CDR: Re: why should it be trusted?

[Tim May]

At 1:10 AM -0400 10/23/00, Dave Emery wrote:
>
>
>	Nobody dies without healthcare under our present system.

Actually, many people do. What planet have you been living on?

(I'm not arguing for "universal health care," or "socialized 
medicine," or Nathan Saper's "soak the giant corporations" scheme. 
I'm just disputing the point above, which is patently false.)

Many do not have insurance, and do not receive care for various 
ailments until it's too late.  Many do not have insurance and do not 
have annual physicals, or mammograms, or prostate exams, or pap 
smears, or any of the hundreds of such things.

Some hospitals offers limited free services, some free clinics exist. 
But clearly many Americans are not receiving such care. And of course 
these "free services" are often a huge distance from _good_ 
healthcare. So much for "nobody dies without healthcare."


>	Sadly, at least for those of extreme libertarian bent that  make
>up the choir on this list, our society has chosen to pass laws that
>require hospitals and to some degree other medical treatment  facilities
>to treat patients who cannot pay - mostly at their expense.   ANYONE
>with a life threatening or even just very serious medical condition can
>walk into most any emergency room and get full medical treatment by law
>even if there is no insurance and no money to pay.

This is not true. Again, I have to question your connection to 
current events. Surely you have heard of folks being turned away at 
emergency room entrances and shipped off to the "public hospital"? 
There are many cases in many cities where people died in ambulances 
that had been turned away at the _nearest_ (or _better_) hospital and 
sent off on a 30-minute ambulance or taxicab ride to the "public" 
hospital in town.

Again, I am not advocating that medicine be socialized or that 
hospitals be forced to treat those they choose not to treat.

(Were it my hospital, I would not think highly of Men with Guns 
telling me I must give $10,000 worth of ER services to someone who 
won't pay me back and who has no insurance.)

>
>	Of course, in the libertarian ideal universe someone not
>completely indigent who had a genetic condition that made them high risk
>might still be unable to get any kind of catastropic medical insurance
>and might be wiped out of virtually all assets by a serious illness,
>even one  completely unrelated in any way to his genetic predisposition.
>


Yes...so?


--Tim May
-- 
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
"Cyphernomicon"             | black markets, collapse of governments.