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Is healthcare a right?
- Thread starter Schattenjäger
- Start date
This comment convinced me into reading the article. What in the fuck.
How is this even a question? I mean, I guess you could make some semantical argument about rights and what having rights even means since they can be denied at any time, but no one should die because they can't afford healthcare. Telling someone to either pay thousands and thousands of dollars (and go into debt in the process) to get treatment or die is fucked. The US is the richest county in the world, it should be able to provide healthcare to all its citizens.
God Damn. I'm sorry for your loss.
God Damn. I'm sorry for your loss.
JinjoUnchained
Member
Problem with message board discussions is that they're not necessarily conducive to nuanced issues like this. My claim that healthcare is an entitlement is in no way an endorsement of the US healthcare system. Which we can hopefully all agree is a disgrace, rigged by special interests to drastically overcharge for essential services. It is neither a free market nor a socialized system, it's a corporatist cluster-eff that serves no one but corporate interests.
Now that my general position on US healthcare is clear, I can address your specific scenario. Holding people accountable for their healthcare decisions WHEN THEY KNOW THE CONSEQUENCES (cant stress that enough) would be difficult to prove and require a high burden of proof. I've said from the first post that I know nothing about such diagnostics and can't contribute to that discussion. Each of your specific scenarios are different health concerns, there's no one answer for all of them.
But, in theory, I still maintain that such a process would be better for society than the "sin taxes" you mention here. We've debated on GAF before, I know you won't agree on this, but my beliefs are strongly opposed to such "nanny state" measures as "sin taxes". I believe that people should have the right to destroy their bodies through whichever vices they want. I also believe, as part of public education, that the government has a role in educating people about the health effects of their decisions. I have no problem with the Ad Council buying space for such PSAs, even legislation requiring it to an extent. Or in public schools, health classes should be given the same attention and funding as STEM/Arts. We should do a much better job drilling such information it into peoples' heads so that they can make good decisions.
What's the difference between those programs and the "nanny state?" The former are for children and/or other people who don't have access to healthcare education. The "nanny state" specifically refers to the government altering the behavior of informed, independent adults. I wanted to make that rhetorical point clear.
And that dichotomy is exactly why I believe that healthcare is an entitlement, not a right. I don't believe that entitlement is a pejorative term, rather, it means a taxpayer service for those in need, not a right for everyone. It might sound harsh, but I believe you have the right to kill yourself through booze/drugs/cigarettes, if society has made it abundantly clear to you the consequences of your actions. Again, very high burden of proof for specific cases, but it's more the principal that matters. I don't want to live in a country where informed adults pump themselves full of sugar because they think they have a right to insulin.
Fluffernutter Pancake
Member
Have you read all my posts and the entire conversation?
I'm getting attributed with a lot of views that I don't actually hold due to a few hastily typed analogies that fell flat and which I would like to formally apologize for and strike from the record. They were wrong to put forward and I don't agree with them --- I would have nixed them and tried to come up with something different if I had had more time to review them and think about it a little more.
Santerestil
Banned
Only in the USA this is a question.
NOT only in the USA the answer is "yes", sadly.
(I'm assuming you want to say "Even if you don't contribute", by the way.)
Fluffernutter Pancake
Member
GAFsharks smell the blood in the water from a hasily-typed, poorly thought out analogy ---- pile on, boys!
But seriously, have your laugh and then realize that I formally withdrew said analogy and admitted that it was extremely poor. It does not reflect my viewpoint.
You're fine to play whatever role you think you are playing. You simultaneously play poor analogy victim, and reformed social issue pundit, so I can't really tell what you are going for.
You will also need to reconcile with the fact that not many users here are going to understand your position, myself included. Advocating for anything other than healthcare being a guaranteed service of every citizen in this country, to me, is absurd. I'm not required to respect it.
DragoonKain
Neighbours from Hell
Just suck it up and realize that it's no different for paying for any of the things our taxes pay for.
And maybe because it's the right thing to do.
Do you have to like it? No, but if a single payer system was eventually adopted and taxes were raised, just take solace in the fact that you'd have no choice in the matter. You pay and just live with it, like everyone else does with taxes. No one likes them, but they pay em or they move elsewhere if they don't want to pay them.
And maybe because it's the right thing to do.
Do you have to like it? No, but if a single payer system was eventually adopted and taxes were raised, just take solace in the fact that you'd have no choice in the matter. You pay and just live with it, like everyone else does with taxes. No one likes them, but they pay em or they move elsewhere if they don't want to pay them.
Fenderputty
Banned
We have debated before and they never devolve into name calling shit shows and scream fests. Which is why I keep coming back to debate more!
