn't. No right is. Things are being provided for you which we, as a society, have agreed are essential. How health is not apart of that is beyond me.

baron816 6y ago

> health care be a right If something is a “right”, it doesn’t imply the government should just take care of everything and it should be totally socialized. One might consider “clothing” a right, but I don’t think we’d want the government to control what we wear. I agree that government should ensure universal healthcare, and maybe a single payer system would be the correct model (though other countries have had better results with partially market driven approaches). But my belief there is based on the fact that humans aren’t currently able to make good decisions about their own health care, and government panels probably would be able to make better decisions regarding public health.

gknoy 6y ago
> One might consider “clothing” a right, but I don’t think we’d want the government to control what we wear. I think it would be _pretty awesome_ if freely available durable (and warm) clothing were made available to people that needed it (homeless, foster kids, etc), much the way my taxes help subsidize peoples' food costs. There's a big difference between saying, "You have to wear this", and "We'll all pay so that people who need it can get shoes/socks/pants/jacket X times per year if needed".
- baron816 6y ago
  I don’t think that would be awesome at all. Could you imagine a committee trying do decide what clothes are acceptable. All sorts of “buy American” clauses thrown in. Each Congressional district would have to have its own factory to produce one part of the outfit. How about we have the Gov set up a negative income tax so that if you can afford clothes, you can go buy some. Or if you don’t need new clothes, you can spend that money somewhere else. Healthcare isn’t driven by want or choice. Government committees can look at data to figure out how to distribute resources. And we don’t want more healthcare like we want more clothes.
  - MAGZine 6y ago
    Where I grew up, clothing for children was tax deductible. It was essential, so a system was put in place to serve the need. I'm not sure why you ended up in a metaphorical pit of despair over one imagined doomsday-scenario implementation.

dionian 6y ago

I think we can all agree that if resources were infinite there would be no need to think about charging for anything

arminiusreturns 6y ago

People really need to learm the difference between negative and positive rights.

spaetzleesser 6y ago

If only the democrats had had a little courage and ran a candidate that embraced Medicare for All. I think with Biden not embracing it they have lost a great opportunity for many years. It would be the most straightforward way to universal health care. The systems are all there, it has shown that it works and people want it. Now Biden is talking about a nebulous “public option” which won’t go anywhere. What a waste.

john_moscow 6y ago

The unspoken thing is that current Medicare is only sustainable because the hospitals are allowed to recover the costs by charging whatever they can get away with to uncovered people. If everyone is covered, quite a lot of money will have to come from elsewhere and it's not like seriously raising taxes to source it would get very popular.

spaetzleesser 6y ago
US healthcare is totally overpriced. I don’t believe for a single second that they are losing money on Medicare. Maybe in some areas but not on average.
paulmd 6y ago
US healthcare spending is already far higher than anywhere else in the world. It's not a "quantity" problem, it's an "allocation" problem. Too much is allocated to various middlemen for profit, and generally too much is wasted on care that does not produce good returns in terms of quality-adjusted years-of-life. For example, too much is spent on the elderly and sick, and not enough on maintaining the healthy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita#/media/File:OECD_health_expenditure_per_capita_by_country.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

srswtf123 6y ago

For-profit healthcare ought to be a crime against humanity. It certainly feels like it is.

jquery 6y ago
Resource allocation is hard. Profit isn’t the problem. Access is. We should be spending more on healthcare as a country, not less. Guaranteed health care for everyone regardless of income level can still happen in a regulated for-profit system. USA federal government is just in general shitty at execution. I didn’t get any stimulus checks. My unemployment I was supposed to get went to some other address I never inputted into the arcane-af website I had to use to register for unemployment. A traffic ticket that should’ve only cost me $29 ended up costing $468 because the government messed up and I didn’t want to risk getting covid going to court to protest and there was no way to appeal online. I would dread these same people in charge of my health care without at least the option of switching providers. All that happened in the past 6 months. If our government could start getting the basics right I’d trust them with my healthcare. Maybe MfA is a great idea but it should be expanded slowly, the way Biden has suggested.
- ArtDev 6y ago
  The president od my small local hospital is paid $985,000 per year. I looked it up. My local hospital also cuts lots of corners to save a buck. I know some nurses who work there. They understaff while they overcharge patients and play absurd games with billing. I think this is pretty normal in the US. The ratio of hospital beds to population is unusually small for a developed country. As soon as my kids are a little older, I am getting out of this country. I am healthy now but as I get older I get more concerned about getting caught in the US healthcare system.
  - jquery 6y ago
    > The president od my small local hospital is paid $985,000 per year. I looked it up. The CEO of a small local tech company is paid $10m per year. I looked it up. > “my local hospital doesn’t allocate resources right” Not surprising. Resource allocation is a difficult problem. Perhaps the hospital would be better off with limits on what they are allowed to pay people like you seem to be suggesting, but I doubt it. To me this is all fundamentally a sign the USA doesn’t spend enough on health care. I don’t have confidence price controls and nationalization will improve matters.