Quote Originally Posted by BorisTheSpider View Post
Nonsense. This is like saying that every chimp in the forest deserves a certain number of bananas. Try to rationally explain this property of "deserving" in relation to a chimp who has no bananas.



Why should the chimp that can climb best and lives in an area rich with bananas have more bananas than the chimp who lives on an island utterly devoid of bananas and never learned to climb trees? Does the second chimp not have a right to have as many bananas as he "needs"? A certain number of bananas should be provided for every chimp, if the first chimp wants to have more bananas, that's fine.

Healthcare is expensive - it takes a lot of labour and capital to produce, the people who produce it need food to eat and houses to live in, that means they have to earn a living or make a profit. If the homeless man can't pay, someone else has to - that takes food off of their table and clothes off their childrens backs to put that money effectively in the hands of the homeless man, that is good and decent all the time it's voluntary.



Without a market in which people could make a living producing food or medicine, there wouldn't be any food or medicine.

Here's the nub of it - if it's so important to you that our hypothetical homesless man has food and medicine, no-one is stopping _YOU_ from paying for it. That's the great thing about a free market system - you are free to give away as much of your money as you like.


In a society in which we demand hospitals treat people when they need any non-elective care, not affording healthcare to those who can't afford healthcare is taking food off of someone's table. Not only do all the rest of us end up subsidizing the medical debtors' care, but those people are dissuaded in seeking preventative care; a malady which may have cost a fraction to treat is left to fester. This will always be the case in any system you can imagine, until we either decide that it's fine for hospitals to turn patients away because of a suspected inability to pay, or we provide a basic level of healthcare to all.