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by caseydurfee 3213 days ago
"your poor lifestyle decisions."

Why frame the issue in this way, except to make yourself feel better about being complicit in denying your fellow citizens access to basic healthcare?

The alternative explanation is that you genuinely believe all issues requiring healthcare are the result of "poor lifestyle decisions", which is plainly ludicrous.

I think you should give some serious consideration as to why your brain forces you to frame the problem in this way. I suspect it's because at some level you do feel morally culpable for whether your neighbor lives or dies, but that inevitably leads to a position where some social programs are morally just, and a belief in orthodox anti-statism is more important to you.

The only way to square that circle is to frame all healthcare issues as "poor lifestyle decisions" and social programs as "like slavery". Much easier to feel better about a child dying because they can't get access to basic healthcare if you can just hand-wave it away as "poor lifestyle decisions."

Your attitude is sickening to me. Why not just go full-on black hat and say "fuck the sick" instead of pretending all healthcare is due to "poor lifestyle decisions"? At least that would be intellectually honest, and no less evil.

1 comments

A huge fraction of health care expenses is due to lifestyle choices. Most diabetes (diet and obesity), most cancer (smoking), many knee/hip replacements (obesity), most hypertension (diet, obesity, sedentary lifestyle), not to mention alcoholism and drug addicition which at least starts with lifestyle choices.
People make the best choices they can with the information available to them.

Malcolm Gladwell recently had a podcast about how McDonalds ruined their French fries when they got bullied into changing their fryer oil from stable saturated fats to unstable polyunsaturated oil: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/19-mcdonalds-broke-my...

I don't think The American Heart Association's propaganda campaign against stable cooking fats helps individuals make good choices for themselves.

Alcohol and drug addictions usually start with physical and/or mental anguish, not 'lifestyle choices'. I wrote about this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15024780