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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

>It makes all the sense in the world when you compare it to any other business. You wouldn't expect for someone who paid $1M to get the same level of treatment as someone who paid $100.

Currently, society does not find it acceptable for someone to die from a heart attack if they cannot pay for healthcare. And people already get different levels of care.

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I don't see how you can justify without using a double standard the idea that its okay to use coercion to take advantage of a minority to enforce an idea of "acceptable" that they might not agree with.

It's not a double standard, I'm claiming that the way society works right now, people don't have complete freedom. Hospitals don't have the freedom to turn people away, even people don't have the freedom to refuse healthcare, so obviously something has to give from the side receiving the product/service (healthcare). It's similar to having to pay taxes for the myriad reasons. You can't opt out of roads and water and other infrastructure.

If voters came out and changed the requirement for hospitals to provide healthcare, or let people forego healthcare, then we can perhaps treat healthcare like any other business.

I think the way that it works in America at least is that you have a minority of rich and healthy people and a majority that does not have much money and is not super healthy. Our democracy is suppose to be limited, in that the government is not suppose to use its monopoly of coercion to enforce the majority decision on the minority. So to get around this the voters forced the hospitals to treat them, even if the question "what if you can't pay for it" was left tacitly unanswered. The hospitals of course can't afford to pay for this bill either so they give the government an invoice for it, and the governments only way of paying that invoice is by increasing taxes. Which is a conundrum of where we are at.

Of course the majority (if its poor and sick) is going to pick the path of least resistance - which is to vote short term to get a subsidy from the healthy and rich (instead of pursuing to long term path toward developing skills to provide valuable services so that you could get rich and afford valuable services, such as healthcare, not to mention living life in a way to minimize chance of getting sick/ill in the first place.)

But in the end this sort of "take from the rich and minority" mentality just leads to the dissolution of thevalue that they create, and unfortunately only after they are gone, to the dissolution of the principle architects of that mentality.

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