Do People Have a Right to Healthcare

1.) Once on life support the people who put him there are now responsible for his life. To take him off is to kill him. Texas allows hospitals to do that and I oppose it.

2.) For Judgement: One must have a common reference point for such a debate. I accept the founders ideas of rights, do not feel they are outdated and they require the prerequisite of a Creator. Its not that those rights cant be taken away or have been hard to come by in history. Its that government does not have a LEGITIMATE right to take them away. This country has been integrated for all of my life (47 yrs) and your 50 yrs comment is utter bovine scatology. Lincolns rationale for abolition was found in the Declaration.

3.) A natural right doesn't depend on the service of others. HC doesn't happen without Doctors, Nurses, Pharmacists etc. One might claim that one would have a right to grow their own medicines without interference for their own personal or family's use in the privacy of one's home. But keep it there in the home.

 

I don't know how you can fully agree with the Founding Fathers' idea of what Unalienable Rights are. Unalienable means that which cannot be forfeited nor taken away. I assume "natural/intrinsic/God-given" and the like are synonyms for Unalienable, and must point out: They have been taken away. They continually are taken away. They will be taken away again.

So, again, I ask, where, how, or when do these rights exist?

 

As for your ridiculous idea that America has been fully integrated during your entire lifetime, I can't help but laugh. If a police officer has ever unjustly stopped, frisked, searched, accused, assaulted, injured, killed, etc. a person based entirely on the color of their skin, the officer has infringed upon their unalienable right to liberty. Are you so bold as to claim this hasn't happened within the first 3 months of 2017, let alone the preceding 50 years?

Edit: Hell, why be so specific about the color of one's skin? Take out that small excerpt regarding racism, and the claim is equally valid.

 

You cannot take away something that doesn't exist.

 

Re-read point 2.) the answer is there. Hint the qualifier is in caps.

 

Is the occasional rogue police officer or agent of the government a country?

 

Then you do not understand the definition of unalienable. Again, its very definition is something that cannot be taken away -- not something that should not be taken away.

 

I very well may be stating myself unclearly. So help me out by clarifying the intent of your comment more thoroughly.

 

This is obtuse. Murderers take away people lives everyday. It doesn't help the victim that his right to life is unalienable. This does not change the founders view that a right to life is unalienable. They would claim that government has a duty/right to take life in war or that of a criminal convicted of a capital crime. They wrote and signed the Declaration yet they used the death penalty. The Creator made such allowances. They would not have found all instances of state sanctioned killing to be legitimate and would be a violation of that unalienable right. You can lose rights through actions. Thats is why due process was so important to them. After due process they would routinely take a persons life, liberty or property ( the original phrase not used in the Declaration because liberty required property and it was felt redundant) Countries violate rights all the time. It doesn't change the nature of the rights. But these things to our wise founders were self-evident. That they aren't today may be another indictment of our failed education system.

 

I'm afraid it is obtuse and simplistic to think the definition of our rights is so trivial. There is a clear distinction, and its influence on reason is quite significant.

Once it is realized that unalienable rights do not exist, it is then realized that our rights aren't physical things that simply exist. They are thoughts and ideas agreed upon as a whole in our society which are subject to change -- which makes them malleable and unrestricted from tradition, religion, or what have you. I can't understate how polar opposite that is to the current argument stating we possess static rights which cannot include something such as healthcare because it's not one of the original, unchanging ideas. Saying "It's out of our hands due to God, tradition, and threat of blasphemy" is not a valid excuse.

 

Now this get back to my original statement of common reference point for debate. It is also why people like me fight for original intent in our justices and adherence to it in regards of the constitution. I dont believe in malleable rights up to vote by society. Neither did the founders. When you throw out their ideas you throw out the foundation of our republic and become unmoored from the rule of law. It devolves into a mobocracy. You can have Rousseau and the chaos his thinking begets. I will stick with Burke and ordered liberty.

Now HC isn't a right not because it wasn't envisioned as such by the founders but because it really doesn't pass a basic test of what a right is. HC requires someone else to give you of their labor. If it is a right then they are compelled to honor it. Forced labor is a violation of an individuals rights. You cant get any more basic than that.

Barry Goldwater was not a racist but he sure was right about 1965.

Uncle Milton also had it right. We opened a can of worms that has infested the society and undermined our rights. It has come a head in todays social battles as we mistake radical egalitarianism for equality under the law. We have traded freedom for some nebulous idea of fairness and elevated equality of all things above the rights of the individual.


“A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.” - Milton Friedman

Maybe with the right justices on SCOTUS we can again put freedom before equality.

 

Your first paragraph is just screaming for tradition for tradition's sake. The Founding Fathers' ideas were great building blocks, but they are building blocks. They are not infallible. They are not perfect. They are 300 year old ideas that people like you think are the epitome of human civilization rather than the aforementioned building blocks they are. The very fact rights have to be ratified and agreed upon by a large committee is the very evidence they're malleable and don't exist until they're agreed upon.

