Should the rich be the only ones allowed vices?

[el_gallo]

It isn't that vices are terrible things that affect much beyond the people who engage in them. It is the fact that people want to be made "whole" after having engaged in the vices and now the cost is borne through increasingly spendy social programs and health care.

If someone wants to smoke that should be their right. However in the past when they died prematurely or couldn't enjoy life in their later years to the degree they might have been able to do so, it was understood as the cost for having undertaken that action.

Now it is deemed there should be no cost. Society should buy him (or her) a new pair of lungs. If someone is obese and has diabetes, they will likely die much earlier. All the life prolonging actions now though are paid for by society.

Then there is the issue of mandated purchasing of certain types of health plans. I hate to break it to you but the people most likely to go without health care were often young adults and the reason they went without it, well because they didn't need it. In almost all cases they were young and healthy.

So in passing health care legislation what they really want isn't wealth redistribution, but health redistribution. They want the young and healthy to be mandated to start buying something they mostly don't need and to take they money that would have paid off a student loan or bought that first house, and instead use it to buy grandpa's and grandma's health care because Medicare is bankrupt and will be even more so when the hippie baby boomers bring their broke, fat and drug/alcohol abused asses into their retirement years.