@giltesque (not just at you; don’t take this too personally) The point is that you do pay for your insurance out of pocket. Many people cannot, and because of this are driven even further into debt. To attribute this to laziness is ridiculous. We live in a capitalist society. The root of this word, you will note, is capital- money used to create more money. The entire basis of our economy is that those who have money can invest it and make more money. It is, in theory and in practice, a system under which the rich get richer- and, while the poor may not get poorer, they certainly are left vastly behind the rich. This principle of self-perpetuation applies to health as it does to wealth: the food of the poor is less nutritious and more damaging than that of the rich: health care is delayed through lack of coverage, and diseases worsen until they can no longer be endured, by which time they are much harder to treat: the environments in which the poor live and work are far more likely to expose them to harmful substances: and lack of access to, or ignorance of, information and private aid resources make them less likely to seek help, and make them more vulnerable to disease. It applies to education: unless you would claim that education, all education, is worthless, then you must recognize that people who grow up in the Chicago public schools, where the standards for both teachers and students are so low that straight A’s won’t get you into college, are much less prepared for life than someone whose parents could sent them to private school. It applies to essentially everything.
Some of this social inertia can be seen as the ‘fault’ of the poor, as a result of a culture of underachievement. But if everybody you knew, your friends, your family, your neighbors, was in the situation I outlined above, and you had no reason to expect anything different for yourself, can you honestly say that you might not give up and accept your fate, if no one who was in a better position was willing to give you some help and level the playing field, instead of just saying “Look, I can pay for my insurance, I’m not a victim, what’s your problem”? Maybe you could; some people do. Most people don’t. Realizing this and accepting this, and then trying to fix the problem by putting a check on that self-perpetuation of poverty and of wealth, does not mean we have to allow people to exist as passive victims buoyed up by the state, and it does not mean socialism, in the sense of total state control. It does mean providing for those who can’t provide for themselves, in recognition of the bitter reality that market forces create. It may be un-American to say that people here do not have an equal chance at life, but it is at least accurate.