Reply to Let Lower Income "Pay Their Fair Share"!

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have to defend OP on the small co-pay on medical care for the poor.  The point is not that the poor get ground down in many other ways by poor housing, substandard food, etc, or that they pay a bunch of local taxes like sales tax.  Rather, it is an incentive question.

Those of us who pay for medical care make choices every time about whether something is worth going to the doctor or not.  If medical care were free, we'd just go without evaluating the necessity.  So you'd end up with a lot of unnecessary doctor's visits.

I was very familiar with a mother and child health clinic some nuns ran in a very poor area of an emerging market country.  At first they offered free services.  But the patients didn't self-regulate visits at all and they also became nastily demanding.  In other words they felt entitled to get whatever care they wanted for free and were put out when the nuns didn't oblige.

The nuns then changed their policy to charge a small amount for each visit--mind you this was largely for pregnant women living in far more wretched conditions than 99% of our poor people. The bad attitudes among their patients vanished.  They appreciated that for their financial sacrifice they could get dedicated and high quality care instead of abysmal care in a dirty government clinic.  The lesson the head nun told me was that: "People don't value what they get for free."[/quote]

All of this. You've gotta have some skin in the game.[/quote]

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