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I am asking you to define "good effect" precisely because it seems to be subject to the kind of cherry picking you don't like. I'm a median to upper-middle American, and I get great value from my healthcare. It's not obvious to me that a system that raises the experience for mean, or even the bottom end, of the distribution would be a good thing for me in many respects: emergency wait time, access to top percentile specialists, out of pocket costs, just to name a few. It also seems to me that you neglect to factor in that people of means, the world over, come to the US to access care from world leading treatments in many conditions. So they might not want American care in their country, but plenty surely want it for their own bodies. Put simply: your "good effect" often smuggles in assumptions about which part of the curve to treat, and implicitly undervalues degradation of the status quo for others. You, as is the habit of liberals, would like to have a debate wherein your moral values about who deserves what and who should be deprived, is taken for granted. I'm sorry, it's not immediately obvious to me that a system where 10,000 people wait 6-12 months for lifesaving operations is better than one where 1,000 people can get the operation in a month and the other 9,000 might have to go into debt to do the same. |
Ah—I usually assume the Rawlsian "Veil of Ignorance" POV when it comes public policy issues, personally, as I think is fairly common. Sure, if that's your perspective, literally nothing matters except how a policy affects you, personally, right now, so my analysis may not hold—but that's not an especially useful perspective from which to consider public policy when discussing it with strangers, and I'm not really sure why you'd even engage on this in public if the only thing you care about is whether a policy is good for you, right this second (circumstances are subject to change, after all)
At least you're up-front about it, rather than hiding it. I don't mind that when it's made explicit—I just also, again, don't get why you'd engage, and wonder whether you might have guessed in advance the sort of more-typical POV I was taking, so really could have understood what I meant by "good effect" without my needing to explain it. What were you trying to accomplish here?