Bernie Sanders Sets a Trap

[paft.livejournal.com]

Senator Bernie Sanders:

I believe, many people in my own state believe, healthcare is a right – R.I.G.H.T. – regardless of income, that every American has the right to the best quality healthcare that the system can offer regardless of income, that if you’re a low income kid, you’re a wealthy kid, you have the same opportunity to access the healthcare system…

Senator Rand Paul: …that means you believe you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. That means you believe in slavery. It means you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses, if you have a right to their services, basically, once you imply a belief in the right to their services, do you have a right to plumbing? Do you have a right to water? Do you have a right to food? You’re basically saying that you believe in slavery. You’re saying you believe in taking and extracting from another person… Do you have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you? That’s ultimately what the right to free healthcare would be…

It’s always a pleasure to watch someone like Bernie Sanders introducing a right wing libertarian like Rand Paul to reality. Randians like Paul often veer between two romantic poses. The first is the doe-eyed idealist who thinks the best of everyone (“Mercy sakes, nobody would actually allow someone to die just because they didn’t have enough money. Why, the doctors would do it for free, or the neighbors would take up a collection or something!”) The second – usually when the horrible consequences of their policies become evident – is the cigar-chomping, hard-eyed, square-jawed realist (“Yeah -- NEWSFLASH! -- kids die when their irresponsible parents can’t pay for their medical care. Suck it up, loser!”)

Sanders knew exactly what he was doing. He set the trap by invoking healthcare as a right, and Rand Paul blithely stepped into it, revealing not only his own disconnection from reality (Universal Healthcare = Slavery) but the horrifying moral emptiness of his worldview.

The answers to Paul's questions are, yes, we have a right to plumbing. Yes, we have a right to water. Yes, we have a right to food. We have a right to these things because we have a right to life, and without plumbing, food, and water, people die in large numbers from exposure to contaminated water, from malnutrition, from dehydration. As a physician, Rand Paul knows this.

Judging from what Paul has said here, that's the vision he has for the poor of America. Not just slums -- shantytowns.

Crossposted from Thoughtcrimes

*

Comments

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

I can see so many high schoolers using this in their first job. What I don't want to wash dishes, what do you mean I'll get fired. This is slavery! SLAVERY!!!


Job requirements, how do they work?

[hikarugenji.livejournal.com]

And of course he's anti-abortion, so he's "pro-life" except that people don't have a right to food or water, much less health-care. Pro-life indeed.

[eracerhead.livejournal.com]

Keep government hands out of my pockets so that we can use them to get in your uterus.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

As a physician, Rand Paul knows this.

Minor factual point you may want to edit, Rand Paul is NOT a physician, his father is. Rand Paul is an ophthalmologist.

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

"Rand Paul was accepted into the Duke University School of Medicine, where he earned his Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) degree in 1988 and completed his residency in 1993."" Since ophthalmologists perform operations on eyes, they are considered to be both surgical and medical specialists."

--taken from Wikipedia

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Do you have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you? That’s ultimately what the right to free healthcare would be…

Oh my. I'm so enslaved! Enslaved, I tell you!

When I get sick I get excellent, top-quality health-care in the nearest hospital.
Of course in order to get that, first I have to bow down to my socialist masters and beg them to spare my life. If they're in a good mood, I live. If not - off to the death panels!

[paft.livejournal.com]

Rand is illustrating the classic, Randian disconnection from reality, in which the dire, easily documented consequences of treating healthcare as a commodity are dismissed as NOT real, but the utterly imaginary image of physicians being dragged from their beds into slavery is treated as undeniable fact.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Rand Paul, of course, was absolutely right. The problem is that Sanders isn't bright enough to realize that he was the one that ended up trapped.

[paft.livejournal.com]

Really? Job requirements = slavery?

That's very interesting.

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

Slaves are not paid for their labour. Hence they are slaves.

Volunteer firemen are often compensated but not paid for their labour. Hence they are volunteers.

Doctors can and do volunteer their time, expertise and other services. But by and large they are paid staff doing labour for wages.

I think we know how insurance works.

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

Salves were paid for their labor in a loose way. They were provided food and housing. They however could not quit.

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

So, I'm guessing that Mr. Paul would have been opposed to the Second World War draft?

I've heard the "national healthcare = SLAVERY!!" argument before, and it's always ridiculous. I have yet to see any old, middle class white people equate Social Security and Medicare with slavery, yet there is no fundamental difference between them and nationalized healthcare. It's only when poor people get something that the complaints start (witness the vitriol spewed about Medicaid, WIC, food stamps, etc.).

