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Should healthcare be free?
in Politics
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Arguments
Strictly speaking, in terms of resources, nothing is free. Even oxygen is not free: it might seem that you are not paying anything for taking a breath, but your body wears out with each breath, its sustainability drops with time, with the ultimate outcome being death to which this factor somewhat contributes - so you pay for oxygen with your health.
For private healthcare, you pay directly. For public healthcare, you pay via sending the money to the government, that then pays for your healthcare with that. Do you get more than you spend this way, or less? In practice, unless you are unemployed and essentially survive off public welfare alone, private healthcare tends to be significantly more cost-efficient than public healthcare.
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https://www.debate.org/debates/Universal-Health-Care-in-the-US/1/
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If taxpayers were to pay less for some things, e.g. Defense, then there could be room for a public healthcare system. Most countries in the world have free and/or universal healthcare, and it works better than what the US has.
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The question is ill-posed. Healthcare cannot be free. You could just as well ask, "Should humans be able to teleport instantly at any distance across space?"
Assuming it somehow could be free - sure, then, at least, having free healthcare offerings alongside the non-free ones would be a no-brainer. But that would be a scenario from a parallel reality.
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We need a huge defense budget to defend freedom worldwide. If our budget for the military shrunk too much, then South Korea and Japan would be invaded by China, costing about 18 million lives of civilians, and ISIS 2.0 or something similar would exist in the middle east, since there is no USA to stop them from existing.
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The US is not even in the top-15 in terms of military spending as a fraction of GDP. Given that the US is by far the biggest participant of international conflicts, decreasing its military budget seems unreasonable.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS
The US military spending is a bit over 3% of its GDP - with the world's average being around 2%, the US is not significantly above the average, while orders of magnitude above the average in terms of involvement in conflicts.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/268826/health-expenditure-as-gdp-percentage-in-oecd-countries/
However, in terms of the fraction of GDP spent on healthcare, the US is by far the largest spender in the world, spending 17.2%, with the second nation on the list (Switzerland) spending whooping 4.8% less.
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Bottom line here is: first, the US does not need to spend more on healthcare at the expense of the military spending, and second, the sheer amount of spending does not mean much in terms of effectiveness. You can spend all of the budget you have on healthcare, and still arrive at something that does not work well.
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Healthcare should be free. Caring for others is a basic moral duty in pretty much every worthwhile philosophical and religious path.
Not only that but state run healthcare is massively more efficient than bloated private sector insurance healthcare options. The USA is literally one of the most inefficient nations in the world on healthcare due to its redundant competing insurance options.
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But it's not the US's job to be the police of the world. We have the UN for that right?
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What are the drawbacks? Aside from the governmental innate inability to do absolutely anything with more than, say, 10% efficiency, there is also the fact that many people end up paying for the services they do not need. For example, aside from dental services (which are rarely covered by universal healthcare anyway), I have not needed to see a doctor a single time in the last ~15 years - yet in the universal healthcare system, I am still supposed to put my hard-earned money out, just so people I have not even met can satisfy their medical needs at my expense.
Paying for something one does not need is the ultimate instance of inefficient spending, and it a sure way to waste the capital that could instead be put to a much better use, such as investment into hi-tech companies that then produce technologies that absolutely everyone can find use for.
Just like I am not forced to give some money to every beggar on the street, I should not be forced to pay for any service I personally do not need. To say otherwise would be to advocate for the authoritarian system, in which the needs of some overshadow the freedoms of everyone. And such systems should not exist in the modern world - even though they do.
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Blues and Raptors handed two very toxic teams embarrassing losses, 95% of the sports world is rejoicing in the news
Repealing the Second Amendment is the first step to Totalitarianism, and it needs to be prevented to protect our freedom
http://www.atheistrepublic.com/
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Blues and Raptors handed two very toxic teams embarrassing losses, 95% of the sports world is rejoicing in the news
Repealing the Second Amendment is the first step to Totalitarianism, and it needs to be prevented to protect our freedom
http://www.atheistrepublic.com/
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