I delight to inform you that you do not have a right to healthcare

Superiority Complex wrote:

Just to clarify - you say compassion and altruism are incompatible and I am the one who is "dumb"?

the sayer of so wrote:

Altrusim does not mean helping people because you want to do so - it means sacrificing your own interests for the benefit of someone else under compulsion. That breeds resentment and is incompatible with compassion.

...i remember when I had *my* first beer....

You are 100% correct - Americans currently have no 'right' to healthcare, but if the healthcare bill passes then Americans will have a 'right' to healthcare, which they freely voted on and intend to pay for through taxation.

Whether the bill should or should not pass is another discussion, but I think you need to educate yourself on the real meaning of a 'right' before you step into that fray.

By the way, your idiosyncratic defintions of the words: 'insipid', 'right', 'privilege', 'insurance' (that was just brilliant!), and 'altruism' suggest to me that you are neither in medical school, nor ever likely to get there, so stop that bullshit immediately.

You are either an above average troll or a below average intellect.

FYI: from the Oxford dictionary:

altruism: devotion to the welfare of others.

I find it laughable that some of you can get on here and complain that we do not have the right to health care. The VAST, VAST majority of Americans have the right to health care.

Only relatively minor portion of the population, children borne with defects and such do not, and that DOES need to be fixed.

There are some that don't have health care because they are adults with a condition and can not be insured, guess what, tough luck, you screwed up, and there are consequences to pay. Now keep reading before you through a hissy fit. For those that develop a condition and are dropped, that is not right and things should be done to fix this, but for adults that go their whole life with out paying for health insurance and then want to bitch and moan and cry when they get sick and no one will insure them (or they have to wear their dead sisters dentures), tough. Should have thought of that before you got sick, like those who are responsible and plan ahead for bad situations and work hard and save money and pay for insurance when they are well.

SO overall everyone DOES have the right. Where some of you get confused is, you think that having the right means you automatically get it and you don't have to work for it, that is not the case. You have to work for your freedom (well some of us do), you have to work for your life (ie. make money, feed yourself etc.) you have to work to pursue happiness. None of these things are just given away in a government hand out, health care is absolutely no different. You have to work for health care and sometime think ahead, but again, you still have the right to it (IMO this is covered under the right to life and the PURSUIT of happiness).

So, yes some insurance reforms need to be made concerning congenital birth defects and insurance providers dropping patients who develop problems while already on insurance (and probably a few more but nothing major). But, overall, everyone here has the right to as much health care as they are willing to work for.

And yes, I am well aware that there are a few spelling errors in my post.

See if this makes sense to anyone...

Doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers provide a service. For that service they are paid money, it is their livelihood.

No one has a right to the services that someone else provides.

Discuss...

they're are? i cant read anyway.

No one has the right to expropriate the labor or property of another person against his or her will. Therefore there is no right to healthcare.

That's not to say that people can't think it's a good idea to have the government regulate or even totally nationalize healthcare, but that doesn't make it a right.

First we must agree on what rights actually exist, then everything follows from that.

Mtn Dew wrote:

No one has the right to expropriate the labor or property of another person against his or her will. Therefore there is no right to healthcare.

That's not to say that people can't think it's a good idea to have the government regulate or even totally nationalize healthcare, but that doesn't make it a right.

First we must agree on what rights actually exist, then everything follows from that.

This is a good post from a guy I usually disagree with. The language of "rights" is in most cases unhelpful because if there's one thing harder than solving the problem of health care, it's solving the philosophical question of what human nature is and what rights follow from that nature.

So, I'd politely disagree w/Mtn Dew and say that instead of trying to find agreement on the ideological question first--what rights we do or do not have--we simply discuss the idea of governmental regulation of healthcare, its possibilities and limitation without resorting to the language of rights.

A good rule of thumb: when people start asserting their right for something, it's because they've run out of reasons for it. In fact, this is exactly what the language of rights is for--to legitimate coercion when arguments end. No one will be coerced under any health care plan that has been proposed. Unless you want to define a possible increase in taxation as coercion.

This discussion seems to be going off the rails. The way I understand it the gov't is trying to provide greater access to insurance to those that don't have it or can't afford it.They propose to do that buy creating larger risk pools of beneficiaries and regulating some of the profit gouging of the insurance industry. People denied insurance or priced out of the insurance market have little to no access to healthcare, whether or not we have the best doctors and care in the world, because it is generally more expensive than insurance premiums. The indigent that use emergency rooms as uninsured care cost the taxpayer much more than if they had some form of pooled insurance coverage.

Mtn Dew wrote:

No one has the right to expropriate the labor or property of another person against his or her will. Therefore there is no right to healthcare.

Groundskeeper Willie wrote:

See if this makes sense to anyone...

Doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers provide a service. For that service they are paid money, it is their livelihood.

No one has a right to the services that someone else provides.

Discuss...

