No. There are three other well-known and frequently adopted solutions. There are the traditional two solutions: they turn to friends and family for help, or else they get a whopping big medical bill and it takes them a while to pay it off and sometimes they go bankrupt. And there's the modern solution: the majority orders some outvoted minority to cover the costs at its own expense.
Those are not alternatives at all. Millions do not have friends and family that could or would cover the expense...
As noted upthread, if not working for everybody meant something wasn't an alternative, well, the public option doesn't work for everybody so that isn't an alternative either.
And, it is well established that you do not get proper medical treatment without upfront proof that you can pay (so, again, same as my first option).
Lots of people have gotten proper medical treatment without upfront proof that they can pay. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, as with the other possibilities.
That's why all scientific analyses show sizable reductions in preventable mortality
Sure. Not saying your solution isn't the best; just saying cut out the religious chauvinism. Stop pretending people are subhuman monsters for disagreeing with you. You don't need the ad hominems. You just need to show your preferred solution gives better medical outcomes for less money.
No where is there or ever has their been a system that doesn't either have massive public coverage of medical expense or people suffering and dying from being unable to get proper medical treatment.
No where is there or ever has there been a system that doesn't have people suffering and dying from being unable to get proper medical treatment.
No logical alternatives exist, except in a magical fairy land where companies that exist solely for profit, willingly give away expensive treatment they know they will never be compensated for.
Only in magical fairy land does costs paid for by common funds mean everybody gets proper treatment. Only in magical fairy land do companies exist solely for profit. Only in magical fairy land does "No logical alternatives exist" follow from you denouncing my first two alternatives and silently ignoring my third. Only in magical fairy land are the protagonists' enemies a gang of scoundrels trying to do whatever is best suited to harm people and whatever is best suited to help the protagonists feel like superior life forms.
Red-herring <expletive deleted>. Failing to bankrupt oneself by personally trying to house and feed every homeless person is not at all the same as refusing to establish a collective societal system that offers medical care to those who need it. Only the latter requires a lack of basic empathy. The former simply means you aren't willing to completely sacrifice your and your loved one's well being in order to make a microscopic dent in a society-wide problem.
In the first place, two things do not need to be "the same" in order for them both to 100% qualify as not "ruling out leaving people without ability to pay their own health care costs to bleed out and die in the streets". Just because your enemies let it happen to more people than your allies do does not magically fly us to a fairy land where letting something happen means you rule it out.
In the second place, bringing up bankrupting yourself is a red-herring. Bankrupting yourself wouldn't enhance your ability to save people; consequently, failing to bankrupt yourself by personally trying to save everyone who the system won't save isn't what it takes to have "enough basic human empathy that rules out option 1". It doesn't take trying to do the impossible; all it takes is doing what you can. All it takes is sacrificing your and your loved one's well being in order to make a microscopic dent in a society-wide problem. If you buy your beloved daughter a PlayStation when you could have given that money to help save someone's life, well, that's what it means to have priorities. That's what it means not to "rule out" letting somebody die in the street. That's what it means to have enough human empathy to choose a PlayStation over a human life. This isn't Humpty Dumpty land. Words mean things.
And in the third place, this wasn't even about
personally trying to stop somebody from dying in the street. Leftists knowingly and deliberately leave people who can't pay to bleed out and die in the streets every day
with their public policy choices, and they self-deceive in order to not notice. Of course nobody wants to be the sucker who pays more so others can pay less; of course it still counts as empathy when you want to pay for strangers' medical care and make your neighbors pay for it too even if you aren't willing to go it alone; but it does not count as empathy to make your neighbors pay for
you and your loved ones "to get proper medical treatment" while the world is still packed with people who can't get
any medical treatment at all. The priorities exhibited by American leftist public policy demands are as follows:
1. Not leaving people in America who can't pay their own health care costs without proper medical treatment
2. Letting American taxpayers keep some of our money
3. Not leaving people in the Third World who can't pay their own health care costs to bleed out and die in the streets
Those priorities are not what empathy looks like. Those priorities are what tribalism looks like. If America's leftists were really the empathy-motivated superior beings they pat themselves on the back for being, then they would not be demanding that taxpayers provide Obamacare, let alone a single-payer National Health Service for everyone in America. They would be demanding that all those billions being taken away from Americans to pay for health care be handed over to Doctors Without Borders.
"But option 2 amounts to the uninsured harming others by using more than their fair share of the commons."
<Counterargument snipped>
None of this has anything to do with what I said.