People who have never actually been poor or needed those services, often desperately, really have no concept of how much that lifeline helps. It's easy for the private school-educated, well-off physician son of a well-off physician father to equate national healthcare with slavery. I'm sure he never had to choose between food and medicine and keeping the power on, when the food and meds had run out, the bill was overdue, the minimum-wage job doesn't even pay the rent since the employer keeps slashing hours and the various government assistance programs have disqualified you for whatever reason and the private charities (usually churches) tell you sorry, we can't help.

Yeah, it must be nice.

[paft.livejournal.com]

It's as if people like Paul were stuck in spoiled adolescence, still mired in the "Poor people are stoopit and ICKY!" mindset of some teenagers.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

What is wrong with making things like health care, food, etc. rights is that the mere lack of those things, represents a violation of rights, which means someone else must be responsible for that lack and therefore must be punished by law.

In essence, it inverts the idea that the protection of rights serves the goal of blocking active deprivation (murder, theft, fraud, etc.) where there is a clear and identifiable perpetrator for each victim, and creates laws meant to punish passivity.

I argue that one can push with all earnestness for the policies one believes in (universal health care included if that's what you favor), but there is a categorical failure of terminology by applying the term 'rights' to things without thinking about the legal implications they can have.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

I'd agree that there are some problems with declaring a service to be a right but maybe it's just a way of framing the declaration that the U.S. needs to start acting like an industrialized country and stop leaving health care to the vagaries of the market. You know, like every other civilized country from Canada to Israel does.

[reflaxion.livejournal.com]

Someone should tell public school employees that their rights are being constitutionally violated.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Actually those people do hate public schools as wretched hives of scum and villainy and hugging-schoolteacher fascists.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

So my mother the nurse was a secret member of the Domination of Draka vanguard here to take over our decadent, hedonistic civilization of slaves? This kind of bullshit is why I never take LOLbertarians seriously.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

Just wait until you need their shiny new railroads built with untested metal!

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

I would hope that at some point political discussion on this topic might become something other than a debate between free-market epidemiology and healthcare-as-a-right.

[paft.livejournal.com]

Well, unfortunately, it's the free-market fanatics who seem to have hijacked one of our major political parties. That reduces the discussion of the issue to such basics.

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

Oh my. I hope you have done something about your inbox before posting this.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

This is nothing. Check this (http://talk-politics.livejournal.com/154634.html) out.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

The funny thing is the proposed American system was a marketplace designed for the uninsured to GIVE them choice and for a chance to leave the slavery of not being insured, of being owned by your financial status. That, and the public option which was not passed would've given people choice as well, and if people thought it was worse than private insurance they can simply go back to that.

It speaks volumes when even the concept of the public option is shot down, because it doesn't threaten the consumer, only the insurance industry. If it was shitty, why not let it fail?

Because it wouldn't fail.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

if people thought it was worse than private insurance they can simply go back to that.

It's funny (as in sad, not haha) that you actually think that's true. There would not have been any private insurance to go back to.

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

Right, because paying 5% extra tax so that everyone can have quality guaranteed healthcare is just like putting a gun to my head and enslaving my family.

[mrsilence.livejournal.com]

They're mostly all good with the military being paid for the very same way.

[chessdev.livejournal.com]

That video is a LEAP a professional dancer would be proud of...sheesh...

[raichu100.livejournal.com]

Healthcare is not a right. It would be amazing, to be sure, if everyone had health care, and it was free. Unfortunately, those resources have to come from somewhere, and socializing something so huge and complex has its drawbacks besides the infringement on choice. I wouldn't go so far as to equate it to slavery; that's ludicrous. However, making it a creature of the state and mandating that every individual buy it whether they want it or not is not a step in the direction of freedom of choice--it's the opposite.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

What are the drawbacks besides the 'infringement on choice'?

I'm so confused by how this philosophical imperative precedes that of the economical and humanistic one. Is it some sort of slippery slope argument?

[soliloquy76.livejournal.com]

I don't think I'd go so far as to say healthcare is a right any more than I'd say police or fire services are a right. They're services that the people feel are essential for modern society. Whether you consider health care to fall into that category is completely subjective.

I have to say that I don't think either of them were doing their side a service with their arguments. Rand Paul, in particular, was clearly off the mark with his comparison to slavery. Are policemen, firefighters, hell, even our military feeling like they're slaves? Are citizens complaining that they don't have a choice in who arrests their bad guys, puts out their fires, or bombs brown people?

