I suppose there are freepers who would say that if your kid gets lost in the woods, you should hire a private company to find them, not call on the police and expect volunteers to come out and help find them.
This is the same thing. We expect people to not get lost in the woods, or to have health insurance or pay for health care.
But when they don’t, and they GET lost, or they have a treatable illness, we, even freepers, tend to want to solve the problem, not let the kid die in the woods, or the patient die in their bed, when we CAN do something about it.
If there was such a thing as “rescue insurance”, the only way to get people to buy it would be to force them to, since at this point rescue is a free service donated by government and private citizens. We essentially have universal rescue insurance, paid for by our tax dollars.
If “rescue” is too much of a unique thing for you, just substitute the fire department. We don’t have private companies that will come put your fire out, we pay taxes (required insurance premiums) to get public fire departments (mandatory insurance) since when our house in on fire, nobody is going to let it just burn down (let the treatable patient die) when we can stop it. And that’s even though most people HAVE fire insurance that will pay to rebuild whatever is lost.
The constitution doesn’t specifically say government is here to put out fires, or to help find lost children, or to provide health care. But the first two seem to be acceptable to even the most stringent of conservatives (maybe EV will express his principled opposition to this, I’ve always admired his consistancy).
We all scream about SCHIP, but I haven’t seen anybody here say the wilkerson baby should have been left to die because her family didn’t pay for health insurance, or that the Frost kids should have been left to rot away untreated.
If we aren’t willing to let people suffer the consequences of their inaction, we have already compromised. To then castigate conservatives who are trying to DEAL with that compromise is unproductive.
There's that key word again . . . volunteer.
One problem with your post here is that your making a comparison between events/circumstances that do not necessarily correlate well. A "house fire" and a "lost child in the woods" are two events that occur extremely infrequently and therefore don't require an enormous commitment of resources on an ongoing basis. This is why, for example, such rescue missions are staffed predominantly by volunteers -- and why most municipalities in the U.S. have volunteer fire departments. Basic medical care, on the other hand, is rendered with such boring regularity that it doesn't even make sense to call a medical insurance policy "insurance" at all.
If there was such a thing as “rescue insurance”, the only way to get people to buy it would be to force them to, since at this point rescue is a free service donated by government and private citizens. We essentially have universal rescue insurance, paid for by our tax dollars.
Not always. In Alaska, for example, there has been a strong push (and this may have even been implemented) to require some form of "rescue insurance" for anyone who tries to climb Mount McKinley. Basically, hikers would have to post a $50,000 bond to cover the cost of a potential rescue -- or they wouldn't be permitted to climb the mountain. This is exactly what happens when the dire event/circumstance in question happens with enough frequency that it becomes a pain in the @ss for the government to adress the problem free of charge.
If “rescue” is too much of a unique thing for you, just substitute the fire department. We don’t have private companies that will come put your fire out, we pay taxes (required insurance premiums) to get public fire departments (mandatory insurance) since when our house in on fire, nobody is going to let it just burn down (let the treatable patient die) when we can stop it. And that’s even though most people HAVE fire insurance that will pay to rebuild whatever is lost.
The original purpose of a fire department was not to keep your house from burning down . . . it was to keep everyone else's house from burning down, too. That's why paid, fully-staffed fire departments are almost always found in urban areas or places with a lot of industrial land uses where fires can be devastating to the public at large and not just the owner/occupant of the property where the fire originates.