Socialized Health Care in the USA

[kandrathe]

Put another way, it's not a battle of the extremes here, "cover-everything" vs. "cover nothing". There are a lot of reasons for a public plan not to cover something. You, however, are in fact arguing the cover-nothing extreme, so for logical reasons it's incumbent on you to take the example most favourable to public health care and explain why it shouldn't be public.

Yes, I thought it was a straw man (and a plea to compassion) to assume that all illnesses were catastrophic. Yes, catastrophic illnesses are each expensive, but a million unnecessary trips to the emergency room for basic first aid are also expensive. I'm actually advocating for "something", but that the "something" be driven by the free market. It is the free market, when the government is doing its proper job (preserve liberty and remove fraud), that will create the most efficient service for health insurance. The government has no incentive to be efficient, and all the power to be abusive.

If you don't believe at all in capitalism, then I can understand why you'd advocate a state run system.

My question is really who should be responsible for your health? Not only in maintaining it, but also in paying for the costs of fixing you when you are broken. It sounds nice to think that the publics health should be maintained by "the public", but that is really just another form of collectivism. People also need food, so the same argument for health care might be used to ration and distribute food. Or, housing. Or, transportation.