Based on this statement alone, it would be an absolute waste of time to discuss the merits or constitutionality of the mandate with you. So I won't. Not true. Everything you say afterwards is wrong because that is simply untrue. The government should guarantee that you get what you pay for and that contracts between individuals and organizations be upheld (contract enforcement). The government should levy stiff penalties on companies that cheat their patients (contract enforcement). Companies should be expected to cover patients with pre-existing conditions but they would be able to charge different rates for different patients in a free market (allow the free market to function freely). The government should also eliminate all tax breaks and loopholes for health insurance companies (actually all corporations) and require greater transparency (get out of the business of subsidizing corporations). Finally provide a safety net of tax-payer funded, patient-first/planned parenthood-type clinics for qualifying citizens (i.e people who demonstrably cannot afford health insurance). All people who show up for emergency care would receive it. If they have insurance, good. If not, they'll be billed and treated like student loans are treated. For the circumstances where a citizen suffers from a chronic disease with lifetime costs beyond those the individual or his company can afford, the government can subsidize that individual's treatment.
If you are declaring--yet again--that you are going to boycott any discussion, that's fine. But you are factually incorrect. In the realm of healthcare policy, "access" refers to care that patient can reasonably expect to receive, not the mere existence of a certain service within geographic proximity to them. Thus, all, access is paid for (by someone), because you don't have access to a service that you never receive. We haven't before, no. But that's hugely different than saying we "can't." There is absolutely no precedent that says we cannot do this. Also, if you follow NewYorkJedi's post, he makes it clear that what's happening is not actually non-participation. Anthony Kennedy agrees. You misstate his argument here. He certainly was arguing that healthcare is not unique. Because if he ever conceded that there was, there couldn't be a slippery slope. There would be a clear, bright line between why the government is allowed to make this sort of law in healthcare but not in regards to anything else. That's why his failure to convincingly argue healthcare is the same as other markets is such a pointed failure. He's trying to make a slippery slope argument without ever establishing that there's anything to slip down.
It's one thing to say "Let us agree that x means y". It is wholly another thing to say "x" means "y". I made it absolutely clear what I meant. That being said, you said That is, I repeat, factually incorrect. Now if you are amending that (as you appear to be doing) to say that there is no such thing as access that someone doesn't have to pay for, then you have my attention. But your claim was false and then your follow-on discussion which followed from that claim was equally fallacious. I am fully prepared to have a discussion, Jabba, but I'm not going to argue with you by restating my position and then defending statements I did not make. I'm also not going to go down rhetorical paths with no obvious potential for gain. When you say that the government is giving you a choice--buy insurance or pay a fine--I don't think there is any way we can have an intelligent conversation on that topic. I find it to be too stupid a discussion to bother even having.
A) We are discussing policy. It is not now, nor has it ever been in bounds to use a term idiosyncratically, then take offense when someone points out the terminology relevant to the debate. Maybe you didn't mean to imply "services rendered and paid for" when you said access. Fine. I've never had an issue with that. But what I pointed out is that the word for what you are describing is not "access" in health policy. B) Your "someone" point was eliminated by your own position in your first post. You acknowledged that there were cases were individuals are unable to pay for themselves. Then you forbade society--the relevant "someone else"--from having any role in paying in their stead. Since the government cannot "guarantee" the acts of good Samaritans and angel donors (the only group left), it is not possible for it guarantee access (again, paid provision of services) while simultaneously taking no role in providing (paying for) that care itself. B2) Indeed, your own ideal vision later describes the government taking quite a prominent role in "the provision" of healthcare, which runs counter to your initial statement that it shouldn't. In light of that, my confusion, and follow-on questioning was certainly justified. Whereas you characterization of my inquiry afterward as "simply untrue" was not.
