You cannot maintain a culture of freedom when corporations have ‘rights’ to anything.
You cannot maintain a culture of freedom when you make exceptions to the very foundation of freedom, that YOU own your body, not your government, not your hospital, not any corporation, nor any socialist ‘do gooders’. There is no moral, monetary, or ethical justification to claim that any of these entities own your body and not you.
When you break apart the most fundamental requirement for freedom, into, ‘well in this case the hospital can own your body’ you are destroying freedom. It cannot be preserved when people are willing to ‘compromise’ it.
OK, I agree with everything you wrote. I just think you are not applying it to my points.
If you let your kids drive the new car, you tell them your conditions and rules and expectations. You can do this because you own the car, you are paying for it, your pay the insurance, AND you are the parent. YOU may decide to put a GPS tracking deice in the car or the kids’ phones or you may not. But you have the right to do that, morally and ethically.
IF, on the other hand your child bought their own car, pays their own insurance, passed their 18th birthday, has their own apartment (you get the idea) they CAN do and go where they want to in that car, even if it is against your wishes and guidance.
Now, shifting that to healthcare ...
You can make your kids take their meds. You can make them eat well. You can chase them off the X-box and push out the back door to play. Once they are adults they ARE at liberty to do what they please.
But are they at liberty to do what they please in ways that adds cost to YOUR LIFE, and the lives of your neighbors?
by way of analogy, explore the ethics here for a moment.
A child is diagnosed with leukemia. The parents are christian scientists or animists or whatever and refuse treatment. Is it right or wrong for the ‘state’ to enforce chemotherapy? Similarly, a child has appendicitis. Untreated that child will likely die. Again, is it right to REQUIRE that child to be treated, even if it is against the will of the child or the child’s parents?
So, if we have people (of majority age now) how injure themselves and add a burden to society by not taking care of themselves and ending up critically ill, perhaps repeatedly, ... and adding REAL COST to others’ lives by driving up the costs of healthcare overall ... are they at liberty to do that? If you have a fat lazy slob next door who has a ‘free’ scooter for trips to WalMart, drinks too much and smokes, eats junk, has an oxygen tank and a one pint bag of prescription pills provided ‘free,’ and gets picked up once a month by the ‘free’ medical transportation service scam ... wouldn’t it be nice if they truly shared in the responsibility for their health AND complied with their course of care? IF they can get all this for ‘free’ don’t you wish there were some strings of responsibility and compliance attached?
Part of me says HELL YEAH! But the libertarian in me says NOW WAY.
I DO NOT want the gummint to be an insurer. I do not want the gummint to act as my health care provider. But part of me sees a value in getting high risk people to do a better job of complying, even if they don’t want to.