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...couple of key words change everything. Google the phrase “universal health care,” and you get over 30 million results. Google “sacrifice for universal health care,” and you’ll get under 200,000. We are ignoring the “universal” part of universal health care. While emphasizing that reforms would cover everyone, we’re at the same time forgetting that this goal requires similarly extensive sacrifice; as a result, our nation’s health-care debate ignores the central issue frustrating...
...long as the prevailing moral discourse in America maintains its current notions, reforming our system of medical care is impossible...
More specifically, health-care advocates need to abandon ethics that prioritize the self over the common good in order for their efforts to bear fruit. Such privileging of autonomy extends from a series of judgments latent in contemporary common wisdom about morality—first, that each person should be free to pursue his desires so long as he does not harm anyone else; second, that such desires cannot be judged inferior to those of someone else. Taken together, these two judgments mean that health-care reform is incompatible with our national moral ethos. Public option or not, finding some...
Americans seem willing to make this sacrifice, but just barely. About one half of Americans support health-care reform, even though only roughly one fifth of Americans predict a material gain from such support of a national system. According to a recent CBS poll, only 22 percent of Americans “said the reforms now being considered would help them personally,” while 30 percent even believed that “reforms would hurt them personally.” In the same poll, 53 percent favored “the government offering everyone a government administered health...
...Because society’s moral axioms enervate attempts to convince the public to join this slim majority. Since Americans now shy away from a hierarchy of moral preferences, even those who would maintain their current care based on selfishness cannot be condemned. If forsaking current comforts for others would not be obligatory under our contemporary moral decorum, appeals for medical reform would then lose nearly all their persuasive force. While objectors rightly note that inaction hurts the uninsured, precisely because the currently comfortable might intend no harm, this complaint proves relevant but non-essential. In our modern mindset, sacrifice...