Agreed. When you actively advocate for this, do you face moral responsibility when someone prepares it wrong and dies?
(I’m pretty sure the legal answer would be yes on so many fronts)
(I’m pretty sure the legal answer would be yes on so many fronts)
Imagine a natural disaster happens, and the strong hoard more water and food and shelter and medicine than they could ever use in a million lifetimes and protect it with guns. Then you tell the poor "in an emergency scenario, here are some options to keep you and your children alive a few more days that aren't totally safe but are better than nothing. Your makeshift roof might fall down in a bad storm, your food won't be perfectly clean, but it's better than doing nothing and waiting to die".
This is what is happening in the US. In this analogy, the natural disaster is free market capitalism, the strong are the ultrawealthy owning class, and the guns they use to protect their property are the police and legal system, who provide the violence that is inherently necessary to keep order in a massively unequal society.
Imagine a true free market healthcare system. Or just one step further than ours: no medicare. Imagine if every middle-aged middle or lower class American had to, as their parents age and require more healthcare than anyone can feasibly afford, choose: bankruptcy and permanent insurmountable debt, or watch your parents die knowing you chose not to stop it. What glorious freedom.
Medicare costs 17% of GDP and it has 44 million people. If you expanded medicare to every single person in america (10x), how much do you think the GDP cost would be then? And what do you think will be the prescription at that point?
Its also a ludicrous proposition to say that because its closer to free market, thats what makes it worse compared to socialized services. Its qualitatively different because it has tremendous regulation and rules. And the proposed solution is to add more regulation.
The problem is actually created by the government in the first place. If you fix the length of the patents or eliminate the patents in the first place the cost of drugs will drop close to the cost to produce them.
Monopolies are well studied in economics and the effects of monopoly pricing due to government granted patents are what we see here, this is a government created problem not a free market one.
Government-protected monopolies (i.e. drug patents) are almost the antithesis of free-market capitalism.
Every property right is a government-protected monopoly; without these government monopolies what you have is an end to private property which may be desirable but is certainly not free-market capitalism, it is communism.
That risk exists no matter what you "actively advocate" for. When you actively advocate for Obamacare, do you face moral responsibility for those who were forced to take a much lower-quality insurance policy because the premiums on their existing unsubsidized policy doubled?
Or, when you actively advocate for the repeal of Obamacare, do you face moral responsibility when a patient who can no longer afford insurance skips a critical doctor visit and dies as a result?
Because humans are not mindless programmable automatons, mere advocates should not be held responsible for other peoples' actions. Otherwise, we'll end up throwing lawyers in jail for successfully representing guilty defendants who go on to commit further crimes.