11 ms·

Share of Americans skipping medical care due to money woes jumps significantly

91 points by mkolassa 3y ago

dfdg 3y ago
Encouraging generic drugs eases the problem a little bit. Right to health care should be in the constitution instead of right to own guns.
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  Health care requires other people’s labor though. If you make that a right you risk needing to implement some kind of forced labor system (sure it can be obfuscated as much as you like). Not taking guns doesn’t require anyone’s labor, so you don’t run into this hazard. I’m not particularly pro gun, I just don’t think positive rights are practical from a design perspective.
  - BlackSwanMan 3y ago
    [dead]
  - reaperman 3y ago
    Welp. Guess we can't have taxpayer funded roads then cuz all the forced labor needed for free roads. Guess we also can't have a right to K-12 education.
    - pfannkuchen 3y ago
      You are hopefully aware of the difference between a right granted to all citizens and a project funded by the government?
      - reaperman 3y ago
        I am. But you dont make sense. All Americans have a right to K-12 education, it's funded by the government. How is that different from all Americans having a right to healthcare, being funded by the government? If someone doesn't wanna be in healthcare anymore they can still switch to whatever they want to. They're not forced labor any more than teachers are. Perhaps you'd like to sign a petition to lower forced labor fed by high false-conviction rates in Louisiana? https://promiseofjustice.org/end-plantation-prisons https://promiseofjustice.org/end-plantation-prisons
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        pfannkuchen 3y ago
        There is fairly well developed theory in this area, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here. Americans do not have a “right” to education in the same way they have a “right” to e.g. free speech. The government can reduce or even eliminate state funded education without violating the constitution. If not enough e.g. teachers will work for the state (for the pay offered, based on tax revenue available, etc), the state can respond to changing circumstances by reducing or eliminating the education services provided. If education were to be added as a “right” then this reduction or elimination in service would not possible, unless you make that “right” so flimsy as to be basically meaningless (i.e. if the government is able to meaningfully remove it, it is not really a right). I don’t believe in forced prison labor at all, so yes I’d be happy to sign that petition. I’m not sure what it has to do with this discussion.
        reaperman 3y ago
        This didn’t convince me that federally funded right to healthcare would be forced labor any more than federally funded anything else.
        dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Americans do not have a “right” to education in the same way they have a “right” to e.g. free speech. OTOH, they do have a right to trial by jury, a right to counsel, and a right to vote in the sense that they have a right to free speech, and each of these rights require someone else’s labor.
    - Rebelgecko 3y ago
      You don't have the right to roads. Similarly education is mostly implemented at the state level, there's nothing legally preventing a state from saying that public school is now K-8 only. Laws requiring people to go to school are kind of a mixed bag, and compulsory education laws usually only apply to children (and in some cases only to pre-teens). AFAIK there's no legal forms of adult forced labor, except prisoners who are exempt from some rights.
      - reaperman 3y ago
        And yet despite being at the state level, all americans do have a right to K-12. Is that also forced labor?
        pfannkuchen 3y ago
        You don’t seem to understand what is meant by forced labor here. I am happy to explain it to you. A right is something that can never be legally violated by the government. It is possible for a health care system run by anyone to end up with a level of resources below what it would need to meet its commitments. If government runs health care and health care is a right, then the government is not legally allowed to fail to meet its health care commitments. Doing so would violate the right to health care, and violating rights is illegal. Therefore at that point the government must either compel resources be increased to match the commitment, regardless of any other factors, or cancel the right. If our plan includes the potential for raising resources to an arbitrary level in certain circumstances regardless of all other factors at that point, then at that point we would by definition need to implement forced labor. If our plan includes canceling a right under certain circumstances, then it is not really a right, is it?
        mcv 3y ago
        This sort of theorising doesn't seem to be very relevant in practice, and I frankly only see this from Americans. Other countries seem to be doing much better without hammering on this needless distinction. They make their health systems work by making sure it's sufficiently funded and well-organised, and don't need to account for a major party simply wanting to destroy it just to hurt people (except possibly the UK soon).
  - ok_dad 3y ago
    I seriously don’t understand people whose ethics accept that some folks will just die because they don’t want to pay an extra few dollars in taxes. You grew up here, your success or failure depends on the health of our society in many ways, and our society is falling apart because opportunistic capitalists drain all of the productivity with very little gain for the average person since the 70s. I guess we can keep playing Wild West until our country falls apart from malignant cases of not caring about your fellow human.
    - pfannkuchen 3y ago
      This is a great example of why discussing politics on the internet is annoying. People assume others’ positions and yell past each other. Not making healthcare a “right” does not preclude having a government run health care system. Why would it?
      - Sakos 3y ago
        Because generally the argument of "it doesn't need to be a right" is coupled with arguing why universal healthcare is bad. Your comment is a great example for how people try to muddy the waters and distract from the issues at stake.
        pgwhalen 3y ago
