I republished an article today on Huffington Post originally published on Medium titled "Love, Loss, and a Greater Society".
Excerpt:
It is for all of the above that I assert a demand for both universal basic income and universal healthcare as the two primary pillars of a Greater Society. We all need, without any conditions, sufficient income to meet our most basic needs. No one should have to choose between food and rent. No one should ever have to look back after the death of a loved one, and wonder how much a lack of insufficient money to cover basic needs played a role throughout their lives. The basics should be covered for everyone as a bare minimum, with everything we earn from employment being additional income to cover everything else we may want instead of need.
Furthermore, when it comes to meeting basic needs, simple cash can never function to achieve universal healthcare because free market private insurance within an unregulated healthcare market isn’t healthcare. It’s a license to take advantage of our inability to say no to any expense to save those we love most.
It makes no real sense to only have one or the other. If we only have universal healthcare, then we will spend more on that than we otherwise would on a population of healthier people with basic incomes. If we only have universal basic income, then the costs of healthcare will continue to rise (albeit more slowly), and people will continue needlessly suffering with a lack of fully universal coverage, or even no coverage at all. Together however, a basic income will create a healthier population, and universal healthcare will protect that population in ways money can’t.
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