I disagree with the asymmetry. Withholding care isn't actually 'doing nothing' and has the ability to be violent or coercive. Take a life-saving but expensive pill. 'Doing nothing' in the case of someone who needs but can't afford the pill would be actually doing nothing - that person could waltz in, walk behind the counter, take the pill, swallow and walk out. Bada-bing bada boom, problem solved no violence or coercion. Healthcare providers don't actually do that though, someone who tried to walk in and take the pill would be met with violence in order to prevent them from accessing the pill until they had paid. That violence is coercive.

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Since the mods are rate-limiting me, here's my reply to your post below:

>Otherwise every person in every situation who demands to be paid for their work, including doctors who demand to be paid by the state in a universal healthcare system are all being coercive.

I agree that this is coercion.

>When taken to that level, the word coerce ceases to have a useful meaning.

Well no, when taken to that level coerce retains it's meaning perfectly, it just happens to illustrate that the market system has coercion baked into almost every aspect. Here, this guy says it better than I can:

But there is no neutral construction of “coercion” that would ever support such a distinction. As Hale aptly demonstrates, coercion occurs when there are “background constraints on the universe of socially available choices from which an individual might ‘freely’ choose.”

In a world of scarcity, all economic rules–including rules that create private property ownership, contract laws, and so on–impose background constraints on the universe of choices individuals can make (e.g. the choice to move into a building and sleep in it without paying anyone anything). When we talk about the economy, we are not arguing about whether we want coercion. We are arguing about what coercion we’d like.

http://www.demos.org/blog/10/28/13/libertarians-are-huge-fan...