        Fwiw, I am strongly pro universal health care, but agree with pfannkuchen’s framing of what a right is. I see it as clarifying position, not a muddying one. Healthcare requires resources, it doesn’t happen just because everyone agrees upon it. We must structure our society to provide those resources, so all its members can be provided healthcare.
        ok_dad 3y ago
        Well if it’s not a right but everyone must get it, what’s that called? A right is pretty close.
  - ztrww 3y ago
    Income tax? Publicly funded education? Innumerable (in a comment) other things especially including Medicaid and Medicare? > Not taking guns doesn’t require anyone’s labor, It does. Somebody has to take care of all the bodies. Mass shootings and homocides in general are pretty expensive both directly and due to lost future productivity.
    - pfannkuchen 3y ago
      None of these are rights and they can all be modified without violating the constitution. What is your point?
  - derelicta 3y ago
    Clearly letting poor folks die is the most moral option. If positive rights make you so uncomfortable, I'll let you know they are very much widespread in today's constitutions. My canton's has many economic rights enumerated, including the right to a proper shelter. And I don't hold it for a nasty totalitarian dictatorship (yet?)
    - pfannkuchen 3y ago
      A government constitution should be designed to be robust. It should be assumed that no rights will be removed under any possible circumstances. The inclusion of positive rights simply reduces the space of possible circumstances the government can traverse without removing rights, and depending on what sort of positive right we are taking about it does so drastically. Giving the government the ability to remove rights is dangerous for obvious reasons (they aren’t really rights at that point, are they). If the medical system is ever mismanaged to the point of insolvency, should the government have the ability to violate a constitutional right to get things back in order? If they are allowed to violate that right, presumably they are able to violate other “rights” in the same class depending on the circumstances as well. No one is saying constitutions with positive rights are totalitarian. I am just saying that they are fragile and should be avoided for that reason. If what you want is a government health care system that can be modified or canceled based on circumstances, then that’s fine, but you can’t call it a “right” since you aren’t treating it as one.
      - derelicta 3y ago
        "If the medical system is ever mismanaged to the point of insolvency, should the government have the ability to violate a constitutional right to get things back in order? If they are allowed to violate that right, presumably they are able to violate other “rights” in the same class depending on the circumstances as well." Well yes? Some rights may be absolute. Some others may be limited. Things are rarely absolute. Democracies are more than their respective constitution. They also rely on their political culture and how healthy it is. Even if your constitutional norms are supposedely "weak", does it matter in the end? It's not a bench of judges who are gonna protect your rights, but citizens as a whole. That's why this whole argument that positive rights being displayed as "flaws" doesn't make much sense to me. And why guaranteeing access to proper healthcare sounds to me like a well balanced risk. What is more likely? Than the State will turn you into a slave through this positive right to healthcare, or that you will end up dead by lack of said guaranteed access to healthcare ?
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Health care requires other people’s labor though. If you make that a right you risk needing to implement some kind of forced labor system Whether that's true or not depends on the exact parameters of the right, and, in any case, the US has compulsory civic labor notwithstanding the 13th Amendment (jury service actively, conscription historically). Jury service direct relates to a positive right. It also has positive rights which require labor but which somehow are not achieved by forced labor (voting, for instance, requires supporting labor.) > I’m not particularly pro gun, I just don’t think positive rights are practical from a design perspective. And yet, the US has positive rights, and the system hasn’t collapsed (e.g.,.the right to assistance of counsel in criminal cases, for instance, in addition to others previously listed.)
    - refurb 3y ago
      Voting is voluntary. Jury duty places a large burden on many people. I served on a jury and there were people who missed out on work and made $20 per day.
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Voting is voluntary. Exercise of all rights is voluntary. Voting requires someone else’s labor (ballot preparation, vote counting, etc.), which is the attribute that you said makes positive rights impractical. > Jury duty places a large burden on many people. And, yet, trial by jury is a right.
        s1artibartfast 3y ago
        After reading your comments last night, I think there's an argument that some of these these things are process operational constraints on how the state can operate. For example, the state doesn't have to charge someone in court, but if they do they must also provide the option for trial by jury. I think the construction of if the state does X, it must also do Y sets it apart from a universal positive right. I'm not a lawyer, but I believe the state can refuse to provide a jury trial for a citizen initiated legal action, like a civil suit by declining to hear the case. I think you could find a similar framing for voting as well.
  - lapcat 3y ago
    > Not taking guns doesn’t require anyone’s labor, so you don’t run into this hazard. Of course it does. Labor is always required to protect your legal rights. Government, military, police, courts, those are all labor. This labor is the difference between actually having enforceable legal rights and living in the Hobbesian state of nature, the war of all against all.
  - laratied 3y ago
    Exactly. Just the typical incredibly out of touch, childish and highly privileged view often expressed on this forum: "The smart people can work remote in Bali for 2x the median USD salary. If your not one of the smart people then you can bath and wipe old people's asses all day while being exposed to all kinds of pathogens for the median salary. The reason we don't have more of this is because of capitalism and whatever politics I don't like". Variations on this theme in pretty much every topic with over a 100 replies.
  - naravara 3y ago