Dude. You said that there is no such thing as access that one does not have to pay for. That's just plain not true. There are free clinics all over this country. Why is it so hard for you to grasp that what you said is just not true? When I make as mistake or I'm unclear in what I mean, I have no problem admitting it. You seem unable to do this which is precisely why I get frustrated in these conversations. I said: I was very clear in what I meant by healthcare as a right. I intentionally defined what I meant in order to avoid this very discussion. But here we are nonetheless. I do not believe it is the responsibility of society at large to pay for access to healthcare. I said it in my first post and nothing I said contradicts that. My "own ideal version" describes government taking a limited role in providing for those incapable of providing for themselves. If you think that's a "prominent" role in providing healthcare, ok. I think it is a far more limited role than providing healthcare for all. I also think it is a far less prominent role than directing an entire population to buy a product whether they want it or not.
I think there's a big tendency to mix what the government has the ability to do with what the government should do, as well as ignoring, imo, the nature of what a right is. It seems easy to say "well, this is what the government should do" when it comes to health care, but the very nature of our government is that it carries with it limits, and any attempt to do work outside of those limits should come from first changing the restrictions on government, then adding those policies. From the standpoint of the Supreme Court, this isn't about if health care mandates are beneficial or not, that's a legislative question. It's fully about if it's something that the government can do. Both are important discussions, but I don't think it's relevant when talking about what the Supreme Court should do to discuss anything beyond how one can interpret the law and what powers that means the federal government has on this one. As to what is, or is not, a right, I strenuously disagree with the interpretation of a right that floats around from time to time. Rights should be, imo, interpreted as that which the government can't interfere with you getting, not what the government has to give you. To me, the test is if one should (or at least could) be able to have it, even if there was no government. It's not about what would be beneficial to get, it's what the government shouldn't be able to take. So, for example, the right to bear arms doesn't mean that, since guns cost money, if I can't afford a gun the government should give me one so that I can have my right. It's that the government can't infringe on my right of being able to have a gun. The distinction rather reminds me of education. I think that everyone has the right to education. Meaning that they shouldn't be prevented from being able to get an education by the government. However, that doesn't mean that they automatically deserve a free education by way of the government. I'm still dramatically in support of providing people with an education, but that's pragmatism, not because it's a 'right'. The right is a check on the government, and "free education" isn't a right, imo, because that's not something the government would infringe on, it's only something the government can provide. Along the same lines, there is a right to access to health care, and there is the question of if it's good public policy to provide a free or heavily subsidized health care. The two aren't the same on a fundamental level.
This is essentially how I feel. This was the distinction I was trying to make though my desire to avoid terms like positive and negative rights led to some confusion. I would modify that a bit to say that government must also ensure that no other citizen, in the process of exercising his/her own rights, does not interfere with the exercise of your own. In the context of health care, I think that access to health care is a right, meaning that the government should not interfere with your access to health care and should also ensure that no one else interferes with that access.
One thing I've noticed is that many people opposed to the Obamacare plan complain it is lack of choice or government focing you to do it a certain way. The weird thing is, many of those people are not opposed to taxing, which is a form of government force to make people pay for things. So, if tax is OK why is making people pay for health insurance not OK? I don't object to paying taxes, because I get services for taxes, including healthcare.
I'm nowhere near as lefty as Rachael Maddow but she did a good job pointing out how some of these Live Free Or Die opponents of this law were FOR the government forcing vaginal ultrasounds on women. LOL, talk about gov't intervention.
That's a very cogent, easy to understand way to put it. Kiki-Gonn: Never gets me how some are so quick to intrude upon others but so quick to deny any intrusion upon themselves.
The problem is determining between fundemental rights everyone everywhere should have and right granted by individual nations. The US has a right to bear arms, but I don't have such a right and I wouldn't view the government revoking it as taking your rights away as it was they who decided that right existed in the first place. Healthcare should IMO be as much of a right as the Right to Life since being denied healthcare would endanger your life.
