Insuring the uninsured is a moral imperative. The problem is that the Democrats have chosen the worst possible method — a $1 trillion new entitlement of stupefying arbitrariness and inefficiency.
The better choice is targeted measures that attack the inefficiencies of the current system one by one — tort reform, interstate purchasing. and taxing employee benefits. It would take 20 pages to write such a bill, not 2,000 — and provide the funds to cover the uninsured without wrecking both U.S. health care and the U.S. Treasury.
But that doesn’t allow them to take over the industry and run our lives.
And I question the statement that “insuring the uninsured is a moral imperative.” Really? So if A has no insurance, B and C have a duty to provide it? You’d have a tough time logically proving that logically, but since it seems to be more of an article of faith than a rational proposition, I suppose it is exampt from logical scrutiny.
I think it’s a realistic appraisal of US society. Even now there is a default universal health care, namely emergency room care. Hospitals aren’t allowed to turn away those who can’t pay. I don’t see US society allowing hospitals to turn people away who can’t pay.
I don’t know what’s in the Democrats’ public health insurance, but I bet it’s comparable to a regular insurance policy. That’s far too plump a policy.
I don’t see US society allowing hospitals to turn people away who can’t pay.
Under PelosiCare, they won’t have to. The uninsured will be “entitled” to their health care, plus three hots and a cot, at Club Fed.
Insuring people is not a moral imperative. Perhaps treating them is, up to some limit determined largely by our welath — we can be more charitable when we are richer — but that’s a totally different story. Besides, we already do treat everybody. I’ve never heard of someone who was left at the scene of an accident, or in an ER waiting room, to bleed to death because they had no insurance. Have you?
There’s no doubt that people without insurance, or poor people in general, get poorer medical care. They also get poorer food, poorer quality merchandise, fewer vacation days, and have to live next to the railroad tracks more often.
In other words, this is part of the definition of “poor.” Unless you want to fantasize about eliminating the concept of poverty — of some magical world where all the children are above average — then it will always be the case that your relative wealth and income strongly influence the quality of medical care you get, just as it influences every other service you demand from society. This is why we all try not to be poor.
This is why we all try not to be poor.
Would that it were true, but many people are poor due to poor choices that they make. They just want the rest of us to subsidize them.
Of course they do, Rand. That’s human nature. The fault is ours if we do it. One of the unkindest things you can do to a man is shield him from the consequences of his mistakes. Because you take away from him his route to learning, and becoming better, making fewer mistakes.
It would be like teaching algebra without telling the students whether they were right or wrong when they did the homework problems. What would they learn? Zip. What a cheat that would be.
“I think it’s a realistic appraisal of US society. Even now there is a default universal health care, namely emergency room care. ”
As with other examples, there is a utilitarian argument and then there is a moral argument.
For example, there is a utilitarian argument for liberty — assertions that private enterprise works more efficiently than government bureaucracy. There is also a moral argument for libery — Ayn Rand’s writings, etc..
There is equally so a utilitarian argument for some manner of public health care for the indigent — the poor not turning to crime to pay for necessities of life, the untreated not spreading infectious disease to the wealthy. And then the moral argument, the Bible parable of Lazarus the begger and the rich man and how the rich man was tormented in the afterlife for having ignored Lazarus.
So tell me, how does the policy of “the poor just go to the emergency room” work out from a utilitarian standpoint? On one hand, the emergency room is supposed to be expensive as all anything, the emergency room does a poor job of providing preventative care, and having the emergency room as your “primary doctor” means a person waits until a minor medical condition becomes a full-fledged emergency before going in.
On the other hand, the emergency rooms have a full-fledged triage system, where the auto accident victim goes to the head of the line in front of the college student suffering from mild food poisoning. The deal if you are a poor person coming in “just to see a doctor” is that you wait and wait and wait until resources are free that you can be seen. So the idea that the emergency room is this uproarious expensive way to care for a person may be overstated, if the “just to see a doctor” function of the emergency room is taken care of during slack times of the ultra-expensive trauma-care function.
But aren’t the inner city hospitals going bankrupt from their ER/Trauma Center. Could be, but maybe a lot of their intake comes from uninsured victims of shootings, which is genuinely an emergency and expensive to treat, and that having waiting rooms full of poor using the emergency room “as their regular doctor” has little to do with that. The health care crisis could be a problem of violence-in-society and not a poor person going to the ER with a strep throat.
Or maybe not shootings, how about homeless persons with substance abuse — such a person could all the time be at death’s door and be a genuine emergency everytime they show up. I have it on anecdotal word-of-mouth that a handful of such people in the community could account for a large fraction of a hospital ER budget. There is talk about treating that cost problem not as a providing-of-medical-care problem but as a social problem and of making a more concerted effort to give apartments to such homeless persons to keep them off the streets and out of the ER.
And again, if a person shows up at an ER “for a regular doctor visit”, would this not be an opportunity to determine their financial status (ability to pay a bill), counsel them on elligibility for Medicaid or S-CHP for their child, and refer them to a clinic where they could have an assigned primary doctor?
So tell me, what part of the “cost of people flocking to emergency rooms” is solved by the Health Reform bill?
It’s like a HMO plan. Expensive? Very. Hence the generous tax credits you’ll be paying for.
That’s human nature. The fault is ours if we do it.
I don’t do it, but the Lefties in goverment confiscate my money to do it so they can buy votes from people who think sucking at the gummint tit is the high life.
One of the unkindest things you can do to a man is shield him from the consequences of his mistakes.
True, proving yet again that the Lefties are obnoxious, self-centered bastards who care not one whit about other actual people, but only how they feel about themselves.