    > Health care requires other people’s labor though. If you make that a right you risk needing to implement some kind of forced labor system (sure it can be obfuscated as much as you like). You have the right to an attorney. The state hiring and assigning public defenders isn't "forced labor." I don't know where this canard came from. It makes no sense if you spend more than 10 seconds thinking about it.
  - foxyv 3y ago
    You don't need to force labor. As always, you simply need to provide people with a living wage and they will do things. A right to health care would simply become a national health system that is adequately funded. Then the only argument would be, how much do we need to fund that health care system to fulfill our obligation to provide people with a right to health care. People become medical practitioners for many reasons and will happily practice medicine as long as they can make a living off of it without being coerced or manipulated. A few want to be able to afford a Ferrari, but the vast majority just simply want to help people and be able to thrive.
- HelixEndeavor 3y ago
  why not both
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- naravara 3y ago
  There is no individual "right to own guns" in the Constitution. When the second amendment talks about the right of "the people" it means as a collective. It's talking about curtailing the Federal government from restricting states from raising state militias. But we don't have a state militia anymore, it's been replaced by the National Guard. There was no serious jurisprudence to interpret the second amendment as an individual right until the 60s. Guns were acknowledged as a practical tool and people saw practical issues with banning them, but that was it.
  - dmm 3y ago
    The supreme court disagrees with you and the only way to change that is to change the ratio of justices. Why do we even bother with a legislative body at this point?
  - rayiner 3y ago
    The first amendment also refers to “the right of the people to peaceably assemble.” By your logic, is there no individual right to protest? The fourth amendment refers to “the right of the people to be secure in their persons.” Does that mean that you don’t have an individual right against unreasonable search and seizure? You’re correct to identify “the people” as the key phrase, and you’re correct that the second amendment is referring to a collective right. But so are the other amendments referring to “the people.” The constitution is talking about a whole society, not individuals. E.g. the fourth amendment guarantees a society where “the people” aren’t subject to unreasonable searches from police. But that collective right also protects the individual. What applies to the collective applies to its individual constituents. This makes sense in the context of the 2nd amendment: militias were “bring your own firearm.” The collective right was enforced through the individual guarantee. There was no need to interpret the second amendment in the past because it really wasn’t unclear what the framers meant. Some of the key figures in the Supreme court’s recent jurisprudence on the second amendment were prominent liberal academics like Larry Tribe and Akhil Amar. Here is Larry Tribe talking about how he changed his mind on the second amendment once he started seriously researching it: https://hls.harvard.edu/today/why-i-changed-my-mind/ https://hls.harvard.edu/today/why-i-changed-my-mind/ (scroll down). Your strongest argument is that the second amendment only applies to the federal government, not the states. That’s clearly true, but that’s true of every other amendment as well. The first amendment’s Establishment Clause clearly was intended to prevent the federal government from interfering with established state churches, or creating its own. The “wall of separation” phrasing wasn’t used by the Supreme Court until 1946. (Ironically, it was quoting the individual views of Thomas Jefferson, who also believed we should overthrow the government every couple of decades. With guns that every individual was entitled to bear!) I’m willing to entertain the view that our whole incorporation doctrine is non-sensical, but that cuts more broadly than I think most gun control advocates would like to go. Moreover, the notion that the 14th amendment was meant to apply the second amendment to states is far better supported than the incorporation of the first amendment. Disarmament of freed slaves was specifically one of the concerns at the time: https://www.encounterbooks.com/features/racist-roots-gun-control/ https://www.encounterbooks.com/features/racist-roots-gun-con...
ProllyInfamous 3y ago
I attended one year in a US medical school program, and am almost forty. I do NOT have US health insurance, because it is unaffordable. Zero dependents — if I had anybody to legally be responsible, I would be on a policy. Probably. NO CODE
halfjoking 3y ago
[flagged]
- winrid 3y ago
  Isn't that just an issue with the J&J vaccine? Some of your points are perfectly valid but nobody is waging a war against the unvaccinated, other than bugging them to get vaccinated. Both me and a parent have blood clotting disorders (hers worse than mine fwiw) and the vaccine wasn't an issue (Moderna and pfizer). Was getting it a risk? Ya. But I saw enough people die from it and didn't want to spread the virus to other old people.
  - halfjoking 3y ago
    I believe the vaccines killed a lot of people, not just J&J https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/the-devils-advocate-an-exploratory?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/the-devils-advocat... My link above was about #ECMOGATE. The claim is that doctors were literally killing the unvaccinated by giving them different treatment plans that lead to more death.
    - winrid 3y ago
      was it the treatment or the fact that they weren't vaccinated that led to the higher death rate?
    - boeingUH60 3y ago
      Take your crackpot science out of here…we can spot BS from afar and this is it.
- boeingUH60 3y ago
  You'll rather take dodgy herbs and supplements than real medicine? No surprise you're unvaccinated, lol.
kapperchino 3y ago
The health insurance companies and the hospitals involved in this scam of a system are responsible for so many deaths and bankruptcies. Every year they make record profits by denying care and raising prices. Nothing will be done to fix this, Biden certainly isn’t going to, the man’s campaign is paid for by them. This whole thing is just so damn frustrating.
freddealmeida 3y ago
this is very troubling. The FED has done too much harm.
- ashleyn 3y ago
  Inflation probably isn't helping this problem much either.