This, to me, reads an awful lot like sacrificing efficiency for an ideal. In the ideal everyone is perfectly educated and can make all of their decisions for themselves. This is never the case though. It wouldn't matter how much you educate the populace on the ill effects of a substance, it will not be perfectly distributed nor understood. There will always be those who choose risk because their risk to loss/win calc is different too. So you remove the Nancy state tax, but that's effectively all you've done. Some smokers loose their houses or die because they can't get treatment as a result. You've also added a level of bureaucracy needed to make this decision. Kinda like how drug testing snap recipients costs more than just giving snap recipients who use drugs their food stamps regardless.
Seriously ... this "education" model is applied to everything in libertarianism. The more and more we're expected to know about things which may affect our lives the less and less likely it is we will actually know enough. Which is why we have "nanny" orgs in the first place.
You'll also note that in previous posts I've said I don't like the term "right". There aren't a set of rights that's universally accepted or understood, hence this thread. I did state that I prefer to refer to it as the "decent" thing to do. You can, like a previous poster here, argue that it's less decent to force tax money to pay for a dying child healthcare than it would be to let the child die form cancer, but I don't believe you'll find many who agree. Framing the topic as a rights issue allows people the wiggle room to obfuscate from what people really are getting at here. "SHOULD we treat healthcare as a right?"
We're an exceedingly rich 1st world nation and the only one who's decided we should sacrifice decency for the freedombuck when it comes to people's health.
Morrigan Stark
Arrogant Smirk
Not really, because only the government has the power to enforce rights.
It's the same as asking, "Should everyone have a right to a free trial" or "Should everyone have the right to police and fire protection".
Again with this stupidity. How's that going for the US, where your obesity rates are through the roof despite having no "government bailing out"?
Nobody, and I mean nobody thinks, "eh, I'll just keep doing unhealthy stuff because if anything goes wrong I can just get meds/surgery lol". It just doesn't work that way. People don't like being sick, even when treatment is free. They don't like going to the doctors, even when doctors visits are free. And they sure as shit don't like being in a hospital even when the hospital stay is free.
This is as mind-numbingly stupid as saying that the presence of a taxpayer-funded fire department means that people will not be careful to avoid setting their houses on fire.
Yes, you're the real victim here.
Even if you withdraw your shitty analogy, you still don't think everyone is entitled to healthcare, which is the problem.
This is not true. People can act out on their conception of rights in an extra-legal way. See 1640, 1776, 1789, 1848, 1917, and 1946.
I think it's fundementally quite different than this, because this is about the state's usage of its own power.
But yes, this is similar. In that case I also don't think the language of right is useful. This is what the state should be doing, not because not having your house burn down is a right, but because the state acting in the interest of the collective should prevent and fight fires.
Morrigan Stark
Arrogant Smirk
Bah, obviously talking about peacetime. No need to be pedantic.
Bah, obviously talking about peacetime. No need to be pedantic.
This isn't pedantry. I've dealt with this exact logic at length above. It's core to most understandings of what rights are. Rights are generally understood to not be merely enumerated rights, and in the context of the question, looking at only enumerated rights makes little sense. The whole point of the idea of natural rights is that people should not be treated a certain way for abstract reasons outside of any specific state context.
What would be pedantry is pointing out that the first 4 of those were in peacetime.
Sure but nutrition and general health knowledge is not the same as studying astrophysics, chemistry, engineering or medicine. You don't have to be an expert because guess what we have for that? Experts. That's why people specialise.
I don't expect you to understand the impact of different foods on insulin levels, or how and what cells do, or even the simple biochemistry of various aspects of nutrition, but I bloody well expect you to as an adult know basic calorie limits and what's generally considered to be healthy and what's not. Just this simple knowledge alone would have a drastic impact on health.
To dismiss education is to dismiss what we are as a civilised society. A small child in the 21st century has a better understanding of the world than an average human 2000 years ago. So what happened? The brain doesn't have a limit, not that we know of at least. I think it's a bit daft to dismiss education as some sort of lefty, Guardian reading, Utopia dream.
Fenderputty
Banned
Why? In the 80's and 90's it was low fats that were healthy. In the 2000's carbs started to become the enemy and now half the board is on keto diets. The back of a label is based on a 2000 calorie diet. So now the person needs to understand enough to also interpret how many calories THEY should intake, make the mathematical adjustment in their head for their weight, understand why trans fats are bad, how trans fats are hidden away as partially hydrogenated oils, know if Omegas are good and what saturated fats are and if they're ever bad. Should they understand that fibers are insoluble carbs?Are diet pills healthy? Is fasting healthy? Does red meat cause cancer? Does burnt charred meat cause cancer? How much is too much mercury in fish? Don't even get me started on the misinformation campaigns by people who fight against non organic or genetically modified foods. What about the family that doesn't have the ability to afford these decisions? That family may have rice and beans every other day of the week with the McDonald's dollar meal sprinkled in here and there.
