[fastball]

Paying for someone else's healthcare shows compassion.

Not paying for someone else's healthcare does not indicate a lack thereof.

A line needs to be drawn somewhere, and many Americans seem to draw that line as "primary rights need to be protected, and all else is every man for himself". Let's say you really want new Macbook Pro. It costs a lot more money than you got. So someone else in society pays for it. Ok, same situation, but someone else doesn't wanna pay for it. Does that really make them a person without compassion.

[onion2k]

The suggestion that someone not having the money to buy a fancy computer and someone not having the money to buy healthcare are equivalent is an odd way of looking at the world.

If those who didn't have a Macbook Pro were going to die then compassionate people would be buying luxury laptops for everyone around them.

[crowaycrestcan]

That's a slippery slope to argue on because eventually everyone is going to die. Where do you draw the line? Your post is ironic, because macs are overpriced, by some measure, and so is the american healthcare, from what I heard. Apple is said to derive value from exclusiveness (price differentiation). I'm not going to draw the analogy for medicine, although medication is controversial enough.

Surely, nobody is going to die from not owning a macbook, that's indeed a strawman. A macbook is not a condition, but a property.

[fastball]

Living with a Macbook (insert any useful technology here) improves your life.

Living without disease/sickness/things medical care provides improves your life.

I don't think it's a straw man. As you said, no amount of medical care can stave off death indefinitely, so I'm not sure why it matters if "nobody is going to die" from not owning a MacBook if nobody is going to live forever from getting medical care. In fact, plenty of people die even after they've received cutting edge care / insanely expensive procedures.