> And it’s just as wrong to take my money to pay for some else’s health care.
I guess that depends upon whether your idea of a perfect civilization resembles a good game of “Survivor” or a good game of Rugby.
And whether you believe in selfishness or selflessness.
It comes down to core values, I guess.
Here in New Zealand we prefer to live and work and fight as rugged individuals who belong on a team, and we finish as a team. We don’t leave any of our own behind.
The Spartans were like that. And, by reputation, many of America’s enduring institutions (like the Marines) are also like that.
We’ve just done all that on an entire-Society basis, that’s all.
A "perfect" civilization would not steal from one to give to another with the ulterior motives of securing political support and elected office. Socialized medicine, though perhaps N.Z. is an exception, creates more problems than it solves while creating a huge, inefficient bureaucracy that more often than not gets between patients and the care they need. Moreover, it promotes the false notions that medical care is both free and a right while raising the price of care for all of us.
We would do better to adopt your country's legal reforms first and see how that goes before ruining our system even more by socializing it. Then we should abolish the HMOs. I don't have insurance and am charged less for care as a result.
The Marines, and the rest of Military, also demand that each individual does their job, pulls their own weight, and helps others.
When a service or benefit is "free", too many who are not pulling their own weight, or even making an effort, go along for the ride. If the provider attempts to eliminate those, they invariably eliminate the deserving as well.
Besides, we do have a system of essentially free care, at a minimal standard. Virtually every county or city of any size has a facility that anyone without the means can go to for 'acute' care. Yeh they probably have to wait longer than in the so called private hospitals, but even the latter must take anyone who shows up for "acute" care, switching them off to the "public" hospital, or in smaller places, sending a much reduced bill to the county or state. We do pay for that with our taxes, just not at the national level. Especially in a place a big as the US, the more decentralized system works better, and originally health care was beyond the powers granted to the national government(and legally still is). Once the national government, and in some cases the state governments when the system was run at the county level, stick their bureaucratic noses in, the system tends to move toward the "free for everyone" sort of deal, with the attendant abuses.
As an example, a county I lived in for 10 years, and still have a home and pay taxes, once had a privately run "Orphanage and Old folks home". It was a nice facility for it's time. the county paid for some of the cost for the orphans. The Old folks provided adult oversight of the kids, and paid some amount themselves. The kids helped with the "chores", such as washing, doing dishes, cleaning up, and so forth. The old folks also provided love, which the orphans needed more than anything, since some were really abandoned, rather than orphaned. The orphans also loved in return. then the state decided that that was "Child Labor", "Exploitation", etc. and separated the groups, causing the Old Folks home to become insolvent. The buildings still stand as a monument to the folly of over centralization. Probably not for long, developement is very near, and the property was sold some years ago. Meanwhile the old folks of today are in sterile "old folks only" facilities, at much higher expense for the state, and the kids are in foster homes, where the foster parent(s) is paid for taking them in and where they are far more often exploited and abused than was the case in the older facility which had lots of eyes watching over everyone. The kids often do not receive the love they would have gotten in the previous arrangement, and are shuffled from home to home with some regularity.