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Modern America 's Role During Life Saving Medical Care

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Modern America’s Role in Life-Saving Medical Care Few debates are more intractable than the one around the issue of the government providing free health care for those incapable of paying for the care themselves. It’s a fight between the capitalist impulse that all people are – ultimately – responsible for taking care of themselves, and the liberal-democratic idea that providing health care for those too destitute to afford ir is one of the issues governments are designed to handle. To let the most unfortunate peoples of a society die due to lack of health care is not something a modern government can allow without serious damage to its credibility and moral compass; for those reasons the United States should provide free health care for those people incapable of paying for life saving medical procedures. Modern democracies are based on a simple trade-off. Citizens agree to abide by rules and taxes, in exchange for the government providing essential services to the people. I can imagine no person would classify life-saving medical care as “unessential”, particularly when it’s someone they know. It becomes easy to display a lack of empathy when someone you don’t know or care about is dying because they can’t pay, but this is the wrong moral stance to take. Making moral decisions in a democracy is as much about the society around a person as it is about the individual decision-maker’s life. Citizens make moral decisions, because they wish to live in a moral society.

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