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Comment by baron816 | Hacker News Reader

> health care be a right

If something is a “right”, it doesn’t imply the government should just take care of everything and it should be totally socialized. One might consider “clothing” a right, but I don’t think we’d want the government to control what we wear.

I agree that government should ensure universal healthcare, and maybe a single payer system would be the correct model (though other countries have had better results with partially market driven approaches). But my belief there is based on the fact that humans aren’t currently able to make good decisions about their own health care, and government panels probably would be able to make better decisions regarding public health.

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> One might consider “clothing” a right, but I don’t think we’d want the government to control what we wear.

I think it would be _pretty awesome_ if freely available durable (and warm) clothing were made available to people that needed it (homeless, foster kids, etc), much the way my taxes help subsidize peoples' food costs.

There's a big difference between saying, "You have to wear this", and "We'll all pay so that people who need it can get shoes/socks/pants/jacket X times per year if needed".

I don’t think that would be awesome at all. Could you imagine a committee trying do decide what clothes are acceptable. All sorts of “buy American” clauses thrown in. Each Congressional district would have to have its own factory to produce one part of the outfit.

How about we have the Gov set up a negative income tax so that if you can afford clothes, you can go buy some. Or if you don’t need new clothes, you can spend that money somewhere else.

Healthcare isn’t driven by want or choice. Government committees can look at data to figure out how to distribute resources. And we don’t want more healthcare like we want more clothes.

Where I grew up, clothing for children was tax deductible.

It was essential, so a system was put in place to serve the need.

I'm not sure why you ended up in a metaphorical pit of despair over one imagined doomsday-scenario implementation.

In the UK, children’s clothing is exempt from their VAT sales tax.

(Yet another way that unusually short people can lord it over the rest of us.)

I don’t think is right to analogise between clothing and healthcare. Everyone needs clothes; specific needs are highly correlated with climate. While this is also true of some basic functions of healthcare (dental care being the most obvious example) most of the very expensive parts of healthcare (surgery, cancer, etc) are not similarly predictable and therefore fit the insurance model better.

And the way to make insurance model work best is to make it universal, mandatory and governed by cost efficiency rather than shareholder profit. Better still, a universal system becomes a monopsony buyer, able to assess value with domain expertise then demand and receive lower prices for drugs and medical equipment.

Some countries do have committes that decide exactly that. And it's a widely cherished and extremely effective social service for new mothers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternity_package

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kela_(Finnish_institution)

Can you imagine? A box full of useful clothes and supplies, decided by government committee, being handed out at the hospital, free of charge, so mother can relax and care for baby! What a nightmare!

I’m not sure about clothing, but there are significant government programs to provide food and housing to people with low income.

Yeah, they don’t have a great reputation. Just give people money instead.

> One might consider “clothing” a right

Clothing as a "right" is as ridiculous as health care as a "right", in my opinion. Though I also believe that governments should make efforts to provide both to those lacking them.

I think we can all agree that the terminology is the truly important thing.

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