Which is more fair? (1) for the government to pay for everyone’s healthcare, or (2) for each individual to pay for his or her own healthcare? Granted some illnesses are self-inflicted, like lung cancer from smoking, still the vast majority of sickness is haphazard chance. If we want to remove bad luck in order to allow those worthy of success to succeed, then we should pay all their medical bills, provided they were not incurred by self-infliction.
It is noteworthy that the weakest argument for capitalism was made by the surgeon, Dr. Hendricks. He wrote:
Of course this is a caricature based on Rand's own fictional universe. Normally people do take into account the desires of the doctors, if they want to have good doctors! But this whole argument is a bit silly really. Choice of patients? If someone is dying of a heart attack, and you are a heart surgeon, you don't choose to give heart surgery to someone else who isn't dying of a heart attack. You don't choose your patients because you don't choose who needs your help. This question can be settled quite apart from the question of who pays for it."I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago. Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything—except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the 'welfare' of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only 'to serve.' That a man who's willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards—never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind—yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn't." (p. 683)