Question 1: Is access to healthcare an individual right?
Question 2: If access to healthcare is an individual right, does the government have to must provide a reasonable level of healthcare to its citizens if a citizen can not afford healthcare?
My thought process is as follows:
It is unjust to deny treatment to people if they can't pay.
It is unjust for an absolute necessity like health care to be so expensive that people often make the decision not to seek it because the bills will cause problems for them or those they support.
Thus, healthcare either needs to be cheaper, or people need to have enough money the cost doesn't negatively effect them beyond perhaps the very short term.
Option one requires price control, heavy subsidies, or single-payer - probably a combo of all 3, plus some other stuff I haven't thought of.
Option two requires massive minimum wage increases (probably $20-25/hr at least, if not more, some of the medical costs are ****ing insane), heavy subsidies, or some kind of insane sea change in how companies work so that they provide healthcare to all employees, and that doesn't even cover the unemployed, that means partial single payer as well.
Basically, my conclusion is that's all bandages on something that needs stitches.
My further conclusion is that we must ensure everyone gets healthcare that they need, in a time frame that keeps them healthy and alive, and without putting them so far in debt they have to change their entire life because of it.
ACA didn't do that. Hell, I'm not sure medicare and/or medicaid did that. Something else is required.
I like the idea of a single-payer system, because it potentially means a fix for a multitude of problems.