Healthcare--a right or not?

Healthcare is a commodity, just like everything else that is bought and sold.

 

To assume that some random guy, Bob, shares some assumptions about right and wrong with us is not unfounded at all. It's the perfectly reasonable induction that Bob will be like most other people we've ever met or heard of in that he can recognize a human when he sees one, he knows the difference between a dead human and a live human, he regards the idea of turning a live human into a dead one as an evil, he is capable of distinguishing between his property and your property and can be expected to treat them differently. To assume otherwise would be the huge unfounded assumption.

That people own themselves is something that normal people have always tacitly assumed. What have people done when wanting to keep members of another race as chattel slaves? Did they go on as if such acts require no justification, or did they rationalize it by contriving justifications such as that members of the other race are not fully human, and that, thus, what everyone knew to be wrong was not really wrong in their case. People betray their moral presuppositions when they offer justifications for their acts. You never hear anyone offering a justification for something he doesn't think is wrong, and the only people who don't feel compelled to offer justifications of atrocious acts are psychopaths who experience no empathy, about 1.5% of the population.

I haven't offered a definition of natural law. What I have offered are observations by which you can discern it. That most natural law theorists have tried to prove too much doesn't mean that there is nothing whatsoever for them to point to, and there is no rational requirement that we provide a complete ontological account if it and all its causes before admitting that we recognize a phenomenon. To say that the consistencies among our respective moral experiences are not natural is to say that they are intentionally cased by agency. Which is the more tenable position?

 

You can call that a legal right to emergency care if you want to. Pile enough of those requirements onto caregivers, though, and watch it become an unmanageable cost of doing business.

Increasing the cost of providing a service does constrict its supply, BTW, so every legal requirement which increases the cost of providing healthcare also makes healthcare less available than it would otherwise be.

 

I think what Mr. Swedish Guy is trying to say is that there is no morality that is universally agreed upon. To give just one example, some people think it's wrong to eat meat. They think it's murder. But other people disagree and will continue to eat meat. This is a case that even in advanced nations people disagree with each other on what constitutes good, moral behavior.

 

By the way....that right is so strong it is available to every person in the US.....even non citizens or visitors

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Rights can be purchased.

 

How does that bear on what I have said?

 

(*)(*)(*)(*) heads always argue for "rights" when they think someone else can be forced to pay for something they want.

 

I wasn't like, disagreeing with you or agreeing with him. I was just trying to summarize his post. I guess it wasn't needed..

 

Every other industrialized nation provides health care to their citizens.

So arguing fhat it is unmanagable isn't a successful approach to trying to prevent America from doing it.

 

The cost of indigent care went down due to the ACA.

That makes sense, as millions more people were covered by insurance. Also, they could use clinics, etc, so ERs were used less for basic care.

 

OK, so we established there is a legal right to some form of health care. In this case, life and death emergency.
Now, if one goes to the ER with an very bad cold? Or the flu? Or a huge lump in the side of the neck?

 

I have Moderate Autism and Moderate Depression. I am unable to work. I believe that Healthcare, Food and Shelter are most basic human rights. Current US system fails disabled people miserably.

 

Oh, well, he's dealing with different people coming at the same thing from different angles. Universalizable principles are useful for articulating particular rights or laws, but that's not what I'm doing here. I'm just trying to show that there is a category that does justice to the descriptor "natural law".

Some people seem to suppose that differences somehow negate the existence of similarities. There are many different flowers with wildly varying characteristics, but this doesn't negate the ideal category of flower. That we may not be able to discern exactly where a stem ends and flower begins doesn't mean that any of us should be expected to think a rock belongs in the category, flower. Someone saying that eating meat is tantamount to murder doesn't prove that he doesn't know what murder is. It proves the opposite; that he not only knows what it is, but that he expects your understanding of it to be so similar to his that he can use it as a metric to convey to you how egregious he finds eating meat to be.

 

We don't need to go slow like that. We all know what the law says, or we can look it up. You can just make your point.

 

We don't need to go slow like that. We all know what the law says, or we can look it up. You can just make your point.

 

Of course there are all sorts of different ideas about what is right or wrong. The only difference between the competing ideas of natural rights or slavery are the arguments used to arrive at the different conclusions. You have to look at the premises the conclusion is founded upon and how the conclusion is arrived at. What you're doing is saying that morality is relative, so why bother with trying to decide if something is good or bad.

