U.S. is not a business, strictly speaking

There’s an interesting and humorous conversation involving the affect of the elderly on the U.S. economy. More specifically, it is trying to hit on the fact that opponents of healthcare reform can't look at U.S. policy strictly as a business because it isn’t one. If we were purely a business we would "euthanize 70 year-olds and harvest their organs for auction." Matt Yglesias shows from this exaggeration that "the problem with this isn’t that it wouldn’t work, it’s that it would be wrong, morally speaking."

If that's the case, we should all be thinking about a way to fund these healthcare reforms instead of trying to not pass them at all.

Austin Frakt points out that government intervention in supporting the retired is inevitable because no one has the incentive to do so themselves. Referring to Yglesias, he agrees that ethics to indeed hinder U.S. policy. Hence the redistribution of wealth falls on the government for healthcare through taxes. In a real business there wouldn’t be a redistribution of wealth to those that don’t pull their weight.

Rather than increased taxes, Ezra Klein offers the alternative of increasing the labor supply by increasing immigration. With more workers paying social security we could offset the "costs" from the elderly.

I completely agree. There seems to be a large amount of illegal immigrants already working in our country, why not make them pay taxes and become part of the system officially.

I thought that this was a unique way of thinking about our economic problems. Maybe those opposed to healthcare reform should think more ethically in light of this and start searching for ways to fund it rather than not pass it.