My question to you is, If ]Roe vs. Wade is overturned and all those unwanted children are born…what responsibility is the GOP going to take to ensure they have good homes? Food? Education?
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Just the fact that the GOP is against any kind of 'government mandated" program for health care - makes me concerned that these children will not have adequate health care.
Is it your opinion that we should kill all sick people who don’t have adequate medical care? How about all hungry people? The problem with your position is that you are actually saying that it is better to be dead than poor. “We should not worry about ending abortion, because if the children are born, they might be hungry or have health issues they couldn’t afford to fix.” Well, I love the poor, and because of that not only do I contribute substantially to organizations that serve the poor, I don’t want to see them murdered before they can even be born. I do NOT feel that it is better to be dead than to be poor.
I lived in Canada for five years and can tell you that despite what you hear about their system. It is a great system. It has problems, of course, but rationed healthcare is not one of them. If you have a problem that is serious you get seen right away. if it is not serious - you make an appointment.
You must know different Canadians than I do. If something isn’t urgent, you have to make a very distant appointment. But it’s true that the Canadian health care system isn’t too bad, although I’ve never heard any Canadian IRL call it “great.” The UK, now, I lived there for a while, and that system was just messed up. I could have gotten treated in an emergency room, but even though I had a NI number, was paying taxes, and was entitled to care, it was impossible for me to get on any doctor’s list. So if anything not serious enough for an emergency room had happened, I would have had to either just wait until I got better, or of course I could wait until I was worse enough to go to the emergency room.
Now, a big difference between Canada and the UK is that the UK has twice as many people in it. It is not really possible to run a system like that if it gets too big.
The US has five times the population of the UK. What do you think it would be like here?
Here is a question for you: Do you think it is morally okay that insurance companies in the US hire doctors to help them find loopholes so they can drop people off of their insurance plans when they get sick? Or, when someone has a long term problem, to raise their rates so high they know they will have no choice but to drop the insurance? I see those kinds of things as right to life issues as well. Where is the outrage?
Well, here’s the thing. There are a lot of VERY expensive treatments out there. Do you think all people are morally entitled to receive all of them? Because if all the people in this country were given all medical treatments that could possibly help, there simply would not be enough money to pay for it and the economy would collapse. Health care rationing sounds terrible, but to some extent it is absolutely necessary. Because “The Government” doesn’t pay for anything. It makes nothing that creates money. When “The Government” is paying for something, what is really happening is that strangers are paying it. If someone gets “The Government” to pay for a $100,000 procedure, really 53% of Americans (those who actually pay taxes) are paying for it–whether it creates a hardship for them or not.
I think it was you (but maybe it was someone else) mentioned someone who had to sell their house to pay for medical bills. Yes, it is sad, but how is it an injustice? I’ve never been able to afford a house, so why should my tax money be paid so that he doesn’t have to sell his house, to cover expenses that aren’t my fault?
If you are going to say that the poor should have access to all of the procedures to which the rich have access, that is really the same as saying that there shouldn’t be any rich, which you can say if you like, but that is a completely different discussion.
Is there a moral right to basic health care? Yes, probably, in this country at this time. Are people being denied insurance because of basic health care needs? No. They’re being denied because they have extraordinary health care needs, which other people can’t afford to pay for them. Although actually, lots of people who are denied health insurance are denied because they didn’t bother to try to get (and pay for) any insurance until they had a big illness. Sort of like being mad because you can’t get new auto insurance to pay for the accident you already had. There are already laws about what companies can do about existing customers who get seriously ill. Probably those laws need to be tightened up. But that doesn’t mean we need to create a huge bureaucracy to take over the health care industry.
The only way to prevent that huge bureaucracy from sucking the economy even drier than it is now is to elect
anyone other than Obama. Nothing could be worse for the poor than four more years of what we’ve been having, except four years of the tricks Obama would get up to if he wasn’t worried about re-election.
The poor who don’t want to do anything except sit around and be taken care of by the government will always be poor. OTOH, the poor who are desperate for useful work they could do to support their families and not live off handouts are not being helped by any of Obama’s policies. As a country, we cannot Obama’s economy-destroying policies for another four years, with more kids coming out of school and learning NOT to work, because there isn’t any work, and learning to blame all of their problems on the only people who might be able to solve those problems (if only they were left alone to do it).
–Jen
And then of course Republicans anytime they held power never did a thing about the injustices of the health care system in this country and only began to talk a talk after Obama came along.
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