Educating people is great, it is not the solution to the healthcare problem.
Morrigan Stark
Arrogant Smirk
I wouldn't have argued about this at length above otherwise, but if you want to pretend anyone pointing out issues with your thinking is pedantic go ahead. It's a pretty meaningless anti-intellectual insult anyway.
Those revolutions happened during peacetime. Which is to say people took enforcing what they saw as their rights into their own hands when the state was at peace.
JinjoUnchained
Member
Fair enough, but I disagree that health education is some impossible ideal, and therefore that we shouldn't base our healthcare system around it. More information is always better, for patients, consumers, voters, everyone. There will always be many pigheaded people who tune out nutritional information as white noise because they want their endorphin rush from sodas/smokes/cocktails. In the same way that some people will always be terrible drivers who don't signal and also tailgate, no matter how much information you give them.
Do these obdurate individuals deserve taxpayer funded medical bailouts if they ignore every warning? Perhaps, if scarcity isn't a factor. If it is, I'd rather those scarce resources go to, say, a responsible parent of limited means whose child is suffering from a congenital disease. But, again, I'd call it an entitlement instead of a right.
For me, the biggest issue is our cultural values on health and wellness. We'd both agree that health education is badly deficient in America. But why? Because the money is in the treatment, not prevention. The good folks at Pfizer make money by selling statins. Those profits go away if education is better and people start watching their cholesterol. Even something as comparatively minor as reforming food labeling laws. Food labels are a form of education too. We can't claim that we want health care for everyone, but then allow Post Foods to put up a sticker suggesting that Fruity Pebbles are part of a child's healthy diet due to "natural ingredients."
Perhaps we can agree that there are many things we can due to improve health education and reduce treatment costs, regardless of who is paying for health care.
Fenderputty
Banned
I don't disagree that health education is important. I disagree that it solves our problems. I helps though, for sure. Similar to preventative care.
You're giving me a false dichotomy here. Resources are scare, but not all of our resources are spent on healthcare.These aren't my only choices. It's now an allocation of resources issue. In that instance I think we have more than ample evidence to suggest that no, scarcity shouldn't be a factor when making this decision. We're more wealthy than any state that is currently and successfully allocating these resources. I would probably argue that even as a poor nation we should allocate resources for our sick before others too.
For me, the question is: Why do you feel (given that we have ample resources needed), that someone who's made a bad health choice should then be left to their own when it isn't necessary?
.
Yes we can and do agree here. Including your point regarding profits in treatment and not the cure or in general wellness and preventative measures.
Fluffernutter Pancake
Member
Sorry, not trying to play the victim here --- the analogy I gave deserves to be feasted upon and ripped on.
In my last post, I was genuinely encouraging the GAFsharks to pile on to the analogy itself, but also wanted to make clear that its original poster, me, has thoroughly dis-owned it and that it in no way represents me. Have a laugh at me for posting it, but don't walk away thinking that that's how I actually think.
Morrigan Stark --- it's not that I don't think it would be great for gov't to provide full, specialized healthcare for all. That would be fantastic. It's that I'm still not convinced of its viability in the US longterm (or anywhere, longterm) without massive debt accrual OR a reduction in quality of care. That doesn't make me dumb or a horrible person, just as it doesn't make you dumb or a horrible person for being convinced that it IS viable.
However, even though I'm not convinced, my thought is that it might be a worthy gamble, even if it might fail. If it would lead to many people getting saved in the short term from death and personal debt accrual, then it might be worth it, as long as it wouldn't lead to even more deaths or debt accrual in the event that the system fails.
Positive rights of any kind make no sense in any philosophical framework I have ever discovered.
Positive rights create inherent conflict between some rights and other rights
Either the only human rights are the negative rights, or there are no such things as rights and power is all that matters.
Positive rights create inherent conflict between some rights and other rights
Either the only human rights are the negative rights, or there are no such things as rights and power is all that matters.
JinjoUnchained
Member
I'm glad we can find some common ground on steps to improve. It would be great if our legislative process worked this way, lol.
My one issue with your last point is an oversimplified view on wealth allocation and resource management. I see this a lot, where people argue, essentially, that you can take a few resources/income from this sector of the economy and move it over to healthcare or some other sector without any negative repercussions. As if our GDP was some big slush fund that we all pay into that's redistributed by the CBO.
