My daughter works in the ER. This is where the poor, the uninsured, the mentally ill, etc go for all of their health care. They are not turned away, they may have to wait a very long time for their non-emergency, but they are seen and treated. Who pays for this? We do. Not via taxes, but higher hospital bills that our insurance pays for by increasing our rates. The ACA is not perfect, but it is one tiny step in the right direction.
You can't compare healthcare to car insurance. I am OK with the fact that I have a car and others do not. I am not OK with me having access to healthcare and others don't. In a moral society, you need a safety net.
Maybe your daughter's ER will treat non-emergency situations of uninsured people, but most won't.
And, yeah I guess hospital prices are probably dictated in part by the amount of written off debt from uninsured patients. However the prices are dictated much MORE so by negotiations with insurance companies, etc. Hospitals, and businesses in general, charge what the market will bear. In a situation where the uninsured are quotes prices TEN TIMES HIGHER or more than what insurance companies pay, I have little sympathy if the hospitals are then unable to collect on those vastly inflated prices.
And I don't think anyone has a "right to healthcare". Healthcare is a nebulous concept anyway. It means anything from "trim this hangnail of mine" to "perform experimental surgery to try and save me from this cancer".
You say, "in a moral society, you need a safety net." Well where does it stop? You can spend millions of dollars trying to treat diseases or conditions that, 50 years ago, you simply would have died from. You can BANKRUPT YOUR ENTIRE COUNTRY paying for ridiculously expensive experimental procedures that have 0.000000001% chance of success. You have to draw the line somewhere.
I draw the line at "stabilizing patients in the emergency room". I think society should absolutely pay for that, insurance or no insurance. I guess you draw the line somewhat higher than I do. /shrug
It's a tradeoff, certainly not a "right" and not a question of "morality". There is no such thing as a free lunch. Somebody pays. I thought it was the hospitals and/or collection agencies that ultimately write off the debt that pay. If it translates into higher prices, then I guess indirectly we all pay (though I find this proposition dubious, I think uncollectible debt plays has only a peripheral influence on medical prices, as compared to say, insurance company negotiations). Either way, somebody has to pay the cost, and whatever the cost, that money/wealth/value is NOT being spent elsewhere. So yeah, you can spend your entire nation's budget on "free healthcare" for your citizens if you want, but that means you won't be spending it on education, infrastructure, etc etc.
HOWEVER (and this is a big however), even though I don't think healthcare is a right, I do accept the fact that, even without universal coverage, the US spends far more in healthcare for less effectiveness than many other countries. That is certainly sad. But the solution is NOT to sweep the cost under the rug as some sort of morality guilt trip on the rest of us. Throughout hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, we have mostly died in our 30s or younger due to largely preventable things like poor dental health and infant mortality. It is only in the last 50 years that our civilization has been productive, profitable, and prodigious enough to allow for all the things we take for granted.
