Socialized Health Care in the USA

[Skandranon]

Yes, of course we should care about each other, but the question I'm asking is should the government force "the workers", (or perhaps it would be more accurate to describe tax payers as "the productive class") to pay for everyones whim of health care, whether that be birth control pills, exercise programs for the obese, or detox programs for the inebriated.

Firstly, I'm not sure of the logical soundness of "some people can be ill due to their own actions, therefore we must treat everyone as if they grow ill due to their own actions". There are illnesses you can aggravate or produce favourable preconditions for, but those same illnesses can easily crop up in people who have never done a thing to make it worse. Once again, if you didn't notice the link in my earlier post, please read it.

Secondly, I feel it's kind of straw-mannish to jump on the most extreme examples of what health care could provide and use it as a reason to dismiss the entire idea. Even "universal" health care systems don't cover everything. There are a number of procedures not covered in Canada for the very reason that they behave more like traditional goods and services.

Put another way, it's not a battle of the extremes here, "cover-everything" vs. "cover nothing". There are a lot of reasons for a public plan not to cover something. You, however, are in fact arguing the cover-nothing extreme, so for logical reasons it's incumbent on you to take the example most favourable to public health care and explain why it shouldn't be public.