91 points by mkolassa 3y ago

dfdg 3y ago

Encouraging generic drugs eases the problem a little bit. Right to health care should be in the constitution instead of right to own guns.

pfannkuchen 3y ago
Health care requires other people’s labor though. If you make that a right you risk needing to implement some kind of forced labor system (sure it can be obfuscated as much as you like). Not taking guns doesn’t require anyone’s labor, so you don’t run into this hazard. I’m not particularly pro gun, I just don’t think positive rights are practical from a design perspective.
- BlackSwanMan 3y ago
  [dead]
- reaperman 3y ago
  Welp. Guess we can't have taxpayer funded roads then cuz all the forced labor needed for free roads. Guess we also can't have a right to K-12 education.
  - pfannkuchen 3y ago
    You are hopefully aware of the difference between a right granted to all citizens and a project funded by the government?
    - reaperman 3y ago
      I am. But you dont make sense. All Americans have a right to K-12 education, it's funded by the government. How is that different from all Americans having a right to healthcare, being funded by the government? If someone doesn't wanna be in healthcare anymore they can still switch to whatever they want to. They're not forced labor any more than teachers are. Perhaps you'd like to sign a petition to lower forced labor fed by high false-conviction rates in Louisiana? https://promiseofjustice.org/end-plantation-prisons https://promiseofjustice.org/end-plantation-prisons
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - pfannkuchen 3y ago
        There is fairly well developed theory in this area, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here. Americans do not have a “right” to education in the same way they have a “right” to e.g. free speech. The government can reduce or even eliminate state funded education without violating the constitution. If not enough e.g. teachers will work for the state (for the pay offered, based on tax revenue available, etc), the state can respond to changing circumstances by reducing or eliminating the education services provided. If education were to be added as a “right” then this reduction or elimination in service would not possible, unless you make that “right” so flimsy as to be basically meaningless (i.e. if the government is able to meaningfully remove it, it is not really a right). I don’t believe in forced prison labor at all, so yes I’d be happy to sign that petition. I’m not sure what it has to do with this discussion.
        reaperman 3y ago
        This didn’t convince me that federally funded right to healthcare would be forced labor any more than federally funded anything else.
        dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Americans do not have a “right” to education in the same way they have a “right” to e.g. free speech. OTOH, they do have a right to trial by jury, a right to counsel, and a right to vote in the sense that they have a right to free speech, and each of these rights require someone else’s labor.
  - Rebelgecko 3y ago
    You don't have the right to roads. Similarly education is mostly implemented at the state level, there's nothing legally preventing a state from saying that public school is now K-8 only. Laws requiring people to go to school are kind of a mixed bag, and compulsory education laws usually only apply to children (and in some cases only to pre-teens). AFAIK there's no legal forms of adult forced labor, except prisoners who are exempt from some rights.
    - reaperman 3y ago
      And yet despite being at the state level, all americans do have a right to K-12. Is that also forced labor?
      - pfannkuchen 3y ago
        You don’t seem to understand what is meant by forced labor here. I am happy to explain it to you. A right is something that can never be legally violated by the government. It is possible for a health care system run by anyone to end up with a level of resources below what it would need to meet its commitments. If government runs health care and health care is a right, then the government is not legally allowed to fail to meet its health care commitments. Doing so would violate the right to health care, and violating rights is illegal. Therefore at that point the government must either compel resources be increased to match the commitment, regardless of any other factors, or cancel the right. If our plan includes the potential for raising resources to an arbitrary level in certain circumstances regardless of all other factors at that point, then at that point we would by definition need to implement forced labor. If our plan includes canceling a right under certain circumstances, then it is not really a right, is it?
        mcv 3y ago
        This sort of theorising doesn't seem to be very relevant in practice, and I frankly only see this from Americans. Other countries seem to be doing much better without hammering on this needless distinction. They make their health systems work by making sure it's sufficiently funded and well-organised, and don't need to account for a major party simply wanting to destroy it just to hurt people (except possibly the UK soon).
- ok_dad 3y ago
  I seriously don’t understand people whose ethics accept that some folks will just die because they don’t want to pay an extra few dollars in taxes. You grew up here, your success or failure depends on the health of our society in many ways, and our society is falling apart because opportunistic capitalists drain all of the productivity with very little gain for the average person since the 70s. I guess we can keep playing Wild West until our country falls apart from malignant cases of not caring about your fellow human.
  - pfannkuchen 3y ago
