The only really good argument against Obamacare I have read...

[fpb]

...mainly because it acknowledges two things: first, that American healthcare is the most expensive in the world; and second, that "insuring the uninsured is a moral imperative", the point is how to do it. http://townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2009/11/27/kill_the_bills_do_health_reform_right?page=full&comments=true

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I take it that you are so rich that you do not feel threatened by any prospect of long lingering and disabling illnesses.

[cerebresque.livejournal.com]

No, I have merely considered the odds of long, lingering and disabling illnesses for someone at my time and situation of life, and made an informed trade-off of risk versus cost.

Since the risk isn't infinite and the cost of insuring it isn't zero, sometimes, that calculation is going to come out in favor of taking the risk; which it's my free choice to do, at least for now.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Can't you tell sarcasm when it bites you on the leg? My argument for universal health cover has nothing to do with the risk to you in particular. If you want to risk and waste your silly life, nothing to do with me. But health as such is a concern for society at large, and as such, a public concern. If you get bubonic plague or Ebola virus, that is emphatically not your own business alone - to take an extreme case. And it is nothing but know-nothing hypocrisy to argue that the state has the right and duty to protect citizens from external aggression (through the army) and internal violence (through the police), but not from health problems which are quite as dangerous and ruinous as any kind of human violence.

[cerebresque.livejournal.com]

Can't you tell sarcasm when it bites you on the leg?

Unfortunately, no. The wide range of arguments which people make that I find it hard to believe that anyone would make in all seriousness have more or less broken my sarcasm detectors.

But health as such is a concern for society at large, and as such, a public concern. If you get bubonic plague or Ebola virus, that is emphatically not your own business alone - to take an extreme case. And it is nothing but know-nothing hypocrisy to argue that the state has the right and duty to protect citizens from external aggression (through the army) and internal violence (through the police), but not from health problems which are quite as dangerous and ruinous as any kind of human violence.

I think we would find this much more plausible as an argument - and reasonable minarchists, by and large, might even agree with you - if we had any reason to believe that anyone proposing a universal healthcare system had protecting the public from transmissible dangers like epidemic and even hereditary genetic disease as its aim - but since every proposal for one wanders back and forth from broken bones to senility via other such non-transmissible/personal issues as cancer, contraception and childbirth, such claims simply aren't credible. Not for a moment.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Conversely, the rest of us have little reason to believe that someone who has chosen to remain uninsured won't turn up at the emergency room demanding care if they turn out to need it. "I know I'm risking my life and won't ask for help if I'm wrong" isn't a credible committment.

[cerebresque.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'll ask for help at the emergency room if I'm wrong.

But since if I do turn up at the emergency room, which I very well might, I will be handed the large bill for whatever care I do receive (which is significant, but is by no means the entire menu), which will be processed through the normal collections procedures should I decline to, or not be able to, pay it, and which I am in every ethical sense of the word obliged to pay... well, then, much as it would suck to be me if I have my risk assessments wrong, I fail to see what makes it anyone else's damned business, quite frankly.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

The nature of modern medical care -- especially delivered via ER -- is such that there's a high chance you wouldn't be able to afford the bill, at which point you declare bankruptcy and walk away. (And if not you personally, certainly many of 'you' following this strategy.) Thus it becomes our business, following from our initial commitment to provide care to everyone who urgently needs it, even if they don't have proof of ability to pay. (As might happen to someone who was well-insured, but mugged and lacking any proof of this at the time his body was picked up.)

[cerebresque.livejournal.com]

Does this, then, not reflect a fatal flaw in the committment you are attempting to undertake?

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Only for a rather idiosyncratic value of "fatal".