alt Hacker NewsThis is on the dot. The entirety of their argument can be summed up as “I don’t want to give a shit about my neighbor”. And, “I don’t want to care for the hungry”. Or, “I don’t want to share medical costs with my neighbors”. Basically, “I don’t want to share anything”.
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It seems normal for the target of forced resource extraction to not even view it as sharing, or see it in a positive light. Helping your neighbor when in need is one thing, being coerced into funding whatever some distant bureaucrat wants is another.
Americans also want to be able to use the roads for free, eat food and drink water that "somebody" has inspected to make sure it won't kill them, and have fire, police, and EMS show up quickly if they have an emergency.
The cognitive dissonance is staggering.
I'm healthier than my neighbors. I carry 4-6 gallons of water a mile every couple of days on foot. I don't own a car either, I ride a bicycle. If my neighbors and I share medical costs, I'm definitely losing a lot there. My neighbors are obese. 40% of Americans are obese. 80% are overweight. Americans are not healthy in general. They don't even try. How is forcing me to participate in their healthcare a freedom?
The American healthcare system is fundamentally broken on top of this. How is forcing me to pay into a system that is broken and a system I won't use, how is that freedom? Americans spend more money than any other country only to recieve worse outcomes. You can walk into an American hospital, tell them you have just returned from west Africa where there is an Ebola outbreak, and tell the nurse you have Ebola symptoms, and that nurse will send you home with a perscription for antibiotics that don't work against viral infections at all. And then you die. I'm citing a real example that actually happened.
https://abcnews.com/news/story/ebola-patient-released-texas-...
Given the state of American healthcare, I wouldn't go to an American hospital even if near death. I'd try to get myself to a hospital in some other country before going to an American one.
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uncomfortably close to the nail. American society is depressingly based on being able to point and laugh at somebody worse off than you. Never take a chance that a change that's good for everybdoy might place the person you laughed at yesterday above you.