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Week 8: Should Health Care Be A Right Or A Choice?

Whether you like it or not, the Affordable Care Act seems to have changed what a lot of people expect to get from their health care plan: insurance companies should not be allowed to deny buyers based on pre-existing conditions, impose lifetime caps on benefits for expensive illnesses, or kick young adults off their parents’ plans until age 26.

President Trump’s new healthcare plan reflects an alternate vision of how the American health care system should work. On this episode of Indivisible, Brian Lehrer is joined by Michael F. Cannon, director of health policy at the Cato Institute, and Sarah Kliff, senior editor of Vox.com, for a debate on what basic care should look like in this country.

Should health insurance in America be considered a right? Should it also be considered a responsibility, like car insurance, to help keep rates down for the sick and the old? Or is the right not to have insurance a more fundamental expression of the American norm of freedom? Beyond that, how much should taxpayers subsidize insurance for their neighbors based on income? And what standards of coverage, if any, should all insurance policies be required to meet? 

Here are some tweets from this episode: