So, this weekend, I hung out with a friend who brought up being for universal health-care at least for children. At the time, I shrugged and thought "Yeah, that's cool". Then I thought about it the next day and something occurred to me. Why are children more valuable than adults?
A child is primarily valuable to family. They are only POTENTIALLY valuable to society. Where as an adult is a known quantity. We know, on a very basic level, how much they contribute to society. So why do we always think of children first? If you have a family that has no health care and the child gets sick or the main provider (mom/dad) gets sick, which will really be worse? Will a healthy child whose Mom/Dad dies and now they have no money be better off?
My first thought is simple biology. We are wired to protect children. In olden times, kids had a much lower survival rate, so it was best for the species longevity to keep those suckers alive and well. But that 'need' doesn't exist to near that degree anymore. Our species is nowhere NEAR the possibility of extinction. But that doesn't stop our biology from placing them on a pedestal.
Second is the 'Children can't control the situations in the world they were born into'. Pretty true. But neither did adults. See, adults were once children. And current adults in America did not come from a time when there WAS some kind of universal child health-care. Yet somehow we managed to avoid some kind of baby holocaust.
Third I guess could be the impact a child that dies due to no health-care has on his family. But again, the reverse could be just as bad.
Our society has become so kid-centric that evoking them has such an immediate response that makes people follow along. It's how we are built. Even I did so until I thought more about it.
Personally, I think we need to focus on educating people to not get into responsibilities they can't afford. Our society loves to focus on symptoms and not causes. Prisons don't fix problems, because we aren't spending money to PREVENT people from feeling the need/desire to become a criminal. Universal health-care is similar. You aren't dealing with the cause of all these uninsured people, or all the children born into bad situation. You are in fact prolonging it. By taking away negative repercussions for being in bad straits, you take a percentage of people and allow them to feel safe and just continue down that path.
I have known people who gain great drive to do better and to budget well in order to provide for their kids. I really don't like the idea of bowing down to the lazy people and perpetuating it. Kids or not.
To bring it back around, I think our culture puts WAY too much weight on the value of a child.
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6 comments:
I am totally with you on this. Some people think it is selfish to NOT have children; I think it is selfish TO have them, especially if you cannot afford them. My stepmother would hve loved to have more kids, but knew she couldn't afford them, and so got fixed. It's as simple as that. It's much cheaper to get fixed than to have and raise a kid--or at least it would be, if you didn't get $ from the govt for having them.
Holly
I think some of it comes from a concept I'll refer to as "potential of usefulness". As you mentioned, adults are a known quantity. And quite frankly, a huge percentage of adults suck. Therefore, a large number of already adults are worthless to society.
Whereas every single child has the potential to be very useful to society. So if you watch over the children and encourage the right traits, hopefully a larger percentage of adults in the future will be useful.
Now that's just some of it. Obviously the biggest piece is the way people are mentally wired. When you have children, some serious mental re-wiring happens (whether you want it or not).
Just my thoughts.
The Irredeemable Shag
http://onceuponageek.com
The problem with the 'child potential' is that society and the government don't raise kids. Parents do. And as you say, a huge percent of adults suck...adults that used to be kids I might add...would it not make sense that said sucky adults will raise sucky kids? Giving kids free health care won't erase bad genes or parenting.
No, but raising more children will ensure that we have more workers (even if they're minimum wage workers) to pay for your social security benefits when you're retired. The system perpetuates itself. We give free handouts, we need more workers, so we can make money and tax them so we can fund our pseudo-socialistic form of government.
Either way you look at it, it's a viscious cycle.
But not having uni-health care for kids doesn't mean they will suddenly all drop dead. We haven't had it up till now, and there are MILLIONS of us.
it's just the slippery slope our government is headed toward. We're becoming more socialist all the time. Universal healthcare is just another step in that direction. They'll start with the children because as you said, it's the emotional reaction we have: 'of course we need to take care of our children'. It's even Biblical... (1Tim 5:8). Heck, at the rate the government is bailing out the financial markets, they're going to own our banking system entirely before it's all said and done. Helloooooo socialism.
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