Hijexx wrote: Decius wrote: Caleb Medley was shot in the eye at the Aurora movie theater mass shooting. Like a number of people injured in the Aurora shooting, he is uninsured. His family has been told that the cost of his medical treatment may exceed $2 million.
The shooting is a tragedy. I know the correlation Xeni is making is a double edged sword. On the one hand it's bringing visibility to an aspect not many people would otherwise think of, mainly the financial aftermath. On the other hand, it feels like using the tragedy to grind a political axe.
There have been a bunch of discussions about gun control in the wake of the this shooting. If you genuinely believe that gun control would make a difference in cases like this, perhaps you are likely to feel that its a legitimate response - you're not grinding a political axe so much as you're pointing out a solution to a real problem. The issue that I have with it is that I don't think gun control would make a difference when it comes to this kind of incident, so I think emotional appeals for gun control that reference the incident do lean in the direction of political football spiking. Where this really becomes a problem is when the solution you're proposing has nothing to do with the problem but you're trying to take advantage of people's feelings about the problem anyway. I don't think that accusation is fair with regard to the healthcare discussion. All insurance is redistributive. We all put money in a pot and one of us gets to take that money because he or she got sick. The debate in the US over healthcare is about who is allowed to access the pot and how much their access should cost. Opponents of national healthcare frequently make the argument that people get sick because they are irresponsible. They smoke. They drink. They don't eat healthy. They ski. Giving them free health insurance just enables them to be irresponsible with their behavior. Honest tax payers should not have to foot the bill for that - these people should be responsible for themselves. The problem with this logic is that expensive health problems can strike at random. This is a perfect example. Caleb Medley was not shot in the face because he was being irresponsible. Should Medley have access to care? This is a real world scenario. If one's views on the healthcare issue don't anticipate situations like this, they are wrong. Should Medley have had insurance? Yes. He would have had access to care if he had insurance. However, anyone could have been in that theater that day. There is not a single human being in this country for whom that answer is no, so there should be no problem making insurance compulsory, just as education is compulsory, because the answer for everyone is always yes in every circumstance. Even if we decide that Medley made a mi... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ] | 
