2009-10-11, 11:56 AM
MasPan Wrote:[color="#cc8899"]This. Also, health care, as a form of insurance, is a business service, not a right. You pay money in exchange for your health insurance paying the majority of your medical expenses. It is a commercial business, and should NEVER be handled by the government (with the exception of federal employees, who the government has every right to have a system in place to ensure that they all receive the same coverage/benefits). You should never be taxed for not buying a service, whether by personal choice or not having the money to afford it. If the government were to say "We are now going to produce automobiles. We will create a system that makes it very awkward/difficult to buy an automobile from anyone else. If you do not purchase an automobile, you will pay a tax to us for roughly the same amount as what an automobile payment would have been." would it be received warmly? No, despite the fact that it may indeed result in more poor people having a car.
@ Above, only if he's doing science.[/COLOR]
I completely disagree. The big difference between healthcare and the automobile industry is that healthcare deals with the well-being of humans, not the transport of them. Isn't the government supposed to take care of its people, making sure everyone has an equal chance at life? If you don't believe so, then I encourage you to make sure martial law is never enacted in times of pathogenic outbreak; let's just let the corporations decide how to best keep the disease from spreading. Everyone on this planet has a right to life, and thus should have an equal opportunity to medical treatments necessary to keep them alive.
I agree that you should never be taxed for not buying a service, but that's not what Obama's health care plan does. It requires every American citizen to have healthcare, meaning they will be paying for a service they have - they just get to choose who they want to purchase from, the government or a corporation, with the government option fluid enough to be manageable for any person's income level.