I'll begin with my personal opinion : Health care should not be a right, anymore then owning a house is a right, in the sense that you aren't born with the "inherent right" to orthoscopic surgery. People who support universal health care support this ideology. Free individuals should not be obligated through taxes to pay for the mistakes of other free individuals. Universal health care is another way of assigning more responsibility for you life to the portfolio's of wealthy bay street lobbyists. Medicine is the only area of our economy, the ONLY, where technological advances have INCREASED costs as opposed to lowering them which is the natural state of advancement in competition, were medical science free to adjust prices. In a truly free market system, more money will be in the pocket of the individual who previously ceeded this money to taxes, where he will be free to make his own choices about his health, in an atmosphere of competition driven by technology which drives prices downwards, as is the case in any other sector of the economy. I say this because its easy to be fooled by movies like sicko which promote universal systems subsidized by the taxpayer, but michael doesnt address the fundamental flaws behind the american system and how money is allowcated through private insurance.
I don't like paying for idiot 15 year olds to get their broken legs fixed after they decided it would be "sew kool" to try and jump over their mom's mini van in roller blades. But I certainly do not want to live in a society where people are forced to choose between keeping a house to live in or curing their 6 year old's cancer. I don't think everyone should be forced to pay either. If you don't have compassion for the people around you, immigrate to the states. Simple.
you overlooked the fundamental points i raised about technology in the economy to make an ad hominem that i dont have any compassion, a baseless assetion if you read anything i just posted.
I read what you said. I have no interest living in a true market economy, I'm a bleeding heart liberal with socialist tendencies. Your stuff about the economy and technology doesn't matter, I care more about the well-being of the people around me. And I didn't say you specifically didn't have compassion, just that people who would condemn families to make those choices, as opposed to helping them, don't have any. And then I made the point that health care isn't so much a right and no one is forced to pay, you can always move somewhere were you don't have to pay taxes so other people can live.
That statement essentially disqualified you from engaging in this debate with any shred of credibility. You cant talk about the flaws of the market system how it exists and think technology and the economy doesnt matter. The points i raised support the fact that a free market system of medicine would do a BETTER JOB of providing care for more people then a universal system.
Yes if you have money. Or if people want to donate to help others. The universal health care system is not without it's flaws to say the least, but I would rather everyone have the ability to get help rather than how the states has it where you go bankrupt and end up homeless. And if you're lucky enough to have health care, most of the time they don't cover it anyways. I don't think the "market economy" is the best way to run health care. Like with every other industry it ends up helping 5 already rich people and not the general public. The system in Canada needs an overhaul, especially for wait times and medication prices. Do I think letting it go freely is the answer? Not for a second. You talk about people having money in their pocket as opposed to paying it to taxes. Well the poorest of the poor don't pay taxes, so where would that extra money come from for them? If you can't even afford rent, how to you propose they pay for 6 months of chemotherapy when they're not working? As for your statement about competition, I think that is more to due with the idiotic patent claims on medication than anything else. Private companies do more of the research, and given the fact even in Canada medication is extremely expensive, I don't think it has to do with our economy or health care. I think it has to do with companies being able to be the only one distributing a "cure" for however much they please and not allowing competition. That does need to change.
You continually operate on the premise that our system is universal and thier system is privatized. This shows an ignorance of the details. The US pays billions of dollars into Medicare (socialist) and because privitized insurance companies are being subsidized by the Government, we dont have a free market economy because it is still burdened by massive regulations. As for the patents on medication, this falls under intellectual property rights, whereas if you come up with something you are entitled to benefit from your invention, taking this legal right away would enable underground economies like china to flourish without having the same ethical principles and Health standards imposed on them, making competition unfair and the enviroment less safe for the consumer.
Not everyone is going to agree with you or state facts in a way that you might appreciate or give credence to. I firmly believe that basic heath care is a right. A right that MANY MANY people in the world are denied. Just because you pay for private health care also does not mean you are fully covered for everything. I happen to know a wonderful family who had both of their children in the USA because that is where they lived at the time. Certainly their first child was expensive at just over $35,000 because she was a fertility baby. But the fact that they had very good insurance and still had to pay over $10,000 for their second child to be born when she was just a normally conceived child is IMO ridiculous. Imagine how much that would have cost should their family not have had insurance and also not qualified for the US version of public health care.
And here's my rebuttal: Correct, but: You aren't born with the "inherent right" to be a free individual as well. So, what's your point? We are born entitled to nothing, every entitlement we received we get it from the society. A society is formed to benefit the majority if not all of its members. You are given limited freedom because it is beneficial to the society, you are forced to pay takes because universal healthcare benefit the society. No moral or ideological argument is needed to explain the cost and benefit of forming a society. If you want to be truly free, remove yourself from the society and live in a jungle. There are plenty of right wing libertarian monkeys and baboons there.
Healthcare should not be free. Privatized healthcare creates competitive market that actually lowers the cost of healthcare as a whole incredibly. So also the competitiveness to provide the best possible care at the lowest price is what will have better returns and produce technological advances over time thus saving more lives. If you can't afford to do cancer treatments start a gofundme or get support from your local community or get a loan.
You want to remove entitlement to life-saving care, you can move to the US and try it out. We don't need that kind of thought in Canada it's stupid. Straight up, you're pandering to the wealthy and probably don't even realize it. "Too remain competitive" what a joke.
It does make it more easily accessible to those who need it though, and thats what matters. I can't even fucking imagine being turned away from a hospital if say I needed care because I didn't have cash, thats barbaric. And it just wouldn't happen in Canada because if you need the care, you're getting the care that's how we operate. The conversation that you're allowing is debating whether or not to treat PEOPLE dependant on their current financial status, and that's sick in the head. Barbaric. Are we re-entering a dark age or something? Did someone forget to give me the memo that tells people they should start thinking like absolute fucking savages? In the west we're supposed to be a little more intelligent than that I thought... Equality and Justice for ALL, not just for the wealthy
The problem then becomes those smaller health concerns that don’t warrant a gofundme. And also those health issues that aren’t a one time bill. Some illnesses last a lifetime, and you can’t just keep creating gofundme pages for the same thing every time you need a procedure. How is someone living off of minimum wage who can’t afford healthcare going to pay for a treatment that they need, but isn’t interesting enough for people to donate to?
People suffering fatal illness should absolutely be treated until they can safely be discharged. I think the government should allow a yearly budget per individual that way they are not stuck paying all of the funds. But it makes no sense why I have to pay for societies mistakes or misfortunes.
You're not paying directly for anything you're just paying your taxes. Why say "Oh my money is going directly to someone who I don't want to be helping" rather than "Oh my money went to roads or schools or the police"? It's a very very negative way of looking at it...
People pay for what benefits society and that ultimately benefits themselves. Imagine if diseases weren’t contained as quickly, because people who contracted Ebola/h1n1/bird flue etc didn’t seek medical care because they couldn’t afford it. These are diseases that show up in Canada. Hell, the plague was just spotted. We absolutely need to make sure everyone is covered, so diseases are quarantined and not spread.
Canada spent approximately $228 billion on health care in 2016. That's 11.1 per cent of Canada's entire GDP and $6,299 for every Canadian resident. That per capita rate would put Canada near the high end of what other advanced economies pay.
