gsingh1015 said:
Why do Americans come here! Tourists? Visiting family? or may be just so that people can ask silly questions!
As to basic human rights - health has the same place as life and liberty along with education and a clean water supply. As to happiness - there can be no happiness if your child is dying in front of your eyes and you have no medical access because you can't pay the bills. But then you cannot explain such simple concepts to people who think a right to carry arms is more important than universal health care!
Healthcare is not a right. It is a service. It is something that requires the skills of other people to provide. As such, it cannot ever be a right. If you make healthcare a "right," you are essentially infringing on the rights of the people who study hard for years to acquire the skills to be able to provide healthcare. No one is entitled to those services.
Education is the same. And food. And housing. All are services. Not rights. If you want those services, you have to pay for them.
Rights are things like the 2nd Amendment, which states you have a right to bear arms to protect yourself. It doesn't at all say the government is supposed to supply you with a weapon. That's on you to acquire it. Or the freedom to practice whatever religion you want. The government is not obligated to build you a church/mosque/temple, etc...things like healthcare, education, food, housing, etc...cannot be rights, because they require the skills of others.
Societies that consider these things rights are always less prosperous than more free-market systems, which is why countries like America and Switzerland have the highest standard of living in the world.
Regarding the drug and insurance companies, there is a huge misconception that these are oligopolies because of the free market, which is blatantly not true. The reason they are oligopolies is BECAUSE of government intervention, not the lack of it.
For example, the drug industry. You know what the requirement is to start a drug company? You'd need to create a new drug which is an effort unto itself, then it would have to pass through the FDA, thus costing you a couple of hundred million dollars and a ten to fifteen year wait.
Well obviously that kind of cuts out 99.99999999999999999999% of the population from starting any new drug companies. Thus the drug companies gain an oligopoly, and become very large and powerful. The barrier to entry in the drug industry regarding starting your own drug company is thus a good deal caused by government.
Contrast this with the computer/software industry which is incredibly free and unregulate, with very low barriers to entry. Thus you have constant startups forming in the industry, and incredible growth in the industry.
The FDA itself through it's stringent regulation also seriously hamstrings our drug industry because of that ten to fifteen year wait. We would be much better with an abolished FDA and having competing private agencies that could do the testing, and drugs available to people who want to use them before the testing if they want to run that risk.
More people die each year from drugs that don't make it to the market than are saved from ones that do. If these drugs could come to market, and then were undergoing testing by competing private agencies, then people could wait for them to be certified safe, but people more desperate (say going to die soon if they don't try something) could try the drug. It would be their choice.
Sort of like when the FDA announces a new drug that they estimate will save 14,000 people a year, well no one thinks that means 14,000 people died for each of the ten to fifteen years the drug had to go through FDA testing. That number could've been greatly reduced had the drug been released.
The drug companies, the insurance companies, Medicare, Medicaid, etc...all are stringently regulated. And now individual doctor's practices are being taken over by government as well or regulated out of existence. Medicare alone has like 133,000 pages of regulation.
All this regulation of the industry was originally meant to "protect" us consumers, but it does exactly the opposite.
I don't trust my healthcare to a big corporation with little competition or the government, I trust my own private doctors with it. For over 100 years in America, our medical care system was simple: if you needed a doctor, you went to one and paid for their services. But somewhere along the line government had to step in and complicate things greatly.
The U.S. healthcare system is messed-up because of the intervention of government, not because of free-market policies.
