I'm not sure how to separate this mindset from one that would have commercial buildings not be required to include elevators and wheelchair ramps. Do you also think that's an unfair burden to put on the roughly-90% of people who are not mobility-impaired? (Not implying any judgement either way, just curious if this is a consistent viewpoint).
I think one difference is that there isn't a great alternative option in the case of commercial buildings -- if you have a job in a given building that doesn't accommodate your disability, you can't just go find a different building. But insofar as food is concerned, you could pay more for more carefully-manufactured food, or just cook for yourself
Exactly. It's like insurance, even if you have no sympathy, you're probably ok paying a little for other people's accidents because you could just as easily have one. Allergens are different, though.
This sort of thought implies not believing in insurance of any kind. Why should people pay into a common fund when only a small percentage of them will ever use it.
People can develop allergies during their lifetime, it's not just something that you're born with. There's also ongoing studies trying to desensitise people's allergies so that they can deal with foods more easily. So a person's allergy status can and does change during their lifetime.
But my message was about the general principle of insurance being the very thing your comment was against. The situation where the vast majority of people pay some cost of which only a few need to utilise.
> People can develop allergies during their lifetime, it's not just something that you're born with.
Sure, but the likelihood of that is low enough that insuring against that isn't worth it for most people
> But my message was about the general principle of insurance being the very thing your comment was against. The situation where the vast majority of people pay some cost of which only a few need to utilise.
No, the principle of insurance is that people pay to hedge against some event that has a reasonable likelihood of happening to them at some point. Whether it's a majority or a minority paying for it is not central to the concept of insurance.
Nope. Assume you have insurance with a one-time fee of $X. It insures against a single kind of event that happens with 60% probability, and pays out $1.6X. So the majority of people are likely to have the event happen to them. The EV of the cost to the insurer is then $1.6X * 0.6 = $0.96X, so the books are expected to balance.
Obviously I'm ignoring variance in this calculation, but you can easily adjust the numbers to give a margin of safety.
Yes? If the government can find a better way to help people with disabilities, great. But small business being sued because a booth is 6 inches too small, or universities having to take down lectures because they lacked close captioning seems to clearly go to far to me. People seem to have a terrible time understanding diffused societal costs and opportunity costs.
I don’t think either of those things is in the spirit of the ADA. ADA requires reasonable accommodation. So if it would be unreasonable, the law says the accommodation isn’t necessary. What I see in those two instances is judicial overreach and a college not wanting to appear insensitive.
Some day if you find yourself with limited mobility you will be thankful the ADA requires the things it does, because you would find it challenging to live in society without it. The market of “disabled people wanting to shop in a store” is vanishingly small and totally unserved without at least some regulation. I’m sure it offends your free market principles, but the free market isn’t the best thing for all of us.