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Is Emergency Medical Care Immoral?

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Alish

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Yes, it contradicts the Objectivist ethics in every way. Doctors are not slaves. They should not have to treat someone regardless of whether that person can return an equal value or not, either in monetary form or something else. If they choose to, that's fine. But the law shouldn't force hospitals/doctors to do so.

Edited by Mimpy
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Incidentally, I happened to have been reading the Hillarycare law from 1993, and was astounded at the number of occurences of passive voice as opposed to active voice, i.e. rather than "physicians shall provide care to eligible persons" it would say "eligible persons shall be provided care", which says so much about the leftist mindset. Who is to provide the care to the eligible persons? Blank-out. The passive voice, in all its ignorant glory, is on full glowing display in the leading post here: "medical care is provided to anyone" ... were it properly written in an active voice, you would have to include the actor. Try it, and then look at it, and ask whether that could possibly be moral.

Edited by Seeker
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Yes, it contradicts the Objectivist ethics in every way. Doctors are not slaves. They should not have to treat someone regardless of whether that person can return an equal value or not, either in monetary form or something else. If they choose to, that's fine. But the law shouldn't force hospitals/doctors to do so.

You've hit the nail on the head. There is nothing immoral about emergency medical care per se (on the contrary, it is a bona fide medical speciality that meets a definite demand in medicine), but, as in so many other areas in our mixed economy, the immorality lies with government intrusion.

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You've hit the nail on the head. There is nothing immoral about emergency medical care per se (on the contrary, it is a bona fide medical speciality that meets a definite demand in medicine), but, as in so many other areas in our mixed economy, the immorality lies with government intrusion.

Right. It's a bit like asking "Is nutrition immoral?" while referring to a law telling people what to eat.

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  • 1 month later...

Laws existing, that require doctors to provide emergency medical care for "free" hardly affects the doctors in many cases. Doctors get paid by hospitals and it is the hospital as an entity that gets stuck with the bill in most cases and not the individual doctor. Physicians would have gone on strike decades ago, if they as individuals were actually required to perform services and not get paid for the work. They are intelligent people as anyone practicing medicine would most likely be, and they know that the "free" services they are providing will be absorbed by the hospital itself, which ultimately has to charge paying customers more to cover all of the "free" services they provide. I don't think there is a single case in the history of the US medical system where a doctor working for a hospital, had his paycheck reduced to account for the "free" work he performed while at a hospital.

The average person without insurance is usually given a large amount of forms to fill out which are submitted to the state so that if the person can't pay for the services performed and meets certain criteria, then the hospital is reimbursed through tax dollars for the work performed and it is the taxpayers that cover the cost and work for free in order to do so, not the doctor himself. In the case where someone can afford the bill but does not have insurance, then collection procedures that exist within our market are in place so that the hospital can pursue them through the legal system, even allowing for the transfering of the debt to a collection agency if and when needed, and allowing for the hospital to write the debt off and see some portion of the money owed via the loss on paper.

Once again.....a doctor would never be dumb enough to go through all of the related education and time to become a doctor if he knew that as an individual, he would not get paid for certain services performed, they leave that to the hospital, taxpayers of the state they live in, and the financial office that is in charge of securing the payment either from the state or the patient once the services are rendered.

The real problem is not that the average person without insurance cannot afford most emergency medical care, but rather the medical system in the US is shackled by regulation, artificial costs, etc that make the care beyond affordable for most people without insurance. It is the doctors that benefit from the restriction to entry into their field, and the hospitals that work with the main five insurers in the US to make the system that is currently in place so expensive to begin with. Combined with the fact that medical debt is dischargable via a chapter 7 bankruptcy, leaves most creditors that hold medical related bills with little or no recourse when someone decides they are unable or unwilling to pay a large debt incurred from medical care.

jws

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