Share of Americans skipping medical care due to money woes jumps significantly

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/05/share-of-americans-skipping-medical-care-due-to-money-woes-jumps-significantly/

by jackalo • 3 years ago

91 54 3 years ago

arstechnica.com

dfdg• 3 years ago

Encouraging generic drugs eases the problem a little bit.

Right to health care should be in the constitution instead of right to own guns.

pfannkuchen8• 3 years ago

Health care requires other people’s labor though. If you make that a right you risk needing to implement some kind of forced labor system (sure it can be obfuscated as much as you like).

Not taking guns doesn’t require anyone’s labor, so you don’t run into this hazard.

I’m not particularly pro gun, I just don’t think positive rights are practical from a design perspective.

reaperman5• 3 years ago

Welp. Guess we can't have taxpayer funded roads then cuz all the forced labor needed for free roads. Guess we also can't have a right to K-12 education.

ok_dad2• 3 years ago

I seriously don’t understand people whose ethics accept that some folks will just die because they don’t want to pay an extra few dollars in taxes. You grew up here, your success or failure depends on the health of our society in many ways, and our society is falling apart because opportunistic capitalists drain all of the productivity with very little gain for the average person since the 70s. I guess we can keep playing Wild West until our country falls apart from malignant cases of not caring about your fellow human.

ztrww• 3 years ago

Income tax? Publicly funded education? Innumerable (in a comment) other things especially including Medicaid and Medicare?

Not taking guns doesn’t require anyone’s labor,

It does. Somebody has to take care of all the bodies. Mass shootings and homocides in general are pretty expensive both directly and due to lost future productivity.

derelicta2• 3 years ago

Clearly letting poor folks die is the most moral option.

If positive rights make you so uncomfortable, I'll let you know they are very much widespread in today's constitutions. My canton's has many economic rights enumerated, including the right to a proper shelter. And I don't hold it for a nasty totalitarian dictatorship (yet?)

dragonwriter4• 3 years ago

Health care requires other people’s labor though. If you make that a right you risk needing to implement some kind of forced labor system

Whether that's true or not depends on the exact parameters of the right, and, in any case, the US has compulsory civic labor notwithstanding the 13th Amendment (jury service actively, conscription historically). Jury service direct relates to a positive right.

It also has positive rights which require labor but which somehow are not achieved by forced labor (voting, for instance, requires supporting labor.)

I’m not particularly pro gun, I just don’t think positive rights are practical from a design perspective.

And yet, the US has positive rights, and the system hasn’t collapsed (e.g.,.the right to assistance of counsel in criminal cases, for instance, in addition to others previously listed.)

lapcat• 3 years ago

Not taking guns doesn’t require anyone’s labor, so you don’t run into this hazard.

Of course it does. Labor is always required to protect your legal rights. Government, military, police, courts, those are all labor.

This labor is the difference between actually having enforceable legal rights and living in the Hobbesian state of nature, the war of all against all.

laratied• 3 years ago

Exactly. Just the typical incredibly out of touch, childish and highly privileged view often expressed on this forum:

"The smart people can work remote in Bali for 2x the median USD salary. If your not one of the smart people then you can bath and wipe old people's asses all day while being exposed to all kinds of pathogens for the median salary. The reason we don't have more of this is because of capitalism and whatever politics I don't like".

Variations on this theme in pretty much every topic with over a 100 replies.

naravara3• 3 years ago

Health care requires other people’s labor though. If you make that a right you risk needing to implement some kind of forced labor system (sure it can be obfuscated as much as you like).

You have the right to an attorney. The state hiring and assigning public defenders isn't "forced labor." I don't know where this canard came from. It makes no sense if you spend more than 10 seconds thinking about it.

foxyv• 3 years ago

You don't need to force labor.

As always, you simply need to provide people with a living wage and they will do things. A right to health care would simply become a national health system that is adequately funded. Then the only argument would be, how much do we need to fund that health care system to fulfill our obligation to provide people with a right to health care.

