Ask Lemmy

I believe in universal basic income, because it is simple and easy to define, and therefore doesn’t have these two problems

Universal healthcare is problematic because of two things:

• How much is covered? Because healthcare isn’t fungible like money is, unlike UBI, UH has a problem where a ton of attention and discussion is required to determine what’s covered and what isn’t. It becomes a “to each according to his need” scenario where “his need” is being determined by the central committee
• Once society is promising to take care of my body, I now have to promise to society to take care of my body. If I want to take risks with my own health or safety, there is now opposition to that from others on the basis that I’m ruining their investment. This means less self-ownership and less liberty.

I'm not a libertarian, but from what I've seen of their positions on this, they don't think that it's possible in an effective way. There's two possible versions: the government pays for everything, or there's public and private health care. A lot of countries have both, which is probably the best option since driving out competition is going to make everything go to crap.

The problem is that there are some arrangements that simply can't work or the existing system would implode in the transition.

There are also a lot of people who don't want to pay because someone who refused to get insurance for years finally decided to sign up for public health care because they suddenly got a serious health problem. In some possible arrangements, it would be necessary to force people to have health insurance, which is its own rabbit hole.