Everyone has an answer to this question: Is Health Care a Right?
The writer, Atul Gawande, describes a visit to the Appalachians of Ohio. He found people who work only at gaming the system -- welfare, disability, food stamps, etc. And he found people who work at multiple jobs for minimal pay who feel like they are paying for the deadbeats' way of life with their taxes. The workers support the bums, and they don't like it. That probably occurs throughout the U.S., but it seems to be getting more notice since "Hillbilly Elegy" became so popular.
Anyway, this paragraph from the article sums up the conflict:
Understanding this seems key to breaking the current political impasse. The deal we each get on health care has a profound impact on our lives—on our savings, on our well-being, on our life expectancy. In the American health-care system, however, different people get astonishingly different deals. That disparity is having a corrosive effect on how we view our country, our government, and one another.
So is health care a right? It is if the government makes it so.
(Link comes to us via Ira Stoll's Future of Capitalism.)
Meanwhile, for those waiting for an Obamacare repeal, as long as our senators and representatives get ambivalent results from their opinion polls, we're stuck with the status quo.
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12:55 PM 9/30/2017
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