...snip...
Correct. The market has its uses. The care for the sick, drunk and injured is not one of them.
Why? And how far do you wish to take it? If gov has to take care of the sick, drunk, and injured why not outlaw alcohol? Wait better outlaw walking in tall shoes since you might fall even if you aren't drunk? Or for that matter why let people walk outside at all. Stay home so you are 100% safe and a government delivery truck will drop off food for you. You can't be a little bit pregnant and you can't be a little bit unfree. It's one thing to say I don't wish to fight this gov bs because it's not worth it and another thing to say oh this stealing and abuse is for my and others benefit.
I don't know what you are advocating here. Some women get drunk. Some women wear high heels. Every Saturday night, the 2 groups overlap and there are broken ankles.
Either you have a concept of a market that works for drunk injured folk or you need a non-market solution.
I'm advocating the reality that everything in the end is a market choice. The market isn't an artificial creation it's simply an ecosphere by which labor gets exchanged for resources and vice versa. The more you mess with it by creating rules that benefit one group over the other the more distorted and dysfunctional it becomes. You propose to create rules that benefit the getting drunk without a care in the world group to the detriment of the others a group that doesn't do so by making them pay for it. The farther along it goes the more people from one group migrate to the other until the paying group no longer has the resources to pay for the non paying group. That is the current modern healthcare problem. Instead of possibly saying that as a society we will just treat the very serious life threatening issues we are discussing broken ankles. Clearly a non life threatening issue which should be delt with in the harshest of terms. Either pay for med care or here is a stick with some bandages for you to wrap it up and hope for the best. The group of why should I bother setting aside resources to cover life's emergencies when I can simply have society cover it has gotten so huge precisely because people keep saying oh we need to take care of them. And the "we" is usually "not me" but lets tax others. When was the last time YOU donated to a hospital since YOU feel these ankle breakers need help?