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Comment by dominotw | Hacker News Reader

can someone tell me this. Right now level of care is rationed by type of insurance you can afford. eg: northwestern in chicago downtown is inaccesible to ppl below certain income level.

In universal everyone has access to every hospital ? Why would someone go to lower level hospital if they can go to northwestern. Now the acess to best hosptials is gated by a queue?

I am not saying this is right but ppl who already have access to northwestern its in their best selfish interst to oppose universal?

i am just countering the point that "ppl opposing it are merely brainwashed by foxnews or are stupid" . Its no different than ppl preventing outsider kids from going to your school.

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You're right, it's not just that people opposing it are stupid or brainwashed: Some of them, to your point, are selfish and don't want others to have access to the nice things that they have.

Can you explain why those people DESERVE access to better care? Do they have more complex/rare diseases that require specialized treatment? Are there specialists who only work at that hospital? Those feel like warranted needs. But "I can pay more so I should have better things" is a ruinous worldview that, at its end, is just Might Makes Right.

> Can you explain why those people DESERVE access to better care?

i dont get why ppl responding to me think i do when i already said this

> I am not saying this is right

i am merely saying that the angle i described should be considered because a big portion of population thinks along those lines ( my guess)

> Now the acess to best hosptials is gated by a queue?

I mean, yes? Literally the same principle we all learned in kindergarten for how to make access to something fair. You didn't get to skip the line in lunch because your parents had a better job than someone else either.

right. my point is last line of my comment.

most of the society doesnt operate in the way that you described.

Most of society also doesn't require paying for indirectly via employer subsidy (driving up the cost to people who are between jobs or have money by other means).

If your objection is to a system that operates differently than the rest of society, it's not clear why the hypothetical healthcare system is more of a bugbear than the very real one that doesn't resemble pretty much any other way that things get purchased. I don't really understand how you think spending time arguing against something that has very little chance of happening based on principles that ostensibly conflict with the actual version that genuinely does exist is a sign that people are not being misled by those with incentives to distract them in that way or otherwise are struggling to reason about an issue logically.

i think you are talking over me with some irrelevant nonsense. did you reflect on why you are being downvoted?

From my perspective, what you're saying sounds like nonsense. I'm not sure why you're more concerned with my karma than I am, but since you're curious: no, I did not spend much time thinking about the one singular downvote my comment received. It's pretty common for people to downvote for any number of reasons (downvoting for disagreement in particular is controversial but not against the HN guidelines), so I didn't really read into it at all. Sometimes a comment I make that receives a downvote will end up with upvotes a few days later, and sometimes it won't; sometimes a comment I make that initially receives some upvotes will end up neutral or worse. At the end of the day, I comment because I have something to say, and while others' opinions on that is potentially useful feedback, and a single upvote or downvote is literally the smallest possible signal that can exist about whether what I said has merit.

no idea what you are harping on when i clearly said

> I am not saying this is right

in my original comment.

Sadly, this is a better comparison than you probably intended, because access to school lunch is still not universal in the US.

If a child cannot pay, there are some districts that serve cheaper alternative meals that don't meet the normal lunch standards, some that shame children by giving them hand stamps, and even some that will literally dump their tray in the trash.

Fair enough. I imagine it's probably not hard to guess that I would similarly be in favor of fixing that!

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