If you increase taxes on, I don't know, say capital gains, to pay for "free health care for everyone", what other effect does that have on the economy? Yeah, lets soak those wealthy investors to pay for grandpa's pacemaker!
Well now those investors have less profit to reinvest in companies researching new and improved surgical procedures and medicines. Or, in general, they have less money for employment, and workers lose their jobs and have less money for their own healthcare.
You can move the shells around as much as you want, there will always be scarcity. Now, if those same investors are hiding those profits in the Cayman Islands and not reinvesting here, then yeah, fuck em. That money can and should be repatriated for health care. But I don't believe that you can wave your wand and tap into the 1% without side effects that might make things worse over all. Mixed capitalist economies are complicated, y'all.
Rights argument aside, many people outside of the US do not know or understand that the US does have programs like Medicade and CHIRP that provide healthcare services to poorer families and their children. In addition to that there are programs that provide these same families support through food programs.
Its the lower middle class that struggles today as they make to much to qualify for the programs and not enough to pay for decent insurance. They are also the ones most vocal with the thought process of "I should not have to pay for others healthcare" as they are strapped and caught in the middle.
The reality is that people in this class that are the only ones who do not have the "right" of healthcare in the US as the poor are provided services and the wealthier of us can afford it or are provided insurance by their employer. Interesting enough, they are also the ones that suffered the most from the implementation of ACA. They were forced to pay for insurance or pay a tax penalty. The poor continued to get the services and the wealthy continued to get insurance from their employer and didn't have to pay the penalties.
I do find it interesting that these lower middle class families are often demonized for having this viewpoint, where always feel empathy. They would also get the most benefit from a universal healthcare system.
Even nutritionists can't agree on what's "healthy" and health fads come and go with the decades constantly. The health lifestyle industry is extremely bloated and filled with nonsense. Expecting laymen to innately understand "healthy" is, at best, a naive delusion.
That doesn't make it a "right," though, that just makes it part of the social compact we've agreed upon as a society, same as other social welfare type programs. You may view this as mere semantics, but it's not. Welfare is not a "right," yet we've agreed it's needed. Elevating something to a "right" carries certain connotations and expectations with it, and I'm not willing to go that far.
CyclopsRock
Member
Literally everything in this post is absolutely mental.
Fair points, but we are starting to hit an equilibrium in terms of the basics. If you start early in school with children, you can do a lot of good in terms of calories and portion control.
It has to start somewhere.
Pesmerga00
Member
1000x This.
As a very sickly child that has undergone multiple surgeries. The incentive to keep yourself healthy is that being in the hospital fucking sucks.
llien
Member
Canadian doctors (and, I suspect, lawyers) don't earn even remotely as much as those in US.
So the problem for USA is (on top of large portion of population feeling strongly against "socialism" and perceiving universal healthcare as "socialism") that costs are so damn high.
CornBurrito
Member
Never said it was friendo.
CornBurrito
Member
There are no such things as rights other than what human society deems are rights.
An alien race could invade tomorrow and enslave/kill all humans. We have no magical right to freedom or life floating in the aether. Human societies long ago practiced infanticide. Slavery has been legal throughout most of human history.
Our current society believes that liberty and freedom should be universal human rights. And now our current society increasingly believes health care is also a human right, along with access to clean food, and water.
Positive rights create conflict, you are right. My right to an attorney could hypothetically make someone a slave since I'd have to be provided somebody's labor. Your Objectivist utopia I imagine would be far worse though.
Elfotografoalocado
Banned
The thing with having a socialized healthcare system is that it grants people time with medical professionals. It's not "I go 20 times under surgery for my heart attacks" because people have had contact with doctors way before that, and those doctors have given diets and advice and education before there is risk of such disease. Many people in the US haven't gone to the doctor in years because it is very expensive, and find out about their conditions the hard way. Here people visit their doctor several times a year and it's encouraged, as well as cancer tests and the like. So there is much more awareness of health risks, of one's state of health, and if something is wrong you just get an appointment and get it checked out.
Also, because healthcare is socialised, instead of for profit, there is no incentive for the people working in the health system to give poor treatment that would give them economic benefit. (i.e. prescribe lots of Pfizer drugs, who give you a comission) That's illegal and people have gone to prison for that.
Finally, because health systems have negotiation power equal to that of big pharmaceutical corporations, they pay much less for the same drugs than doctors/hospitals in the US. (A chemo bag is around 1000 for the Spanish healthcare system, and more than 3000$ in the US)
I'm not an objectivist at all, I abhor totalizing philosophies of any kind really.
