"your poor lifestyle decisions."

Why frame the issue in this way, except to make yourself feel better about being complicit in denying your fellow citizens access to basic healthcare?

The alternative explanation is that you genuinely believe all issues requiring healthcare are the result of "poor lifestyle decisions", which is plainly ludicrous.

I think you should give some serious consideration as to why your brain forces you to frame the problem in this way. I suspect it's because at some level you do feel morally culpable for whether your neighbor lives or dies, but that inevitably leads to a position where some social programs are morally just, and a belief in orthodox anti-statism is more important to you.

The only way to square that circle is to frame all healthcare issues as "poor lifestyle decisions" and social programs as "like slavery". Much easier to feel better about a child dying because they can't get access to basic healthcare if you can just hand-wave it away as "poor lifestyle decisions."

Your attitude is sickening to me. Why not just go full-on black hat and say "fuck the sick" instead of pretending all healthcare is due to "poor lifestyle decisions"? At least that would be intellectually honest, and no less evil.

A huge fraction of health care expenses is due to lifestyle choices. Most diabetes (diet and obesity), most cancer (smoking), many knee/hip replacements (obesity), most hypertension (diet, obesity, sedentary lifestyle), not to mention alcoholism and drug addicition which at least starts with lifestyle choices.

People make the best choices they can with the information available to them.

Malcolm Gladwell recently had a podcast about how McDonalds ruined their French fries when they got bullied into changing their fryer oil from stable saturated fats to unstable polyunsaturated oil: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/19-mcdonalds-broke-my...

I don't think The American Heart Association's propaganda campaign against stable cooking fats helps individuals make good choices for themselves.

Alcohol and drug addictions usually start with physical and/or mental anguish, not 'lifestyle choices'. I wrote about this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15024780

But you are already paying for the lifestyle decisions of others, just in separate pools. The very definition of insurance states that you collectively pay for everyone in the same group.

As I understand it, healthcare in the US isn't voluntary, thanks to the ACA, where the onus is on citizens to have a third-party product covering them at all times. If you choose not to, but could afford it, you are fined for not doing so.

Socialized medicine just amalgamates the disjoint pools of policy holders, and allows the state to manage aspects of care (i.e. avoid the hyper-inflated per-person costs in the US).

I really don't understand your argument, you are never paying for solely your own healthcare in the US system, unless you forego cover completely and accept fines from the govt for doing so.

Where do people like you come from? Do you really not know anyone who has a congenital illness or who got a cancer diagnosis out of the blue? Do you not know anyone who, due to unpredictable circumstances out of their control, was out of work for an extended period and could not afford health insurance?

More fundamentally, why does it matter whose fault it is? This is 2017 and the US is an extremely prosperous nation. Everyone should have access to health care without being financially ruined, regardless of their "lifestyle choices."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/i-dont-know-how-to-expla...

> Someone always has to pay, and socialized healthcare just means that your neighbor has to pay for your poor lifestyle decisions.

The existing US system has the taxpayer paying as much as a share of GDP, and more per capita, than many developed countries that have fully socialized systems. It also has more than that in private costs, on top.

The American government already pays for a pretty large amount of healthcare through medicaid and medicare. Do you not support those programs?

That's really interesting that affordable healthcare for minimum wage workers sounds like enslaving wealthy corporate overlords to you.