Uglysasquatch wrote:
gbaji wrote:
rdmcandie wrote:
No you are just an idiot. Do you know who Universal Health Care covers? Yep that is right everybody. If everybody is covered how can anyone be discriminated against under it.
You honestly don't know the answer to that? I'm not sure I can help you, but since my point has nothing to do with health care, I'll leave it to another day.
The problem gbaji, is you said
universal healthcare, and as stated earlier, you always use the words you meant to use and in their clearest definition. That being said, universal healthcare covers all equally as well.
Yes. I meant "universal health care". Didn't mean to confuse anyone by abridging it later. I included it in a list of things which represent government discrimination, so it's kinda amusing that several people got their hackles up over just this one. Why not talk about affirmative action, or income assistance, or any of the other things on the list?
But since you asked. The fact that universal health care "covers" everyone does not mean that everyone gets the same thing. In fact, let me take a moment to topically compare another issue which was raised to illustrate how inconsistently we apply this so called principle of non-discrimination:
Title IX requires that funds be allocated equally for sports programs between men and women. It does so regardless of actual demand, based on the assumption that if you fund womens rugby, women will sign up to play rugby. In theory, it's not a terrible idea. But in practice it has some problems. I'm not going to talk about those in detail though, since I don't want to distract from the point.
Examine a school which has a mens rugby team. In order for them to keep that team, the school must fund a womans rubgy team with the same amount of money. What this means is that if men get a rugby team, so do women. If men get a soccer team, so do women. If men get a fencing team, so do women. And so on. The principle at work is that in order to not discriminate against a group on the basis of sex, you *must* provide anything given to one to the other as well, even if it's not wanted. Doing otherwise is considered discriminatory since you are treating women and men differently.
With me so far?
Let's apply this to universal medical care. So if patient X needs a heart bypass, can we not provide it to him unless all other patients
also receive a heart bypass? Clearly not. We only grant any specific procedure to those who need it. It would be silly to do otherwise, right? But wait! By the definition we're using under title IX, this is discrimination. Anything provided to one group must be provided to the other. No exceptions.
The point is that the principle of non-discrimination by government is best illustrated by something like title IX, and this is *not* how most government programs work. In fact, most of them are very very discriminatory. I suspect that the problem most of you have is that you equate discrimination with something being unfair to a minority group. But that's not what it means. It means any time you provide something different to two different people based on any difference between them. Period. So if I need a heart bypass, and you need a liver transplant, the government is discriminating with how it provides the service if it gives me the bypass and you the transplant.
It would be absurd for it *not* to discriminate, as I think we can all agree. That's what Scalia was talking about. Government must discriminate to function. The courts job is to ensure that it does not discriminate in ways that single out for harm one group or another. But as he said, it does not "prohibit discrimination". It can't.
I just think most of you are reading into his words based on a flawed assumption about what he meant when he spoke about discrimination. He's using the actual literal meaning (as am I). And when you apply that meaning into place, it makes perfect sense.