Reference no: EM134008360

Assignment:

In debates about health coverage, some have argued that we should distinguish between healthy people who have lived their lives the "right way" and unhealthy people who have not taken proper care of themselves. People in the latter group are the "undeserving sick," and they don't deserve health care. For example:

In a CNN interview, Representative Mo Brooks makes the case in much starker terms: It will free healthy people from having to pay the cost of the sick. "It will allow insurance companies to require people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool that helps offset all these costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, they're healthy, they've done the things to keep their bodies healthy," explained Brooks. "And right now, those are the people who have done things the right way that are seeing their costs skyrocketing."

Is there a morally relevant difference between deserving and underserving sick people? Is it reasonable to blame people for getting cancer, asthma, heart disease, diabetes, and Parkinson's disease? Many diseases arise because of bad genes-should people be blamed for their genetic deficiencies? Should a smoker who gets cancer be considered undeserving of affordable health care? Is a policy of denying health coverage to people because they have not led the right kind of life morally defensible? If so, how?