- Position‹4 of 4
- There are sinister implications to this failed sale
- Argument1 of 2›
There are worrisome social implications
If a country has exclusive rights to a drug, yet believes healthcare is a privilege, the consequences include the creation of a new 'underclass'. Remember survival of the fittest? Such behaviour champions that idea, but on the basis that 'fit' means rich, and 'weak' means poor.
The argument
Poverty is understood to be a major contributor to ill health as it acts as a barrier to accessing appropriate and effective health services. In other words, the poor cannot afford to purchase items that promote a healthy lifestyle. This reality is only amplified as health care is increasingly considered to be a privilege and drugs subsequently become more exclusive. As a result, only the rich— who can afford such medications— are deemed valuable enough to society to continue their life. Moreover, promoting an exclusive drug could also throw others into poverty. This is due in part to the cost of seeking health care, which can include not only out-of-pocket spending on various forms of care, but can also be manifested through more informal payments like transportation costs. It is here that payments associated with health care services lead to decreased use of health services and catastrophic health expenditures. Additionally, an individual/a family in similar circumstances can expect to experience a considerable loss of income as they either need to cease working or become a caretaker. Therefore expanding the gap between the rich and the poor even further; consequently, the poor will face death at an overwhelming frequency.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Survival of the fittest is not an inherently negative notion. Instead, survival of the fittest motivates others to work harder in life. As President Trump has stated: "You wouldn’t give some bozo with zero experience a management position. Why should health care be any different?” He also said, “Where I come from, you have to prove your worth. You have some guy with no college degree working a minimum wage job; no ambition, no goals, nothing to show for it. Yet for some reason, the current administration believes he — and millions of people like him, should have access to health insurance. It’s outrageous." Why should we let those who contribute nothing benefit from our own hard work? Through a survival of the fittest inspired system, a sorting structure can be implemented. In other words, an individual will experience a wake-up call that will demonstrate their need to work for what they need, while it simultaneously reveals those who truly require help.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The link between poverty and ill health is well established, but the premise generalises from systems in which patients pay at the point of use, whereas most high-income countries fund vaccination publicly and distribute it without charge. The step to who is 'deemed valuable enough to society' also imputes a judgement to an outcome: a pricing structure can be unjust without anyone having decided whose life is worth continuing, and putting it that way makes the claim harder to defend rather than stronger. [Rejecting P2] The catastrophic-expenditure and lost-income mechanisms are real, but they describe the cost of treating illness rather than the effect of an exclusive vaccine, which is the subject at hand. The premise also does not reach its own position: the sinister-implications position concerns what the attempted purchase reveals, whereas these premises describe the general consequences of unequal access — an argument that would apply to any expensive medicine, and would apply equally had no purchase ever been attempted.