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Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

>not everyone shares the same opinion and belief, so should the government force those people to spend their earned income on healthcare for others?

Yes. Ideally, that's what governments should do: require citizens to act in our collective and long-term best interests, not only their own.

In the case of healthcare: a healthy population is a productive, happy, and peaceful population. All of those things are good for the economy, not to mention any one particular person's soul -- you can make a completely utilitarian argument for it and largely sidestep thorny issues of morality.

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most likely what will happen is people will just leave CA, leaving a shortage and it will fail

> most likely what will happen is people will just leave CA

Could you please inform our population here about that?

Republicans keep promising that people will flee the Blue states due to various policies; somehow it never seems to happen.

Could you let us know what we're doing wrong? We'd really like to send some of these folks to Red states to help balance out the voting.

Thanks bunches.

http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/article136478098...

"Every year from 2000 through 2015, more people left California than moved in from other states. This migration was not spread evenly across all income groups, a Sacramento Bee review of U.S. Census Bureau data found. The people leaving tend to be relatively poor, and many lack college degrees. Move higher up the income spectrum, and slightly more people are coming than going.

About 2.5 million people living close to the official poverty line left California for other states from 2005 through 2015, while 1.7 million people at that income level moved in from other states – for a net loss of 800,000. During the same period, the state experienced a net gain of about 20,000 residents earning at least five times the poverty rate – or $100,000 for a family of three."

Life in California is becoming a luxury good, largely due to its own policies, and that is not a state in the right direction.

Do people migrate out of EU states with universal health care? They have free movement and everything.

I think this would actually be another great lock-in feature, on top of rent control and Prop 13 making it so nobody would ever want to sell their house.

> Yes. Ideally, that's what governments should do: require citizens to act in our collective and long-term best interests, not only their own.

That's starting to sound a lot like Marxism where the value of the individual is less so than that of the collective (Government / State).

I'm sorry but no thanks. Who determines what our best interest is? The only person on this planet that can determine my best interest is me. If I'm incapable of doing so for myself then that is too bad.

It's starting to sound like civilization. When we live together, I don't want to subsidize your poor decisions.

If you want to live your life alone in a forest somewhere, you can pay no tax and make all your own decisions.

What does this have to do with healthcare? Is it a right or a privilege? Your answer to that question makes it clear why we likely disagree.

Healthcare is a SERVICE that someone PROVIDES to you for MONEY. It has a tangible COST. It is not a RIGHT which is something that WE as a COLLECTIVE have determined WE individually possess (liberty, right to bare arms, freedom of press, right to assemble, etc)

That is the bedrock issue behind all the arguments on this topic and why (despite idealistically admirable), universal healthcare will likely never happen...

To make it clear, personally I am not opposed to doing everything we can as a society to bring the cost of healthcare down and make it available and affordable to as many people as possible. But to guarantee blanket coverage for ~325M people is not realistic.

To add on to the comment of seanmcdirmid

Adding up the population[1] (in millions, rounded down) of all countries in Europe with universal healthcare[2], except the 144 million from Russia, which is mostly asia anyway, I get to 484 million people covered by universal healthcare.

This includes countries like Germany (81M), France (66M), the UK (65M), Italy (60M) and Spain (46M), which should alleviate the fear of 'small European countries can do that, but not a state as big as California'.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_univers...

But there are more than 325 million people covered by socialized medicine in the EU. Why is that unrealistic?

Heck, it could even help our economy, because you probably don't buy your own health insurance anyways, but get it from work. Take away that burden from the companies, and it could actually make them more competitive.

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