[stonogo]

"Universal health care" is a phrase that basically means "everyone is on medicare" by now and to a right-wing listener is synonymous with losing control of your health care decisions.

"Institutionalization" is a weird synonym for "imprisonment" to any left-wing listener, since those are the only "institutions" we put homeless people in, mentally ill or not.

This is the kind of bullshit fight that makes me miss the fairness doctrine in media. People still disagreed, but they at least focused on making their case instead of misrepresenting the other side. Now not only does the fight go on, it's full of shitty rhetorical tricks designed to appeal to emotions instead of any kind of actual policymaking. It's exhausting and I had hoped Hacker News to be a sanctuary from this.

[sickofparadox]

Institutionalization necessarily involves imprisonment, but should not be limited to just that, I don't know why you are considering this to be some rhetorical flourish. I am not misrepresenting anyone, nor am I playing word games. Homeless people are often experiencing chronic, severe mental health issues and should be put into a psych ward that helps them regain control of their lives. They will not do this on their own, so this is where the rest of society comes in, say "yes we do actually know better than you," and take them off the street.

[rbanffy]

> Homeless people are often experiencing chronic, severe mental health issues and should be put into a psych ward that helps them regain control of their lives.

Can't you see you are denying agency to a whole population because they live in a way you don't agree with? And keep them like that until they do?

I know homelessness takes a huge toll on mental health, but to incarcerate homeless people until they are "cured" without focusing on the causes for the mental health problems some experience is just that: taking them off the streets to somewhere people aren't forced to acknowledge they exist.

[sickofparadox]

Yes, these people are so mentally ill (and potentially drug addicted) that the state needs to supersede their agency so that they can rejoin society. I have no issue with this morally because I know beyond the shadow of doubt that if they can rejoin society they will experience a far better quality of life than they could ever hope for homeless. I explicitly acknowledge they exist, that is why I want them to be helped.

The man that lives under a bridge on the walking path near my house, who alternates between screaming for hours on end and being in a fentanyl trance, is not making logical decisions and would be better served by a psych ward and addiction treatment.

[rbanffy]

> Yes, these people are so mentally ill (and potentially drug addicted)

Please, stop. You didn't say depriving the seriously mentally ill and the terminally drug addicted of agency. You said it about homeless people, justifying with a plausible, but not confirmed, argument that they are mentally ill, drug addicted, or both.

I too want the mentally ill and drug addicts to be helped, and even conced that, in those cases, it might need to be necessary to treat them against their will, but to just incarcerate (because good psychiatric care is expensive, and the US, it seems, can't even afford universal healthcare on par with the average European country) them even though they have not been convicted of any crimes.

[rbanffy]

> "Universal health care" is a phrase that basically means "everyone is on medicare" by now and to a right-wing listener is synonymous with losing control of your health care decisions.

I live in a country where there is universal healthcare and I still am in full control of my healthcare decisions - I can still see a private specialist, and I have private insurance on top of the public service precisely for things like that - and to have a private room in the hospital. This also causes the private insurance to be very cheap, because the risk it deals with is much smaller.

I too miss honest debate, and news focused on providing reliable information instead of just blindly listening to anyone who wants to have a platform.

[stonogo]

This is why I put "to a right-wing listener." It doesn't matter what happens in your country. In the US, for decades, Medicare has been known as a miserable nightmare of cost-driven inefficiency and denied service. Nobody is afraid of the system you describe; they're afraid that all health care will be worst-case, and they're not willing to risk worst-case in the pursuit of universal healthcare.

This is a good example of why we no longer have that honest debate. Words that one side uses to describe their goals get sabotaged by the other side to mean the worst possible interpretation of the results of the policy. So, in one direction, "universal health care" gets heard as "worst-case Soviet doctor hell" and in the other direction "freedom of speech" gets heard as "permission to promote literal Nazis." As long as twisting the language remains profitable, we'll never get past this.

[rbanffy]

> In the US, for decades, Medicare has been known as a miserable nightmare of cost-driven inefficiency and denied service.

The reasons for that are many, and all of those are completely artificial - there are almost no political incentives to make it work well (and compete with private healthcare), and plenty of incentives to make it not work at all (because private healthcare donates a lot to politicians).

> and in the other direction "freedom of speech" gets heard as "permission to promote literal Nazis."

That's one feature of absolute freedom of speech - and that makes the freedom of speech a complicated issue with a lot of grey in the middle. OTOH, agencies such as the FCC and the FDA exist that could be a model for one that prevents the soviet-doctor-hell scenario.