    This is a great example of why discussing politics on the internet is annoying. People assume others’ positions and yell past each other. Not making healthcare a “right” does not preclude having a government run health care system. Why would it?
    - Sakos 3y ago
      Because generally the argument of "it doesn't need to be a right" is coupled with arguing why universal healthcare is bad. Your comment is a great example for how people try to muddy the waters and distract from the issues at stake.
      - pgwhalen 3y ago
        Fwiw, I am strongly pro universal health care, but agree with pfannkuchen’s framing of what a right is. I see it as clarifying position, not a muddying one. Healthcare requires resources, it doesn’t happen just because everyone agrees upon it. We must structure our society to provide those resources, so all its members can be provided healthcare.
        ok_dad 3y ago
        Well if it’s not a right but everyone must get it, what’s that called? A right is pretty close.
- ztrww 3y ago
  Income tax? Publicly funded education? Innumerable (in a comment) other things especially including Medicaid and Medicare? > Not taking guns doesn’t require anyone’s labor, It does. Somebody has to take care of all the bodies. Mass shootings and homocides in general are pretty expensive both directly and due to lost future productivity.
  - pfannkuchen 3y ago
    None of these are rights and they can all be modified without violating the constitution. What is your point?
- derelicta 3y ago
  Clearly letting poor folks die is the most moral option. If positive rights make you so uncomfortable, I'll let you know they are very much widespread in today's constitutions. My canton's has many economic rights enumerated, including the right to a proper shelter. And I don't hold it for a nasty totalitarian dictatorship (yet?)
  - pfannkuchen 3y ago
    A government constitution should be designed to be robust. It should be assumed that no rights will be removed under any possible circumstances. The inclusion of positive rights simply reduces the space of possible circumstances the government can traverse without removing rights, and depending on what sort of positive right we are taking about it does so drastically. Giving the government the ability to remove rights is dangerous for obvious reasons (they aren’t really rights at that point, are they). If the medical system is ever mismanaged to the point of insolvency, should the government have the ability to violate a constitutional right to get things back in order? If they are allowed to violate that right, presumably they are able to violate other “rights” in the same class depending on the circumstances as well. No one is saying constitutions with positive rights are totalitarian. I am just saying that they are fragile and should be avoided for that reason. If what you want is a government health care system that can be modified or canceled based on circumstances, then that’s fine, but you can’t call it a “right” since you aren’t treating it as one.
    - derelicta 3y ago
      "If the medical system is ever mismanaged to the point of insolvency, should the government have the ability to violate a constitutional right to get things back in order? If they are allowed to violate that right, presumably they are able to violate other “rights” in the same class depending on the circumstances as well." Well yes? Some rights may be absolute. Some others may be limited. Things are rarely absolute. Democracies are more than their respective constitution. They also rely on their political culture and how healthy it is. Even if your constitutional norms are supposedely "weak", does it matter in the end? It's not a bench of judges who are gonna protect your rights, but citizens as a whole. That's why this whole argument that positive rights being displayed as "flaws" doesn't make much sense to me. And why guaranteeing access to proper healthcare sounds to me like a well balanced risk. What is more likely? Than the State will turn you into a slave through this positive right to healthcare, or that you will end up dead by lack of said guaranteed access to healthcare ?
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Health care requires other people’s labor though. If you make that a right you risk needing to implement some kind of forced labor system Whether that's true or not depends on the exact parameters of the right, and, in any case, the US has compulsory civic labor notwithstanding the 13th Amendment (jury service actively, conscription historically). Jury service direct relates to a positive right. It also has positive rights which require labor but which somehow are not achieved by forced labor (voting, for instance, requires supporting labor.) > I’m not particularly pro gun, I just don’t think positive rights are practical from a design perspective. And yet, the US has positive rights, and the system hasn’t collapsed (e.g.,.the right to assistance of counsel in criminal cases, for instance, in addition to others previously listed.)
  - refurb 3y ago
    Voting is voluntary. Jury duty places a large burden on many people. I served on a jury and there were people who missed out on work and made $20 per day.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Voting is voluntary. Exercise of all rights is voluntary. Voting requires someone else’s labor (ballot preparation, vote counting, etc.), which is the attribute that you said makes positive rights impractical. > Jury duty places a large burden on many people. And, yet, trial by jury is a right.
      - s1artibartfast 3y ago
