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If you are a Libertarian and hold liberty as your core value, why do you not believe in universal healthcare? Nothing impacts liberty more than sickness and death. (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (6 children)

I believe in universal basic income, because it is simple and easy to define, and therefore doesn’t have these two problems

Universal healthcare is problematic because of two things:

How much is covered? Because healthcare isn’t fungible like money is, unlike UBI, UH has a problem where a ton of attention and discussion is required to determine what’s covered and what isn’t. It becomes a “to each according to his need” scenario where “his need” is being determined by the central committee
Once society is promising to take care of my body, I now have to promise to society to take care of my body. If I want to take risks with my own health or safety, there is now opposition to that from others on the basis that I’m ruining their investment. This means less self-ownership and less liberty.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Yes, but universal basic income instead of universal healthcare has two issues as well:

You may not be able to afford expensive healthcare procedures, which may result in all ranges of bad consequences, from lost productivity to death. In either case, there's a big chance society loses a productive worker for no good reason, and for the person who couldn't get healthcare it's obviously super bad, too. All while this expense would be returned in the economy many times over if the person got recovered and continued working, and the person in question could keep living a fulfilling life.
Relying on private healthcare institutions means falling victim to the price-inefficient businesses, as a lot of your money goes to cover profits of the healthcare organization. When there is no public alternative, prices go through the roof. Even in the US, where there is some government oversight but no full-scale universal healthcare system, the prices for healthcare are insane. Thereby, you either have to hand people a fat UBI check and constantly increase it as companies drive up their appetites, putting more strain on the system than universal healthcare ever could, or let people not have decent healthcare, or control the healthcare institutions (which is not super libertarian), all while living with a reality that many people will not think of their medical needs or will genuinely have other strong priorities and will put money to something else, ending up shooting themselves - and the economy - in the foot.

I often hear criticisms of some "committee" deciding whether you're gonna get healthcare or not, like here. In an alternative when it is ruled by money, it's how much you earn that decides it. Someone in a critical condition might not receive help simply because they are poor. Someone will always be cut off, and it'd better be someone who needs the help the least or requires too much resources to help that could be better spent saving more people.

This is constantly ommitted by the haters of planned systems, which I think is very unjust.

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