It has everything to do with what you said. You said the uninsured are harming others by using more than their fair share of the commons. I pointed out that by imposing an overpriced monopoly on the provision of health care, the government is in effect holding the commons hostage. When a hostage is killed because you don't give an extortionist what he wants, that doesn't mean you harmed the hostage. The extortionist is the one who harmed the hostage. Option 2 amounts to the government harming others by wasting the commons. When you accuse the uninsured of harming others, you're blaming victims.
The "option 2" I referred to was about a system where people choose to get medical care and the public must pay for it. The ACA, despite its flaws, is a well-intentioned effort to strike a balance where people are not left to die from easily treatable health concerns without opening the door for an abuse of the commons that would occur with simply free health care for all. For all its problems, it is an attempt to use the Fed to help people from actual demonstrable harm.
Didn't say it wasn't. But that's an argument for the ACA; it is not an argument that the uninsured are harming others. You don't need to blame the victims in order to argue for the ACA.
No. They aren't stopping abortions maliciously, but because they believe fetuses are people and because they believe reproduction is holy. They aren't prohibiting pot because they want people to take fentanyl so Johnson & Johnson will be richer, but because drugs are bad, m'kay? They're sincerely judging
Really? What principle do they use to conclude that pot is bad? Do they apply this principle consistently? No, they just made it up out of nothing in order to rationalize making it illegal, just like they do with homosexuality. If their actions are not malicious, then no actions in history can ever be said to be malicious.
Why would you expect a principle? Why would you expect consistency? They think pot is bad because people they've been trained to look up to have been telling them it's bad all their lives, the same way they've been told homosexuality is bad, and it's normal for humans to just carelessly believe what they've been told and what everybody around them believes. It's one thing to accuse somebody of malice for
originating memes like those; it's quite another to accuse the masses who just picked it up by osmosis. They're guilty of all sorts of intellectual failings -- gullibility, lack of skepticism, irresponsibly spreading inadequately examined ideas, and so forth -- but malice is a ridiculous accusation.
They know their justifications are lies and made up nonsense, which is why they consistently advocate violence against those who merely doubt them. They have no reason to think their beliefs are true. They believe them out shear desire for them to be true, because it rationalizes their desired actions. Belief in a hateful God is a willful malicious act of inventing a God that let's you engage in hateful acts and call them "love".
Where do you get this stuff? They don't know their justifications are lies and made up nonsense; those justifications seem as intuitively correct to typical Christians as yours do to you. They advocate violence against unbelievers because a good God sending unbelievers to Hell is something they were taught to believe in when they were malleable children. Good grief, if Christians all invented a God, what would the odds be of them all inventing the same one? Belief in a hateful god is the normal natural expected consequence of having a human brain and being indoctrinated by the previous generation of believers in that god: a generation who believed for the exact same reason. Religion is a contagious disease of the human brain, a disease most brains have little natural immunity to. You might as well accuse people of maliciousness for catching cholera.
Malicious desire to oppress and exert authoritarian control is the sole basis of monotheism.
Quite possibly; but what has the basis of monotheism got to do with today's monotheists, people who are three thousand years removed from whatever the basis was?
Nonsense. My arguments are based on the premise that it's wrong to cause another individual human bodily harm or to prevent their control of their own person, unless they are using their person to harm others. I require that empirical evidence of harm be shown.
This is the direct opposite of the rightist principle that "harm" is whatever I (masquerading as a God I invented for this purpose) arbitrarily declare it to be, and that no one's will will but my (aka "God's") matters for what should or should not be done to or for anyone.
In short, you entire argument is a false equivalence where you assert that the following positions are identical:
1) "We should not let people put poison in each other's drinking water, because people don't want that to happen to them, and we cannot have anything resembling a peaceful civil society if we allow such things."
2) "We should let people poison each others drinking water, because God said so, and we should only consider what God wants."
You are not good at correctly representing your opponents' positions. I assert nothing of the sort; Christians didn't invent their God. You are arguing against strawmen of your own construction. And your conviction that your arguments are based on the premise that it's wrong to cause another individual human bodily harm or to prevent their control of their own person, unless they are using their person to harm others, is a self-delusion you maintain by applying unreasonable criteria for who is harming whom. You're applying the same sort of inference procedure as a libertarian who claims he's against initiation of violence and then justifies copyright laws by defining making a photocopy of a book as initiating violence.
When you impose an individual mandate, you are preventing a mandated guy's control of his own person. To square that with your positive self-image of what your principles are, you need to convince yourself if he remains uninsured then he's harming others. Well, where's the empirical evidence you say you require?
(Note for any who need it: I'm not arguing against Obamacare. It can stand on its own merits; it doesn't need to rely on ad hominems against the people it taxes. I'm only arguing against ronburgundy.)