        After reading your comments last night, I think there's an argument that some of these these things are process operational constraints on how the state can operate. For example, the state doesn't have to charge someone in court, but if they do they must also provide the option for trial by jury. I think the construction of if the state does X, it must also do Y sets it apart from a universal positive right. I'm not a lawyer, but I believe the state can refuse to provide a jury trial for a citizen initiated legal action, like a civil suit by declining to hear the case. I think you could find a similar framing for voting as well.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > Not taking guns doesn’t require anyone’s labor, so you don’t run into this hazard. Of course it does. Labor is always required to protect your legal rights. Government, military, police, courts, those are all labor. This labor is the difference between actually having enforceable legal rights and living in the Hobbesian state of nature, the war of all against all.
- laratied 3y ago
  Exactly. Just the typical incredibly out of touch, childish and highly privileged view often expressed on this forum: "The smart people can work remote in Bali for 2x the median USD salary. If your not one of the smart people then you can bath and wipe old people's asses all day while being exposed to all kinds of pathogens for the median salary. The reason we don't have more of this is because of capitalism and whatever politics I don't like". Variations on this theme in pretty much every topic with over a 100 replies.
- naravara 3y ago
  > Health care requires other people’s labor though. If you make that a right you risk needing to implement some kind of forced labor system (sure it can be obfuscated as much as you like). You have the right to an attorney. The state hiring and assigning public defenders isn't "forced labor." I don't know where this canard came from. It makes no sense if you spend more than 10 seconds thinking about it.
- foxyv 3y ago
  You don't need to force labor. As always, you simply need to provide people with a living wage and they will do things. A right to health care would simply become a national health system that is adequately funded. Then the only argument would be, how much do we need to fund that health care system to fulfill our obligation to provide people with a right to health care. People become medical practitioners for many reasons and will happily practice medicine as long as they can make a living off of it without being coerced or manipulated. A few want to be able to afford a Ferrari, but the vast majority just simply want to help people and be able to thrive.
HelixEndeavor 3y ago
why not both
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
naravara 3y ago
There is no individual "right to own guns" in the Constitution. When the second amendment talks about the right of "the people" it means as a collective. It's talking about curtailing the Federal government from restricting states from raising state militias. But we don't have a state militia anymore, it's been replaced by the National Guard. There was no serious jurisprudence to interpret the second amendment as an individual right until the 60s. Guns were acknowledged as a practical tool and people saw practical issues with banning them, but that was it.
- dmm 3y ago
  The supreme court disagrees with you and the only way to change that is to change the ratio of justices. Why do we even bother with a legislative body at this point?
- rayiner 3y ago
  The first amendment also refers to “the right of the people to peaceably assemble.” By your logic, is there no individual right to protest? The fourth amendment refers to “the right of the people to be secure in their persons.” Does that mean that you don’t have an individual right against unreasonable search and seizure? You’re correct to identify “the people” as the key phrase, and you’re correct that the second amendment is referring to a collective right. But so are the other amendments referring to “the people.” The constitution is talking about a whole society, not individuals. E.g. the fourth amendment guarantees a society where “the people” aren’t subject to unreasonable searches from police. But that collective right also protects the individual. What applies to the collective applies to its individual constituents. This makes sense in the context of the 2nd amendment: militias were “bring your own firearm.” The collective right was enforced through the individual guarantee. There was no need to interpret the second amendment in the past because it really wasn’t unclear what the framers meant. Some of the key figures in the Supreme court’s recent jurisprudence on the second amendment were prominent liberal academics like Larry Tribe and Akhil Amar. Here is Larry Tribe talking about how he changed his mind on the second amendment once he started seriously researching it: https://hls.harvard.edu/today/why-i-changed-my-mind/ https://hls.harvard.edu/today/why-i-changed-my-mind/ (scroll down). Your strongest argument is that the second amendment only applies to the federal government, not the states. That’s clearly true, but that’s true of every other amendment as well. The first amendment’s Establishment Clause clearly was intended to prevent the federal government from interfering with established state churches, or creating its own. The “wall of separation” phrasing wasn’t used by the Supreme Court until 1946. (Ironically, it was quoting the individual views of Thomas Jefferson, who also believed we should overthrow the government every couple of decades. With guns that every individual was entitled to bear!) I’m willing to entertain the view that our whole incorporation doctrine is non-sensical, but that cuts more broadly than I think most gun control advocates would like to go. Moreover, the notion that the 14th amendment was meant to apply the second amendment to states is far better supported than the incorporation of the first amendment. Disarmament of freed slaves was specifically one of the concerns at the time: https://www.encounterbooks.com/features/racist-roots-gun-control/ https://www.encounterbooks.com/features/racist-roots-gun-con...