People become medical practitioners for many reasons and will happily practice medicine as long as they can make a living off of it without being coerced or manipulated. A few want to be able to afford a Ferrari, but the vast majority just simply want to help people and be able to thrive.

HelixEndeavor• 3 years ago

why not both

naravara3• 3 years ago

There is no individual "right to own guns" in the Constitution. When the second amendment talks about the right of "the people" it means as a collective. It's talking about curtailing the Federal government from restricting states from raising state militias. But we don't have a state militia anymore, it's been replaced by the National Guard.

There was no serious jurisprudence to interpret the second amendment as an individual right until the 60s. Guns were acknowledged as a practical tool and people saw practical issues with banning them, but that was it.

dmm• 3 years ago

The supreme court disagrees with you and the only way to change that is to change the ratio of justices. Why do we even bother with a legislative body at this point?

rayiner2• 3 years ago

The first amendment also refers to “the right of the people to peaceably assemble.” By your logic, is there no individual right to protest? The fourth amendment refers to “the right of the people to be secure in their persons.” Does that mean that you don’t have an individual right against unreasonable search and seizure?

You’re correct to identify “the people” as the key phrase, and you’re correct that the second amendment is referring to a collective right. But so are the other amendments referring to “the people.” The constitution is talking about a whole society, not individuals. E.g. the fourth amendment guarantees a society where “the people” aren’t subject to unreasonable searches from police. But that collective right also protects the individual. What applies to the collective applies to its individual constituents.

This makes sense in the context of the 2nd amendment: militias were “bring your own firearm.” The collective right was enforced through the individual guarantee. There was no need to interpret the second amendment in the past because it really wasn’t unclear what the framers meant. Some of the key figures in the Supreme court’s recent jurisprudence on the second amendment were prominent liberal academics like Larry Tribe and Akhil Amar. Here is Larry Tribe talking about how he changed his mind on the second amendment once he started seriously researching it: https://hls.harvard.edu/today/why-i-changed-my-mind/ (scroll down).

Your strongest argument is that the second amendment only applies to the federal government, not the states. That’s clearly true, but that’s true of every other amendment as well. The first amendment’s Establishment Clause clearly was intended to prevent the federal government from interfering with established state churches, or creating its own. The “wall of separation” phrasing wasn’t used by the Supreme Court until 1946. (Ironically, it was quoting the individual views of Thomas Jefferson, who also believed we should overthrow the government every couple of decades. With guns that every individual was entitled to bear!)

I’m willing to entertain the view that our whole incorporation doctrine is non-sensical, but that cuts more broadly than I think most gun control advocates would like to go. Moreover, the notion that the 14th amendment was meant to apply the second amendment to states is far better supported than the incorporation of the first amendment. Disarmament of freed slaves was specifically one of the concerns at the time: https://www.encounterbooks.com/features/racist-roots-gun-con...

nradov• 3 years ago

You are stating legal misinformation. There is an individual right to own guns in the US Constitution. This was settled in District of Columbia v. Heller.

https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/supreme-cour...

Technically many of us are considered members of the Federal militia, although in practice that statute is effectively moot.

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title10/sub...

ProllyInfamous• 3 years ago

I attended one year in a US medical school program, and am almost forty.

I do NOT have US health insurance, because it is unaffordable.

Zero dependents — if I had anybody to legally be responsible, I would be on a policy. Probably.

NO CODE

kapperchino• 3 years ago

The health insurance companies and the hospitals involved in this scam of a system are responsible for so many deaths and bankruptcies. Every year they make record profits by denying care and raising prices. Nothing will be done to fix this, Biden certainly isn’t going to, the man’s campaign is paid for by them. This whole thing is just so damn frustrating.

freddealmeida• 3 years ago

this is very troubling. The FED has done too much harm.

ashleyn• 3 years ago

Inflation probably isn't helping this problem much either.

Share of Americans skipping medical care due to money woes jumps significantly

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