Well, by that logic, censorship isn't taking your rights away because they give freedom of speech in the first place. My stance, on the whole, is that the government recognizes rights, but it doesn't create them. To use an imperfect scientific analogy, just because we've determined what the equations are for gravity it doesn't mean that we can then change gravity by changing our equations. Gravity will maintain it's properties, no matter what equation we use for it, so we can just be more or less right about it. Similarly, the rights are always present, government can just chose if they will acknowledge those rights or not. (Obviously, rights aren't the testable thing that gravity is)
I don't have a right to bear arms that the government isn't recognising, it's just not a right I have (or even want). Rights that exist from the moment of birth until death should be upheld by government at all costs and they should not be able to take them away. The ironic thing is that violating rights is part of life, it just depends what rights they are (tax is a violation of rights after all, it's stealing your money by force and you don't have the choice to not do it) and whether they matter. Rights did not exist in Humanity's entire existance, the concept of rights was not understood or implemented in various past socities. Animals don't have the same rights as humans because as far as we know they don't have the concept of morality or understand the difference between right & wrong (at least, the vast majority of them don't). They function on instinct alone, that is not justification for giving them rights. Healthcare is a right everyone should have and that should be granted to them and protected. The right to bear arms is a right one country decided its people should have and it can be removed at any time.
Yes, you do have a right to bear arms. It is the same right as the right to self defense. If someone attacks you, you are completely within your rights to fight back in order to preserve your life or the life of someone else. That isn't something granted to you by the government, but an inherent property of being alive. You might choose not to exercise that right, but that doesn't mean that you don't have it. Actually, the right to bear arms is an ancient part of British law, well predating the formation of the US. For example, it was clearly stated in the Bill of Rights in 1689: In fact, your nation didn't start implementing any significant limitations on the right to bear arms until about 100 years ago (the Pistols Act of 1903). If you read Blackstone's Commentaries, you can see that the British Right to Bear Arms is well grounded in Common Law all the way back to 1181. (I've studied the subject of firearms in law quite a bit.) However, there is a difference between a right and an entitlement. A right is something that you inherently have. An entitlement is something that you are owed. Entitlements are granted by the government. Rights are not, because you already have them. Kimball Kinnison
I don't need a gun to defend myself. And under your interpretation I have the right to carry a spear or sword or crossbow, none of which I would be allowed to carry around in public. No-one can carry knives either. You don't need weapons to defend yourself, weapons are not a right. Not having a gun does not stop me from defending myself, not having healthcare takes away my ability to sustain my life as I have the right to do.
Hundreds of years of English Common Law disagrees with you. To quote from Blackstone's Commentaries (1765 edition): Now, the UK may have moved away from this in the last hundred years, but that doesn't change the history of it. Remember, your initial claim was "The right to bear arms is a right one country decided its people should have and it can be removed at any time." In fact, the right that the US holds to is deeply engrained in British Common Law (defeating your claim that it's something "one country decided its people should have"), and, as Blackstone stated, it is derived from the "natural right of resistance and self-preservation". Just because you have allowed your country to infringe your natural right doesn't mean that it isn't a natural right. It's no different than how you have a natural right to freedom of religion, even if the country you live in decides to restrict that right (as happens throughout the Middle East). Just because the government has the ability to restrict a right doesn't mean that it isn't a right.
It's right because the state decided to make it one, not because it's a right. They said it was a right people should have, and so it was. Later they decided it was no longer a right people should have so they took it away. Entirely different from rights such as those the UN states as the Fundemental Human Rights, those must be granted in every country and can't be taken away (at least not legally).
Except what you describe isn't a right, but a privilege. Rights are, by their very nature, inherent. Privileges are granted or revoked on the basis of someone's authority. After all, what is the difference between a nation saying you have a right and the UN saying you have that right? And why then couldn't he UN decide to revise what is or isn't a fundamental human right? What gives the UN the authority to declare what is or isn't a fundamental right?
What gives a government the authority? Just because they write on some legislation doesn't make it a right. Healthcare is not a right if you put down on a law "healthcare is now a right". Whether or not it should be is the purpose of discussion, but the basic human rights simply are because they are, all other stated rights were decided upon by various individuals in charge at certain times
