u/ILikeMeat

I did not.

Thanks, will do

Armor with most abyss slots

I also can't seem to access the comments via Fox's article.

Why?

What?

That was a pun.

Especially bacon.

I agree that insurance companies do things that we don't want or need them to do. This is because we are buying something from them that makes no sense; insurance is for pooling financial risk, not for managing the service we're buying. If it is a commodity, this further supports my point that customers can switch companies if the price they're being charged is too high.

I agree with some of what you're saying (you are right about the insurance industry having too much influence), but I still dispute the idea that there can ever be a free market for health insurance.

*I also find that I can't agree with the idea that we should just pay 60% of all health care costs out of pocket. Your conclusion just doesn't coincide with my experiences. You have an unrealistic view of what primary care costs and you seriously underestimate the number of people who will require assistance to come up with this money (even if it is much less than you think). Neither tax credits or a welfare system is ever going to solve this problem.

It seems clear to me that any insurance plan, which seems to be what you are proposing, absolutely needs to make preventative care cheaper because this is what will ultimately make health care affordable. If you force people to bear the cost of preventative care a large portion of them will forgo health care until such time as they are forced to pay for it by an emergency or escalation of a chronic condition. This is really the system we have in place today. Forcing people to pay for preventative care does not make health care cheaper, it makes it more expensive.

Good bye Mr. Troll, I hope you feel better tomorrow.

But, how would you know?

Thornton Melon

In essence you are saying that if we change my defintion of autonomy, or apply it as I have defined it only in certain circumstances, then it might be ethical to to take rights away from women and give them to the state (for it is the state, and by extension popular opinion, which must inevitably decide who makes decisions for a fetus). Fine, I concede that. However I would add that acknowledgment that choosing to accept a fetus as a person requires a definition of autonomy in which a woman's health is subject to the whims of popular opinion is the central issue in the abortion debate and that most people are either unaware of it or consciously choose not to address it.

Two out of three ain't bad I guess.

No, that is not a justification. At the point where you have decided that a fetus has rights you have effectively removed the rights of the mother. There can be no balance. It is an either or situation. This has nothing to do with morality, it is a conclusion of ethics dictated by patient autonomy.

No, you are incorrect and you are being purposefully misleading. You are saying that because I do not choose to address tangential arguments I have not considered them, furthermore you imply that because I have missed some mysterious subtlety in these arguments that my core argument is flawed. This is disingenuous of you. If you want to address what I've said then go ahead, but please don't say that because I don't talk about issues that aren't relevant to the discussion that I haven't made my point.

No, the issue isn't complex though it can seem complex because of tangential arguments introduced by the pro-life movement. It boils down to this: by granting a fetus autonomy you must remove the autonomy of the woman carrying it and this is not ethically supportable. If you arbitrarily define a fetus as a human being it does not automatically have autonomy because it can not decide for its own welfare. Children, for instance do not have autonomy. In the case of children we restrict the rights of parents to decide for their welfare of their children to decisions which will not produce lasting harm. The difference between a child and a fetus is that at conception a fetus represents an existing risk to the mother until the time it is born. Children too represent a 'threat' to their parents, the difference is that no one is forced to care for a child without choosing to do so. For a fetus to have autonomy must be assigned and because it cannot be verified it is not intrinsic. If we as a society decide to assign autonomy to a fetus we must then remove the rights of a mother to decide what course of action will be taken in dealing with a risk to her person. Because a fetus cannot make decisions for itself and the interests of the mother restrict her from doing so, we must also designate a third party to make these decisions. We are, in effect, saying that decisions about a mother's health should be made by the state. The standards of decision making that society establishes for the third party would have to be defined by popular rule. The philosophical underpinning of placing the will of the state, or a third party, before of the will of an individual is similar to philosophical underpinning of both the penal system and of slavery. This is the crux of the abortion debate.