If one is truly a conservative, one would leave it up to charitable people in each community to pay for indigent health care which is, of course, the largest unfunded cost in the health care system.
But, people are not charitable in many places, the government has already imposed indigent care obligations on the hospitals, and the “indigent” are mostly a bunch of addicted malingerers who don’t deserve charity.
So, what to do?
Leave it to El Paso, Detroit and Tuscon to provide the cost of care for these people or nationalize the problem and the solution?
Back in the 50's and 60's it used to work that way. However once government got into the health care business via medicare, health care costs have sky rocketed. Just like higher education prices have sky rocketed with the introduction of government backed student loans. Once gov starts picking up the tab costs go up, up, up. But is it what it is and sadly there is no turning back the clock.
Most of the charity based hospitals like Catholic, Jewish are no longer around. The hospital emergency rooms are actually “leased out” operations who tend to get stuck with all the indigents, so guess what happened? The hospitals could not get operators for the ER’s which means some hospitals have NO ER’S.
Cleveland Clinic of Cleveland would not let you in the ER unless you were a current patient with a Cleveland Clinic Member card. So everyone who needs ER treatment gets funneled to Metrohealth.
Go ahead and drop dead on your way there.