Anyone else believe in universal coverage for kids?

[Trader]

But how to you look after kids who don’t really have choice as to whether their poor parents smoke around them, or feed them junk food every day?

In geneal though, that’s a slipperly slope. Should we rule out excercises like running which are great for your heart but bad for you knees?

Skiing?

Working too hard? Stressful jobs, etc etc. the list would be endless.

Most of this is pretty simple. It is what actuaries do for a living. A large car may better protect the occupants in a crash, but is more dangerous to the vehicle it hits. They crunch the numbers and come out with rates to compete in the market and still get a return for the owners. You cannot eliminate risk, but you can manage it to reasonable levels. Are you aware that breathing the air for 90 years gives you a significantly greater risk of dying in the next 12 months than if you have been breathing for only 50 years? That is a risk we accept because the available alternatives are worse.

Most important is that you take responsibilty for your own actions.
It does not bother me at all to help the children of the poor, but it bothers me a lot to hear a parent say that it was not his or her responsibilty in the first place. That would contradict thousands of years of Judeo-Christian ethics and the current Catechism of the Catholic Church.

 

[thomfra]

It does not bother me at all to help the children of the poor

So essentially you don’t have a problem for universal coverage for kids, provided the system used to administrate it was effective.

 

[Trader]

So essentially you don’t have a problem for universal coverage for kids, provided the system used to administrate it was effective.

Not quite. The great majority of children should be covered by their own parents, which is a kind of universal coverage designed by the Creator himself.

For a long time medical professionals have been required to provide basic health care, whether that is by government decree or obedience to their Hippocratic Oath. The problem is only about who should pay for the care, and what level of care is required.

I think the best way to do that is to give the poor grants to purchase insurance that best meets their needs. I would hope we do not do it with more tax deductions and credits which would further complicate an already absurdly complicated tax system. Because of all the complexities we never really know how much aid is delivered and the benefits to individuals can be very different for because of other things that are unrelated to the particular need. This would be a small and targeted program, not a universal one. It would be a smaller problem if more parents would better meet their own responsibilities.

The hardest part may be to determine what level of care is required. If the Church teaches that I am not required to take extraodinary measures to prolong my own life(and it does), can it be just to require me to pay for extraodinary measures to prolong someone else’s life? I promise you that few parents of sick children will concede that any measure to save their children is extraodinary.

Countries with socialized medicine solve that dilemna by seeing that everyone gets equally bad care. Ask the medical refugees from Canada.

 

[Caeryl]

sorry to say that the last quote is not true. My brother makes just a little bit to much for medicaide… so no one in his family is insured…

Medicaide is not avalaibe to all children who are not insured…

 

[rosetta_stone]

how are we supposed to pay for this system considering the giant deficit the U.S. is currently running?
link of former head of the GAO talking about deficit problems.
youtube.com/watch?v=OS2fI2p9iVs

so how can we justify pushing our country farthr into debt and screwing generations to come who will have to pick up the tab?

lastly there is no right of healthcare in the Constitution and to implement any universal heathcare plan would be another rationalist policy in line with FDR’s policies.

 

[Wirraway]

assuming that providing wide access to inexpensive, basic and preventative health care is fiscally sound over the long haul,

one solution starts with expanding the number of health care providers, and that would mean breaking the the choke point imposed by the AMA. but does a neighborhood clinic need a medical specialist or even a GP, or rather can society be served by the equivalent of a navy corpsman or nurse to set a bone or stitch up a cut, or vaccinate?