I'm somewhere between Frédéric Bastiat and Lysander Spooner in terms of my opinions on rights and law. Law must be based on some principles of justice(human rights) in order to have any authority and validity at all. The only real moral justification for the law or for government is the collectivization of the self defense rights of the individual.
The fact that rights have historically been violated does not mean they do not exist, the fact that the world has always had injustice does not mean justice does not exist.
CornBurrito
Member
Can you provide me scientific prove that the rights you think exist just float in the aether? Is there a Higgs Boson particle of freedom of speech?
Rights exist because humans collectively have agreed they exist. Prove to me otherwise.
Personally I find your sense of justice warped. Freedom isn't a More/Less thing. We trade some freedoms for others. I'm free to shop at my local grocery store and not have to travel 50 miles to shop, because the owner cannot refuse to serve me for having white skin. Meanwhile you probably find that a grave injustice and loss of freedom for the business owner. In fact, its a huge gain of freedom for me and a small loss of freedom for the owner.
Rumblebones
Banned
Yes. Unequivocally.
My original post said that either they don't exist at all, or they only encompass negative rights.
There can be a fairly compelling proof for human rights based off of self-ownership, which IMO is the fundamental right.
You can be imprisoned, tortured, killed, etc, but as long as you remain alive, you are in possession and control of your own body and mind. All other natural rights follow pretty logically from this basis, including the right to life and liberty(which are ordinarily considered primary, but I consider them secondary to self-ownership). If you do not own your own body, then you have no right to use it, which is a fairly obvious logical and physical impossibility, as you can't not use your own body.
Since conscious creatures have inalienable rights of self ownership over themselves, they have the right to live and be free to the extent they do not cause harm to others.
As a logical proof of rights, I consider this fairly ironclad. If you want hard scientific proof, things become more difficult because then you have to grapple with the inherent illusory nature of the self. IMO that's not really relevant, as the right to self ownership is completely justified regardless of the existence of an actual identifiable 'self' or free will, simply based on the experience of what it is to be conscious.
CornBurrito
Member
Do the severely mentally pr physically disabled not have rights?
Also I think there's a fairly compelling argument for rights being whatever is collectively agreed upon by society, namely that humans are biologically a social species. Not a solitary island individual.
No, they clearly are the owners of their bodies, regardless of their disability. I'd argue that this extend even to (at least some) animals as well.
Conscious creatures have self ownership, as it is physically impossible to do otherwise. In the absence of some mind control technology that has yet to be invented anyway.
I'm skeptical of collective derivations of human rights because the entire point of human rights is to protect the individual from the collective.
CornBurrito
Member
Interesting. The freedom for a business to racially discriminate might very well end up in this tyranny of the majority you so fear.
Imagine an island with 10 people. 9 of them own 98% of the land. They all decide fuck guy #10, they won't allow him to hunt or gather on those lands because the guy has three arms and is an abomination. The remaining 2% of the island he claims ownership of has not enough food for him to survive. He dies, and everyone claps because their precious rights weren't violated.
I'm doubtful of that, but that's not really the point, as I am not deontologically pure in terms of policy, only in direction.
For example, homelessness is a pretty easy to understand example. Providing housing for the homeless infringes to a smaller degree on individual rights than criminalizing it and paying to incarcerate them, so it makes sense to do so.
Not because there is some mythical 'right' to housing though, it is just because that is the policy that minimally infringes on rights.
Edit: just saw your hypothetical that you added.
In your example the actions of the 9 would be immoral, but that doesn't mean they could or should be illegal or that the tenth has a right for the other 9 to provide him with food. Nor could he force the 9 to make such actions illegal unless they agreed. Which is the whole point about how rights by consensus breaks down.
CornBurrito
Member
What gives the 9 the right to control 98% of the land though?
GiantEnemyGoomba
Member
People deserve protection from their own bodies. Especially considering no one had any choice in being here.
Locke's argument was that private property is justified because the owner has mixed their labor with it.
The bigger argument for private property is that if no one had a right to own and control property outside of themselves, we would all cease to exist, so that doesn't seem entirely logical that that could be the case.
The big problem with your hypothetical is that it assumes the island produces enough food for the 9 to support the 10th. What if the Island only produces enough for 9? What if by providing for the 10th, is depletes the stockpiles of the other 9 to the degree that none of them survive the winter? Who decides the other 9 have too much and must give and in what proportion?
I see no way to answer those questions in a just fashion, so IMO they should be left to the moral realm instead of the legal.
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