ProllyInfamous 3y ago

I attended one year in a US medical school program, and am almost forty. I do NOT have US health insurance, because it is unaffordable. Zero dependents — if I had anybody to legally be responsible, I would be on a policy. Probably. NO CODE

halfjoking 3y ago

[flagged]

winrid 3y ago
Isn't that just an issue with the J&J vaccine? Some of your points are perfectly valid but nobody is waging a war against the unvaccinated, other than bugging them to get vaccinated. Both me and a parent have blood clotting disorders (hers worse than mine fwiw) and the vaccine wasn't an issue (Moderna and pfizer). Was getting it a risk? Ya. But I saw enough people die from it and didn't want to spread the virus to other old people.
- halfjoking 3y ago
  I believe the vaccines killed a lot of people, not just J&J https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/the-devils-advocate-an-exploratory?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/the-devils-advocat... My link above was about #ECMOGATE. The claim is that doctors were literally killing the unvaccinated by giving them different treatment plans that lead to more death.
  - winrid 3y ago
    was it the treatment or the fact that they weren't vaccinated that led to the higher death rate?
  - boeingUH60 3y ago
    Take your crackpot science out of here…we can spot BS from afar and this is it.
boeingUH60 3y ago
You'll rather take dodgy herbs and supplements than real medicine? No surprise you're unvaccinated, lol.

kapperchino 3y ago

The health insurance companies and the hospitals involved in this scam of a system are responsible for so many deaths and bankruptcies. Every year they make record profits by denying care and raising prices. Nothing will be done to fix this, Biden certainly isn’t going to, the man’s campaign is paid for by them. This whole thing is just so damn frustrating.

freddealmeida 3y ago

this is very troubling. The FED has done too much harm.

ashleyn 3y ago
Inflation probably isn't helping this problem much either.