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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29421 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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Are you also going to give them medical care? "Yes" is unaffordable, and "no" makes it into a horrible deathtrap.

If we instead just ask, "How much medical care are you going to give them?" then there are plausible answers. After all, bandaids are medical care that you could give them. So is, like, free MRIs for anyone with a slightly sore wrist. Of course, the American polity is allergic to the very concept of this question most of the time.

This is a special case of the general problem people have when being pinned down into agreeing to how much is "enough" to give someone a "basic existence", but it's special in that people have been overly conditioned to view healthcare as a binary, either you "have it" or you "don't have it" thing. Compare e.g. food, where most people make their own choices on a regular basis about how much food they buy, what quality, etc. There, people are at least likely to have the capacity to engage in a discussion about how much food (quantity and quality) is "enough", even if there is sufficient heterogeneity to prevent meaningful political solutions.

Let me rephrase: Any level of medical care that would be affordable would make it into a horrible deathtrap.

Bear in mind that we can't afford to give everyone food, housing, clothes, and pocket money with or without medical care, unless we're living in Star Trek. The only reason this is even slightly plausibly affordable is that there are a limited number of poor people. I'm skeptical that there are so few that we could afford to do this. Medical care just makes it orders of magnitude worse.

And that doesn't even consider problems like "what if everyone, as soon as they retire, signs up for the poverty program so they get their medical care paid for".

If we instead just ask, "How much medical care are you going to give them?" then there are plausible answers.

They're utility monsters. They will essentially hold themselves hostage for whatever you have, and more. Unless you're willing to, at some early point, say "fine, die then" (and the US is demonstrably not so willing), they will consume ever-increasing amounts of resources.

Of course, the American polity is allergic to the very concept of this question most of the time.

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