That makes sense in the abstract, but you the argument is (when you break it down) circular. You never actually support the contention that someone cannot have a right to the services that someone else provides. In virtually every other developed country they do. Are those countries all "wrong"? Consider re-phrasing it:

Human beings who live in one of the most developed countries in the world (economically if not morally it seems) have a right to healthcare.

Insurance companies are charging extortionate premiums and excluding people (many people) from coverage for reasons that are beyond their control.

If someone cannot afford the premiums or is excluded from coverage because they are sick then they are being denied a fundamental right.

No company has the right to deny an individual of their rights.

Of course, that analysis is circular (but no more so than your previous example).

Sayer of so... it is time for you to slowly slither away. You have lost all credibility here.

Mtn Dew. it was nice to see a well-thought-out response from you. I would have expected something more black and white (no pun intended), but I am happy to apologize for misjudging you (on this occasion at least!).

Mtn Dew wrote:

No one has the right to expropriate the labor or property of another person against his or her will. Therefore there is no right to healthcare.

I think you might be conflating "human rights", with the right of a citizen to demand that a democratic government should reflect the desires of the majority.

I can't believe it takes an Englishman to remind an American of Thomas Jefferson's words: "The will of the people... is the only legitimate foundation of any government". The popular majority voted on two candidates, one who promised healthcare reform, and one who did not - the one who promised reform won.

Barak Obama was elected, in part, on this promise of healthcare reform - it is not illegitimate to refer now to the citizen's "right" to see that promise become law, and that "right" has a different definition than the "right" you are attempting to conflate it with.

Simple contract law - A promises to do something for B, B acts on that promise, B now has a legal "right" to enforce that contract.

Wendell Gee wrote:

You are either an above average troll or a below average intellect.

FYI: from the Oxford dictionary:

altruism: devotion to the welfare of others.

That definition is wrong. It is anti-conceptual; i.e. of contains no qualifiers to distinguish it from anything else.

the sayer of so wrote:

Yes, altruism is a bad thing. Altruism is an imposed duty to serve others and is totally incompatible with compassion.

I have to say man, to think that you, as a future physican, don't believe you have a right to serve the needy really makes me scared for the future.

Regardless of whether you got to/through school on your own steam, you still owe it to others who sustain the other 99% of this country and allow you the ability to be successful. I'm not saying pay for their healthcare, but at least do some pro bono work for christs sake.

the sayer of so wrote:

Altrusim does not mean helping people because you want to do so - it means sacrificing your own interests for the benefit of someone else under compulsion. .

You know I was kinda rooting for you with your first post because you identified what I think is a very true point. But this is not the defintion of Altruism. In fact, the thing that makes Altruism... "altruistic" is the very fact that there is NO compulsion involved. That the person who is helping others is doing so out of their own free will.

You made a decent initial point point. Don't spoil it by making things up. This is not altruism at all.

the sayer of so wrote:

What decadent filth. Insurance is a contractual agreement into which one enters VOLUNTARILY, trading value for value with the insurance company and the other enrollees - it is not redistribution. That you would have to resort to such a grotesque distortion of context is clear proof of the weakness of your position.

I have to agree with OP Troll on this one. When it comes to insurance both sides agree on the terms of the contract. If OP Troll goes his whole life without serious medical problems then he'll end up paying more into the system than he uses. Oh well. On the other hand if he has a serious condition he could use more than he put in. Both sides have some risk, both sides know what the potential "reward" is. Hard to argue this is anything other than free market principles at work.

sayer of so wrote:

A right is a concept which applies only to human action and not to material goods or services. In the simplest terms possible, one has the right to any course of action that does not violate the person or property of someone else. One has the right to keep his own property, but not to take anyone else's regardless of whether "society" votes in favor of such.

"Privilege" does not apply here. A privilege is something allowed to you by someone who doesn't have to allow it. When your parents give you money for an allowance, that's a privilege. Trading your own money for goods and services is not privilege.

Here's the thing - a right is whatever we want it to be. There is no universal standard for rights. There are no rights in the animal world, and rights certainly did not evolve with humans.

At some point in our history humans decided we would invent the concept of rights. I think we've done a pretty good job. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Right to free speech. Right to not incriminate yourself.

So you are saying "there is no right to healthcare". Yes, you may be correct simply because there has not been a right to healthcare yet. But since we invented the concept of rights, we can change them any time we want.

Some people think healthcare SHOULD be a right. So the debate is not whether healthcare IS a right or not, it's whether it SHOULD BE. You seem to think no, and that's fine. But it's a wrong line of thinking to say that it shouldn't be a right simply because it is not currently one.

right or not. One thing. Some shouldn't have it, when others do not...

why do you get it when your 65 (medicare) or under 14 (children's defense fund) or under the poverty level (medicaid) and everyone in between is left to fend for themselves and pray they don't get sick, or unemployed.

It appears to be a "right" already for some, so make it a right for everyone. problem solved.

Do you have a job Sir Lance a lot?