I don’t think you are right when you say, “Make no mistake that access to affordable and meaningful health care should be thought of as a human right and civil right.” Health care is a privilege of living in a developed society and is an economic imperative. Poor health care hamstrings the economy and costs more that good health care.
Any definition of affordable and meaningful health care would be somewhat arbitrary and capricious. Rights are not arbitrary they are unalienable but even the supreme courts puts limits on the “rights of the bill of rights.”
We should make sure that poor people who seek out proper health care get proper health care. We mostly do that, the very poor get almost free health care under from Medicaid.
The not quite so poor envy those who get Medicaid, these not quite so poor have to pay a substantial portion of their income if they need health care or want insurance.
I guess that you want to consider Health Care a right, you even call it a Civil Right because you are a Civil Rights Warrior. You battle for the poor and disadvantaged and your banner is Civil Rights. When what you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Try to rethink the issue. What is the minimum necessary standard of care and how is it going to be paid. Just because I said minimum does not mean stingy it means, a level below which the care would be inadequate.
It is understood that experiment treatments would not be included in the minimum standard of care but most affordable established effective treatment would be in that care. Private rooms in a hospital would not be the minimum standard. This standard would not be hard to establish but it might vary by region because it is somewhat dependent on Culture and Sociology.
Who should pay for Health Care? Should who pays be based on the recipients ability to pay? I say yes but if you think it is a right then it should be free to all. I think that if you are a billionaire and you need a treatment that costs a million dollars then maybe you should have to pay half the cost of the treatment but if you have no money in the bank and earn barely over the poverty line then your 300 dollar a month prescription should only cost you 30 dollars. Whether it is the half a million dollars or the 270 dollars the recipients did not have to pay, someone has to cover those costs.
That someone is the rest of us. It could be thru insurance or taxes or cost transfers by the providers but in the end it is the rest of us who pay. By the way the cost of not providing heath care also falls on the rest of us. You see if we don’t provide health care we end up with emergency care, or disability care, absenteeism at school or work, lower productivity, homelessness, etc. Pay me now or pay me later. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
The burden that falls on the rest of us does not fall equally or proportional it falls where the Powers that Be decides when they pick the winners and the losers. You are one of those Powers that Be, are you going to continue to pick the big insurance companies and the government agencies and their workers along with the Doctors, Nurses, Big Pharma companies and Medical device providers as the winners and the upper middle class Americans as the losers?
We need Medicare for all but not because it is a right but because we are a rich country and it makes financial sense. We would be healthier and wealthier if we had Medicare for everyone. What is will or won’t do to the budget is a separate issue called tax reform.
TEK
