On Healthcare and Modern Medicine

I think I've had a fever for five or six days now, but it's finally broken and I notice a minor improvement in how I feel. Nevertheless, I'm not up for conceptualizing, planning and writing a forceful, detailed commentary on modern medicine and health care. But I do want to say how amazing I think modern medicine is, and how lucky I feel to live in an age where even something like antibiotics are now taken for granted. Beats the heck out of dying from infection.

I do, however, wish that this country (USA) had a more humane and less barbaric approach to the needs of its citizens though, with respect to health care. I definitely believe we're individually responsible to maintain to the best of our abilities our bodies - so people who drink and smoke and eat to excess and abuse their organism and then expect the state to fix them up at its expense are assholes. But there should be some universal access to both preventative medicine and acute care. That seems to me like a fundamental human right. I'm not talking about the right to have massively-expensive end-of-life surgeries that prolong one's bed-ridden existence by three months at the cost of three-hundred-thousand dollars. Rather, I'm talking about being able to go to the doctor when you have a sore throat and you need antibiotics because you have an infection.

The fact that we have so many millions of Americans who are hard-working and yet uninsured is profoundly disturbing. What incentive, especially in a stagnant, depressed, or contracting economy, does business/capital have to offer health care benefits as an incentive to labor when there's a surplus of workers throttling each other to secure a position? None, of course. And should it even be the business of business to insure the health of its workers? I don't think so. Whatever the best way forward is, it's not what we have right now.