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

Hey! Welcome back!

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

I believe, many people in my own state believe, healthcare is a right – R.I.G.H.T.

Then his state can provide it, but don't ask the rest of us to provide it for him. Mass. did it and it isn't a problem for the rest of us, it doesn't affect us. And when it fails, it still won't affect us, and people can learn what not to do, again, just like we didn't learn after Hawaii tried it a little bit.

Sanders knew exactly what he was doing. He set the trap by invoking healthcare as a right, and Rand Paul blithely stepped into it, revealing not only his own disconnection from reality (Universal Healthcare = Slavery) but the horrifying moral emptiness of his worldview.

First, I doubt Sanders knew what he was doing, he's too blinded by his ideology, as are you. Second, it only shows your own disconnection from reality to not understand how imposing universal healthcare does equal slavery. That you don't understand how having a right to X means that you have to force someone to provide it to you, and that the Constitution describes no "rights" of this form.

Judging from what Paul has said here, that's the vision he has for the poor of America. Not just slums -- shantytowns.

And this is just your delusions talking.

[paft.livejournal.com]

So what do you think should happen in your vision of a "free country," to someone who cannot afford the medications that keep them alive, or the medical rehab that would, after an accident, return them to a normal life?

Do you consider public school teachers, city police, etc. slaves?

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

What I don't understand is how people believe a socialized system is fundamentally different from what we have now.

Why is competition good between insurers? Insurers operate by a risk pool, and having multiple risk pools reduce the efficiency.

Also, if private insurers reduce the costs, why have our costs skyrocketed? Other countries have lower costs due to their different system. Shouldn't time have proven our system to be cheaper if that was really what it was supposed to do? And don't go adding the red herring that government caused the costs to go up, that's bullshit and you know it. You would have NOTHING to back that up.

[paft.livejournal.com]

The questions these "universal healthcare is BAD" people never want to answer is what they think should happen to people who can't afford healthcare in a system that treats it as a commodity.

Ask that, and watch them skitter away from the conversation as fast as they can or denounce the questioner for being "emotional."

Yeah, people get so impossibly "emotional" about the idea of watching themselves or people they love die from easily treated illnesses or injuries.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

What choice do we have in the current system?

We have

high-deductible

and

low-deductible

and it works out that everyone pays the same amount anyway.

This trope about how our system has 'choice' is a complete farce.

[paft.livejournal.com]

Our current insurance based system really, REALLY reduces choice. I've known people with chronic illnesses who have stayed in jobs they despised simply because leaving would risk their health insurance and quite possibly their lives. I've also known chronically sick people who were literally afraid to talk about the problems with their insurance because they feared losing it.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Blue Cross/Blue Shield encourages you to seek alternative medicine. It's in the fucking pamphlet.

"Oh yeah we'll cover all KINDS of homeopathic medicine!"

They would rather you go to a witch doctor than a physician.

Seriously, does anyone know how health insurance works? Anyone? It's them telling the doctor what their client is covered by. That's it. That's the only communication between them and the doctor. The government would be WAY better than this, because they are MUCH MORE likely to try experimental treatments with clinical trials (this is for circumstances with no cure or low survival rates). Do you think a private insurance provider will advocate something with clinical trials? HELL NO. Pay for that shit out your own pocket, son.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Blue Cross/Blue Shield encourages you to seek alternative medicine. It's in the fucking pamphlet.

They offer it because their idiot customers demand it in this case.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Without regulations NOBODY with pre-existing conditions would have private insurance in America. NOBODY.

What's that? You're pregnant? Sorry that's a pre-existing condition.

You're human? Well gosh, that means you could die some day! Sorry we'll have to take a healthy person in their 20s over you.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

http://hiphopwired.com/2010/04/12/chris-rock-talks-healthcare-with-bill-maher/

tell me this shit is worse than other countries if you're poor. go ahead and try.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

You know why 3 hospitals were closed down in NYC? Nobody can afford to go there. What is this mystical 'choice' that people have? The choice to go into financial ruin?

A socialized system encourages people to go to the hospital! They treat people now rather than the more expensive later. You think doctors are some scarce resource? They're not, not by a long shot. Even better, if people go to the hospital more often when they're feeling unwell, you have more hospitals, more resources being produced, more jobs, and a healthier population.

The current system discourages people from going to the doctor unless they're rich or REALLY, UNAVOIDABLY sick.