If that's how you feel, then you've bowed out of the discussion because there is no way to get from 'is' to 'ought'. 'Cannibalism is practiced by some tribes in Papua New Guinea' is a positive statement, but you can't get from that to "Papua New Guinean tribesmen should not eat each other" because those tribesmen might disagree with that notion. They probably think we humans are quite tasty, and that saying they shouldn't eat each other is as daft as some animal rights activists forming a human blockade in front of a KFC franchise saying that we should consider that chickens own their own bodies, so it is immoral to order a bucket of original recipe.

Even if everybody agreed, that wouldn't matter. What matters is how we arrive at the conclusion of a particular argument. Since you are bowing out of that, you are bowing out of logical debate. You can still make statements that presume we might want to consider other peoples feelings on a particular subject, but you can't say we ought to consider other peoples feelings.

I'm pretty sure you have made a few "ought" statements from time-to-time, but how could you defend those statements using a relativistic perspective? Maybe "This is America, and the law says we can't discriminate against people because of the color of their skin!". A moral relativist would have to concede that it's just fine and dandy for other people to discriminate against blacks because they don't live in America. You'd also have to concede that it was fine for people back in the day to own slaves because that's just how they thought.

Not my view of rights because I have to use universal principles. Yours do collapse, and that is true whether you are talking about slavery or cannibalism or ownership of the shirt on your own back.

People don't have to agree that slavery is wrong for slavery to be wrong.

See the trap you are now in is of your own making. Weren't you just talking about how concepts such as good or bad are relative, therefore not universal? You can't climb back on that wagon when it's healthcare you are trying to argue in favor of. Sorry, but saying that we ought to help people when it concerns healthcare because you've not only watched that ship set sail on the waves of relativism, you helped launch her.

 

That healthcare is in fact a legal right. In fact, most of the world will see healthcare as a legal right.

 

... arguing that what is unmanageable? I said "Pile enough of those requirements onto caregivers, though, and watch it become an unmanageable cost of doing business.", and it's true; there is a theoretical point at which any job is too hard to do, and that point can be reached in principle by continuing to add arbitrary requirements to it.

That point is not a Boolean variable having no effect until it is reached. There is gradation into it. As requirements are added, cost of providing the service increases, all else being equal. Requiring hospitals to treat anyone seeming to be in need of emergency care increases the cost of operating a hospital. Other such requirements will increase the cost of operating a hospital. ' nothing really controversial here.

 

It's always about relativism. In the healthcare part, it didn't use to cost more than a monthly mortgage payment to participate in the health care arena. Just the insurance premium can be more than a person's morthage.
It's gone from affordable to most all, to becoming unaffordable to even some middle class.

 

That is what the ACA is trying to address. Or even single payer.
Get people to do preventative care instead of emergency care. Relieve the ER rooms of costly, sometimes unnecessary visits.

Preventative maintenance on machines has always been less costly than waiting for the machine to fail. Same with humans.

 

That's not what moral relativism means. Moral relativism (there are actually several variants) is saying that we cannot arrive at a prescriptive statement from a positive statement.

A positive statement is a description of what is. So for example, "April showers bring May flowers". It's not saying that something should happen, but rather that it simply does. There is no moral imperative that flowers should start growing in May due to rain in April.

A prescriptive statement is something like "We should help people who can not help themselves". This is not something that just happens, but is rather something that ought to happen.

What you're doing is saying that supply and demand relate to the price of something. This is, of course, true. It doesn't mean that we ought to control the prices of certain goods or services based upon the ability of people to obtain them. The law of supply and demand is not something that ought to happen, but is rather a positive statement based upon empirical evidence.

 

If that's all you need to say you have a right to healthcare, then say you have a right to healthcare. Since healthcare must be delivered by other people, a right to it entails a right to part of the lives of other people. If you're comfortable saying that you are entitled to part of the lives of other people, be my guest. Personally, I find the idea deplorable.

 

I am entitled to a part of their lives. And the government will compensate them for it.

 

Yes, the government will compensate everybody from its magic printing press. How stupid all of humanity have always been for thinking they ever had to work to bring things into existence. How stupid governments have always been for thinking they ever needed to forcibly expropriate their tax victims.

 

We are not talking about just any business. We are talking about health care.

As I pointed out, every other industrialized nation is managing.

And, we are not, as there are millions of US citizens without coverage even though we spend more per capita.