You're misrepresenting your opposition as some anarchist, hair-brained concoction of deceit, half-truths, and lies. I don't have the fortitude to deal with your intellectual misrepresentation and the circles you employ in your reasoning, so I'm bowing out of this dialogue with you.

 

Wasn't sure where to put this and landed here. The point of my post is the insurance piece towards the end, but I'll provide context first so it makes sense.

I've had back pain for a few weeks under my right shoulder blade. It started when I was in Italy. I just woke up one morning and my back hurt. I've also experienced some chest pain/discomfort in the general area of the sternum.

I came down with a cold/sinus infection sort of thing shortly after the back pain began. Lots of drainage, coughing, etc. Figured maybe pneumonia or bronchitis, but then why did the back pain start before the cold? Could also be some sort of muscle strain, but that doesn't make a ton of sense either. I played a flag football game the day after I got home from Italy. Played another one last night. Didn't really notice the issue during either activity. The pain is most prevalent when I wake up in the morning, or after slouching back on the couch. It hurts most when I cough, but it also hurts when I take deep breaths. But again, I don't really notice it much otherwise throughout the day.

So my symptoms are weird. I had an appointment already scheduled with my primary care provider, so I asked him about it. After his physical examination, he didn't know for sure what was going on, but he wanted to rule out a pulmonary embolism & aneurysm. He made it abundantly clear that he didn't think it was either of those things causing my issues, but because he couldn't rule them out, he wanted to get a CT scan done. He suggested getting the scan done that day or the day after because if it was one of those things happening, I could basically drop dead at any time.

So I walk out of the office with his order for the scan. I call American Radiology. We go through the whole process of getting the appointment scheduled, and she asks me, "Does the order from your Doctor say stat?" I told her that no, it didn't, but that I felt the words "pulmonary embolism" and "aneurysm" probably implied "stat." She informed me that, unfortunately, my insurance (United Health) requires a 5 day review period unless the order says "stat," and that she couldn't schedule me until 5 days from then. So I had to go back to my doctor's office and inform them of the situation, which they responded to by writing "Stat" in the top right corner of the form and initialing it. They were then able to get me scheduled same day, and, luckily, I'm not going to die from an aneurysm or a pulmonary embolism.

Obviously the whole 5 days thing is a little absurd. I've got my doctor telling me I should get this done as soon as possible (today or tomorrow) because if he doesn't tell me that, he could be held liable if I drop dead the next day. Meanwhile, the insurance company decides it can wait 5 days. But I think what stood out to me was all the different ways this could have been significantly more frustrating/annoying for someone who isn't me:

• I wasn't really "scared" or "worried" because my doc made it clear that it was very very unlikely that the PE or aneurysm was the cause. I know a lot of people who still would have been nervous and/or scared shitless, especially people with kids/a family. Hard to imagine being someone who feels that way and is told "wait 5 days because your form doesn't say 'stat.'"
  
  
• The close proximity of my doctor's office and flexibility of my job allowed me the time to go back to my doctor to get that "stat" tag on my form. Not everyone has that luxury. Imagine being someone who had to go right back to work after the first doctors appointment. He calls American Radiology later that afternoon/evening and finds out about the 5 day thing. Can he even get back to his doctor's office that day for the stat tag? Can he get there the next day? Is he forced to just say "[uck fay] it" and wait the 5 days? Incredibly irritating.

Beyond that, I asked what the cost for the test would be if I just paid for it with cash without going through insurance. They told me $600. If I, as a fairly well off but by no means rich person can hear that number and think, "Okay, that's not that bad. If worst comes to worst, I'll just pay for it myself," then I KNOW it's [uck fay]ing fractions of pennies for the damn insurance company. So why the ridiculous delay?

Anyways, thanks for coming to my TED Talk. I guess the bottom line is [uck fay] insurance? Just couldn't believe what I was hearing.

 

And all this with a non-life threatening or incapacitating condition, so you can actually ask questions and weigh options. It is ridiculous the burden placed on the patient.

 

Yes. It is an immoral system where a third party is profiting off of people's life and death situations.

 

Posts like this really kill the pregame vibe we have going on right now.

 

Okay, I laughed at this one.

 

I don't fall into the "healthcare is a right" or "healthcare should be free" camp, but I do feel that people should at least get what they pay for.

 

Brigham Buhler went on Joe Rogan recently and talked about a lot of this stuff. It was an interesting listen.

 

That is a matter of perspective (what they pay for). We call it "insurance" but then it is applied to very predictable routine care. That's not insurance then, it is "medical services" in general. The whole system is [uck fay]ed, is what I am saying. Insurance is supposed to be for low probability events, to limit risk. But that doesn't describe how the health industry functions.