There is no right to healthcare! It isn't in the constitution, it isn't a "natural right", it isn't anywhere. I oppose the bill and I oppose the concept. If people are too damn lazy or unintelligent to get insurance I don't care. If they can't afford I don't care. I'm tired of people trying to beat around the bush and couch their language in platitudes. I am not my brother's keeper. I feel no commitment towards the deadbeats and failures of the world. Don't expect me to pay for them.
Though you can argue this point from a purely legal perspective it can be also be argued that the spirit of the constitution is to better enable the execution of the declaration of independence with its goal of a more perfect union, (ie a better society for all Americans) with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Thus the idea of healthcare being a right, since a person getting sick is a threat to both life and the pursuit of happiness.
As to you larger point, I disagree completely. The majority of people who receive government assistance of any kind are not unemployed, lazy bums, but the working poor. These people work 2 sometimes 3 jobs and still can't make ends meet.
You may feel no responsibility to your fellow citizen and it is your right to make such arguments. But thank god most people disagree with you and most people accept the idea of a social contract in which society takes care of its own through some short of government which serves as social insurance. You may not ever need this insurance but if some tragedy should befall you it is there.
Case in point, I was recently on vacation on Maui, Hawaii celebrating my acceptance to USUHS. I was hiking the Hale Maui trail, 15 miles and got lost right at the end of it. I found myself trapped in a creek bed unable to go forward or back. I had allotted plenty of time to finish the hike before sundown and had brought 14 liters of water with me. However, despite having an extra 2 hours, I was unable to find the trail and ended up sleeping on the volcano, (a cold, windy, wet and miserable night let me tell you, it got down to 40 degrees at that elevation, 7,000 ft and with windchill it was maybe 30 degrees). By early the next day I was out of water and down to my last food. I was lucky to find 2 six gallon water jugs hidden off to the side of the creek bed, so I had plenty of water but no food.
I spent 4 hours that morning scouring that creek bed looking for a trail, any trail. I finally found one and though I had found the Hale Mau trail, but had not, instead had found an abandoned trail that would have led me over a different volcano, going in the wrong direction.
Lucky for me my father had called search and rescue the night previous at 7 pm, when I was 2 hours late, (he was picking me up at the trail head in a parking lot at 5 pm the previous day).
The helicopter found me 6 hours after sunrise, in the middle of one of the volcanic valley floors, completely lost and going in the wrong direction.
When I was reunited with my father and explained what had happened I pointed out that this is why we pay taxes and participate in civil society, because its a form of social insurance.
Had we lived in a libertarian/anarchy utopia you seem to advocate I would have likely died out on that mountain, and the contributions to society I would have made over several decades as an Army doctor, (including the many hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes I would have paid) would be lost along with my life.
I am sure you believe that search and rescue is a waste of tax dollars and that any hikers who get lost should save themselves or die but lucky for me most people disagree with your cynical, every man for himself view.
Its easy for a successful person to look down on any less fortunate individual and proclaim them to be lazy, stupid and not worthy of assistance of any kind. BUT you should realize that in our society only the super rich are truly safe.
For example, my father has a friend who is a doctor, owned his own FP practice and was very successful. His wife developed cancer, which they fought for several years and she unfortunately died from. This doctor, who had been a millionaire, lost everything fighting for his wife's life. He spent every penny of their savings, mortgaged the house, even took out loans on the clinic he owned and ended up losing everything and declaring bankruptcy. If a millionaire can go bankrupt due to medical tragedy then whom among us is really safe?
I remember other people like futureCTdoc, those who invoked Laissez fair libertarian economic principles, who said that the losers in our society are just the collateral damage of the best possible economic system and that there are always winners and losers and that the losers must sink or swim on their own.
These were people who were only concerned with their own self interest, specifically making as much money as possible. They were wall street investment bankers, the ones earning record, multi-million dollar bonuses each year and proclaiming that they had earned every cent because they had earned record profits for their companies through the creation and trading of credit default swaps and financial derivatives.
Then their financial ponze scheme ended, with the global financial markets melting down due to the toxic assets these sons of bitches had created, bundled and then sold.
These same laissez faire, gordon gecko mother ****ers then went running to congress demanding the biggest bailout in history, took $780 billion of tax payer funds and then used it to invest in the stock market that had collapsed because of their idiocy.
They got in at the bottom, and the market rallied, (because they were pumping so much of our money into the market they had cratered) which then rallied, they made record profits, (after dumping their toxic assets onto the gov) and gave themselves billions in bonuses, (again using tax payer funds!).
These *******s, who for years decried any form of welfare as worthless entitlements for deadbeats, then bitched about how they were entitled to their million dollar bonuses even after they had run their companies into the ground!
Perhaps futureCTdoc is true to his principles and honestly believes that no one should be anyone's brother's keeper and that every one should truly fend for themselves. Perhaps this noble idealist has experienced personal tragedy and has lived his principles and is even willing to die for them, (rather than take a dime in government aid of any kind).
Or most likely, if tragedy ever befell him or his loved ones he would then demand society bail him out, by using the same government programs that he spent his entire adult life railing against.
