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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Denying people welfare benefits for antisocial behavior is not controversial.

Medicare isn't "welfare", it's the standard American health system for people over the age of 65. Moreover, there's no good-faith way to call it "welfare". Please stop doing this here; you have other venues for this kind of rhetoric.

Medicare is obviously welfare! It’s a socialized system that involves society paying for medical care for old people, instead of leaving old people or their families to pay for it themselves.

Medicare is obviously welfare! It’s a socialized system where society pays for medical care for old people, instead of leaving old people or their families to pay for it themselves.

Of course whenever you have taxpayers paying for something for individuals, those taxpayers may properly decide to exclude undeserving individuals from receiving benefits.

Excluding undeserving individuals from government benefits is not controversial.

What would be controversial is classifying people as undeserving for past actions that

(1) were and are completely legal,

(2) are not even considered to be bad by a large fraction of the country, and

(3) have nothing whatsoever to do with what they are being excluded from.

Well over 90% of Americans aged over 65 are Medicare beneficiaries, most of them having paid into the program throughout their whole lives. I think this argument is probably better suited to your twitter TL.

> Moreover, there's no good-faith way to call [Medicare] "welfare".

For some context, Wikipedia says:

> In the United States, depending on the context, the term "welfare" ... can also include social insurance programs such as unemployment insurance, Social Security, and Medicare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_spending#United_States

No. Not in the context Rayiner meant it, where there's policy discretion about who gets it, the way you might apply work requirements to SNAP.

I don't think "policy discretion to deny" is what the word "welfare" means.

But in any case, Medicare is literally denied to prisoners, which is an example of ... denying welfare benefits for antisocial behavior?

The entire thread is about the discretion to deny services.

Say a 68 year old veteran went to a VA doctor for a facial skin cancer, and was denied treatment because when he enlisted 50 years earlier he got a tattoo of his unit on his buttocks.

Do you really believe that denial would not be controversial?

No, but only because he made up for it by being a veteran.

What if he was a retired farmer, the 50 year old tattoo was to commemorate the year he led his high school football team to the state championship, and it was Medicare denying coverage for a facial skin cancer because of that old buttocks tattoo?

Probably not controversial.

I don't see how you can come to that conclusion.

About 1/3 of Americans have a tattoo [1]. Of the people without tattoos 66% say seeing a tattoo on someone gives them neither a negative or positive opinion of the person.

A tattoo on the buttocks will not cause skin cancer on the face. (There is a small association between tattoos and skin cancer but that is skin cancers at the tattoo sight, and it is not so much that they cause the cancer but rather make it harder to notice the cancer so it tends to be farther along before detected).

So I don't see how it could not be controversial to cut of Medicare to someone over something that a solid majority don't care about and that almost certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with their skin cancer.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/15/32-of-ame...

He's saying he doesn't personally approve of tattoos. I don't think there's any further place you can productively take this conversation.

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