Free healthcare is unnecessary

The argument

This argument works by analogy with how societies already handle another expensive public good. Education ministries commonly offer scholarships to students who cannot afford to pay university fees themselves. The assistance is deliberately targeted: students who can afford the fees are not entitled to these forms of support, and nobody regards that as an injustice. The principle at work is that public help exists to remove a barrier, and where no barrier exists there is nothing for it to remove. The question put is why healthcare should be treated any differently. If the justification for subsidy is need, then subsidy should follow need in medicine exactly as it does in education. Those who can afford to pay for their own healthcare should be made to do so, because their ability to pay means that the obstacle the subsidy is designed to overcome is simply not present in their case. Making treatment free for them does not secure access they would otherwise lack; it transfers a cost they were capable of bearing onto everyone else. The conclusion is a matter of scope rather than of principle. The argument does not deny that some people genuinely cannot finance their own care, nor that those people should be helped — on the contrary, it insists that free healthcare should be made available to those who really need it and lack the resources to pay. What it denies is that the entitlement should be universal. Free healthcare is unnecessary for the portion of the population that could pay and therefore should pay. Healthcare should accordingly not be free as a general rule, but reserved, like a scholarship, for those whose circumstances actually require it.

Context

The government should not have to pay for services that people can afford to pay for themselves. The government’s publicly funded healthcare system should only be available to those who cannot afford it themselves.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Education is not a necessary precondition for survival. Good health is. The government should provide its citizens with the necessary resources for survival free of charge. They should provide access to clean water and air for free. They should also provide access to healthcare for free. Without our health, we cannot survive.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Governments should provide services that protect our basic right to existence for free.