I'd love to run a survey of how many people go to the doctor when they have the flu under a certain income level. I bet it's pretty damn low. I know many people that wouldn't go to the doctor when they think they have the flu, because they can't afford the sick days from work, because gosh Americans sure work hard! We don't need those things they have in other countries like many sick days.

Many companies give you extra money if you don't take sick days. How great an idea is that? Now nobody takes sick days, so they come into work dying from some disease and give it to everyone else. Great work, America!

[paft.livejournal.com]

The hideousness of this system is that if you're concerned about a symptom, you have to weigh the possibly dire consequences of a medical bill you can't pay against the chances of it being grave enough to warrant attention.

Not long ago I fainted in public while on vacation with my husband in another city and suffered some rather serious and disabling pain. Let's just say I was groggy and frightened and in agony, and I had my first ride in an ambulance and spent the day having lots of tests in the local hospital to rule out anything that might warrant immediate surgery or followup. Fortunately nothing serious was found. I was given some painkillers and checked out.

Now we're saddled with an appalling medical bill. If, instead of being in public, I'd been seized by those pains and that dizziness at home, I probably would have considered putting off that ambulance ride and betting on it being nothing serious. Which is bad. Very bad. Because those symptoms were not something that should be ignored, not something that should be "treated" by merely taking an aspirin and going to bed. But the cost of having them ruled out as something serious could end up affecting our lives. Badly.

That's the reality of "health care" in this country.

[dreadfulpenny81.livejournal.com]

I see Sen. Paul's point. Everyone has a right to health care, just like you have a right to a haircut, a good meal, or clothing. However, it's just like paying for ANY service. I'd love to see someone walk into WalMart, start grabbing stuff off the racks, and refuse to pay for it by saying it's their right. They'd be a laughing stock.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

I guess it depends on what people as a society in any given country decide to do. They get together and draw consensus on whether or not health care is a citizen's right, then they enact legislation based on this decision. In America they're trying to skip that step and just enact legislation one way or the other, which is why we're not getting anywhere in either direction.

Let me remind...

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

html fail, third attempt...

I see the argument so far has boiled down to: is health-care a right or not? So let me quote this thing which many in America are considering now totally irrelevant: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1949:

"Everyone has the right to a standard of living and well-being of oneself and one's family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care."

Is it just some beautiful words written on a paper without a meaning? For some in your country, they really are. Which is sad for a first-world country. For many others, not so much.

Although the above statement of high principle was adopted at the explicit urging of the United States, and although it reflects the truths of that great nation's founding documents, all the US governments combined have achieved neither formal recognition nor practical realization of these rights. Mass homelessness and the escalating health care crisis in the US are compelling evidence of the disregard for human rights. Sadly, your otherwise great country is but one of many nations where grave offenses against the dignity of human beings are commonplace, and global enforcement of human rights remains a distant goal. In the US, however, the twin advantages of democratic institutions and great wealth provide the opportunity for your nation to implement the principles of human rights. Implementation of human rights principles would lead inexorably to the elimination of mass homelessness.

A useful summary of the international agreements that establish and codify the human right to health care, entitled "The Right to Health Care in the United States: What Does it Mean?" (http://www.nhchc.org/Advocacy/RighttoHealthinAmerica.pdf) has been published by the Center on Social and Economic Rights, and is available by clicking here (http://www.nhchc.org/Advocacy/RighttoHealthinAmerica.pdf) or at CESR's website (http://www.cesr.org/).

Since 1991, the National Health Care for the Homeless Council has recognized that "every person has the right to adequate food, housing, clothing and health care" and has incorporated a human rights perspective into their work to assure health care for everyone and to end homelessness. Policy changes that would advance implementation of the right to health care, along with other human rights such as housing, are described in the annual Policy Statements of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council (http://www.nhchc.org/Advocacy/PolicyPapers/policystatements.html).

Much more could be said on the matter, but I suspect that would be pointless, since those who have already decided that access to adequate health care is NOT a right but a privilege, would not change their mind no matter what. In the long run, a society which does not recognize a basic human right as a right, is in deep trouble. Even if it is still presently the number one nation in many respects. This will not last forever, and in case you are still wondering why that is, the inadequate health of a nation is one of the most significant, if not THE most significant factor for its demise, along with inadequate education.

Re: Let me remind...

[whoasksfinds.livejournal.com]

everyone should have a right to happiness too. i mean its a cool idea, just impossible to implement. somehow poverty, hunger, and homelessness still exist in the world despite the UN charter. how can that be if its a "right"?

the US was founded upon the principle of limiting the government and protecting the rights of the individual. we'd like to keep it that way.