Main reason I ask is because Chillindude, a prominent member of the competitive Melee community had a stroke recently and as he’s relatively healthy and works out often, he doesn’t have health insurance, and even though he’s sponsored by Team Liquid, one of the largest e-sports teams out there, because he is classified as an independent contractor, he doesn’t have health insurance through them.
The way he got the stroke was through an infection in his knee that he got misdiagnosed twice, and the hospital was going to throw him out even because he’s been stabilized, but doesn’t have coverage, which to me is actual BS but I’m honestly curious as to why this would be the case, considering strokes need so much recovery done for them.
Situations like this is part of why I couldn’t write my own thing for the ideal society post I made the other day, because I have no clue how healthcare should be handled. I do know however that portions of why healthcare is so expensive is due to the companies that make the equipment being anti-“Right to Repair” and the actual repair costs of the equipment being outrageous (Louis Rossmann made that a video months ago and I can’t find it), but still, this whole situation is really outrageous to me, that the hospital was going to throw him out after he stabilized due to a lack of proper coverage, and that stroke recovery as a whole is as expensive as it is in the US. I’d love to hear from our European people if it’s really any better there or am I being lied to, but still, idk what the solution really is.
Edit: I’m in the US, so this is pretty important for me to know.
Yes, our State has a lot of bad incentives put in place, those vaccine laws very prominent among them.
And sometimes that impulse is healthy: elsewhere in this thread I mentioned that a main reason the American right opposes nationalized healthcare is that we know it will be run by our enemies.
But ultimately that response should be considered something more akin to a survival tactic instead of a goal unto itself.
Another thing to consider: whenever the right proposes actually punishing someone for doing bad things, its enemies accuse it of "big government". But a government that amounts to "do what you want, but if you harm people we're going to punish you in proportion to how much harm you did, up to taking your life" is going to be much smaller than one that attempts to regulate behavior up-front to minimize the ways you can harm people. Which is what we do now.
Imagine if instead of passing the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 -- which created the FDA -- we just tried and executed the heads of the food companies which were poisoning people and left the food companies which weren't alone.