What freedoms will you lose if Obama's healthcare plan is passed?
People currently have little choice in what sort of health insurance they will have. Their employer chooses for them or they choose the best plan they can afford. The plan will not restrict your choice of doctors.
What exactly is your problem with the bill?
And an extra challenge: Try using concrete terms. Try not to use right-wing ideology. Try to use language that a moderate or perhaps even a liberal will find reasonable.
Being required to have something that you know you should have isn't an infringement at all. It is irresponsible and hurtful to your fellow Americans to not have health insurance. The rest of us have to take up the slack for those without health insurance when they join insurance plans or end up on disability.
We do not lose substantive freedom when private companies go under (after all free-markets make companies go under all the time). To the extent that a government enterprise can provide a commodity, indistinguishable from the privately produced commodity, we actually gain freedom.
"Being required to have something that you know you should have isn't an infringement at all."
Something you should do in order to avoid harming others. You harm others when you are not well and cost the country and your risk pool members extra money. We are forced to avoid harming other people in many ways, most of which seem justifiable.
Individual freedom is limited when one is not well. Everyone agrees to begin with that barring substantial losses of freedom everyone should be well. Healthcare should be a commodity that there is enough of. Thus, scarcity pricing becomes less important. The fact that there is not enough healthcare to go around is merely evidence of a gross market failure.
The scarcity of doctors is not an argument against healthcare reform, but for healthcare reform. We need to train more doctors.
Typo in one of the additions. Sorry.
I meant provide a commodity cheaper.
It should have read:
We do not lose substantive freedom when private companies go under (after all free-markets make companies go under all the time). To the extent that a government enterprise can provide a commodity CHEAPER, indistinguishable from the privately produced commodity, we actually gain freedom.
By reducing the bulk of necessary base costs, making health insurance cheaper adds to our freedom.
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Your objection to my justification of limiting individual liberty in cases of harm to others is actually kind of disturbing.
A widely accepted view is that harming others is the only justification for limiting liberty. Liberty is not your take home pay and the good stuff in the Constitution. Your liberty is being able to do all that a human could reasonably expect to be able to do in the context of his or her community. Your liberty does not imply that you get to keep everything you make. No one believes that taxes for defense or taxes for the police department are infringements on liberty (I recognize that some people believe this, but let's concern ourselves with reality). These taxes are inherently redistributive. Your house isn't burglarized at the same rate as all the other houses. If you live in Kansas, why would you care to help build coastal fortification?
But, lessening your take home pay is justified in the same way for health care as it is for defense. Harm would probably come to us, if we didn't have the military. Harm does befall members of peoples risk pools. Harm befalls the economy when people are not working. [Ex: I am not as rich because my neighbor is dying of cancer because he didn't health insurance and didn't get it diagnosed early.] Harm befalls those who are made sick by those who are sick, but don't know how sick they are because they haven't been to the doctor.
Personal harm is not a good justification for infringing liberty. Only harm to others. [A lot of liberals will give you a justification from morality that we should help the underinsured. I think we simply be better off if we did, and that is the best argument for me.] That is why the list of things that yall made that we could ban are irrelevant. You can bust ear drums, but it is illegal to play loud music in my neighborhood, see?