INDY500
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
no, i think it is fair. we live in a country where everyone will be treated if you show up at the ER. my bills probably in some small part helped cover them. i don't resent other people for that. i resent a system where these people cannot afford coverage or had coverage denied to them.
we do not want people with a GSW to go untreated. i don't care if Joe Crackhead doesn't have health insurance -- if he's gunned down and rushed to the ER, we shouldn't deny him care simply because, god forbid, someone else (like the government) is paying for it. i don't think that health care is a commodity like food or even car insurance -- it's much more akin to education, where we force everyone to go to school up until the age of 16. why not bring Joe Crackhead into the system, find a way to pay for him, and maybe we can not get hung up on our free-market-saves-all ideology. Joe Crackhead is a person, no matter what stupid decisions he has made, and i don't understand the ideology that would let him bleed to death in the streets simply because he's made a series of bad decisions.
if that comes out of my pocket book in part, so be it. i'd rather pay for Joe Crackhead to have his GSW stitched up than for G.I. Joe to go kill Tommy Al Quaeda in Baghdad.
I know of no one that wants to withhold lifesaving treatment from any individual, crackheads and illegals included. That is a pool of individuals in which, along with the elderly, poor and disabled, Americans through their taxes and charity wish to see at least emergency care needs taken care of.
What they don't want however is to have to pay for it in the form of waiting lists, reduced quality, less innovation, less choice, less personal freedom, more government and more debt on future generation.
Monopolies don't work in education either by the way. Free markets and competition would improve our ailing education system more than endless increases in spending and enlarging the federal bureaucracy have.