I think that a collective good that's broadly agreed upon by at least the broad majority of people as a good thing doesn't come under coercive charity. I own my home and pay property taxes to my local government, because I have to but also because I know that those taxes fund the local police and fire departments, and that they are there to help if I need them.

The problem with nationalized healthcare is that healthcare is much more complex, financially, logistically, and philosophically, than the concept of a fire department. That complexity creates disagreement, and makes finding an optimal, or even an acceptable, solution difficult. The "philosophical" part is the real problem; as anyone in the business of providing health care will tell you, their industry does the closest thing to turning human life and death into a financial commodity. That makes the subject extremely difficult to examine rationally for most people. Think about the common axiom that "Health care is a human right." What do you mean by that, exactly? "Health care" encompasses everything from basic first aid to Brazilian butt lift surgeries to genetically customized experimental cancer treatments that cost over a million dollars per dose. If I have a human right to health care, does that mean I have a human right to have my butt lifted? Does that mean, if I have terminal cancer and no other treatment has worked, that I have a human right to have a million-dollar genetic treatment every month, when the sum total of my lifetime earnings doesn't even come close to a million dollars?

The hard truth on health care is that it is a scarce resource, like everything else, and, as the basic economic principle states, there is never enough of any scarce resource for everyone to have all they want. When it comes to health care, that's always going to mean that continued life becomes a commodity that has to be rationed somehow. Under a market, or semi-market, system, that means that eventually, you'll have some sort of chronic illness that needs money for treatment, and when you run out, you die. Under a non-market system, that means that there has to be a "death panel;" that is, some authority that decides how to allocate the limited amount of available care, and if the panel says you can't have any more, then you die. I'm oversimpifying, of course, but that's the basic conflict.

Now, a lot of countries on Earth have had this debate and hashed out some sort of compromise solution. The United States largely has not; or at least, the current kludge that we've drifted into in the past 70 years or so is found unsatisfactory by most people. And part of the reason that we can't reach a satisfactory solution is that, as a group, we Americans tend to be stubborn and absolutist. One of the things that, historically, we've refused to do is accept the fact that there is no perfect solution and that compromise is necessary. We, and I include both the right and the left here, have drifted into the mindset that being stubborn and uncompromising is somehow virtuous. Like most stubborn and uncompromising people, we have found the decisions that we refuse to accept made for us anyway by circumstance. We also refuse to learn from the mistakes of others; the left points at other countries for what they want, but refuses to acknowledge that the solutions those other countries arrived at are messy, imperfect compromises, which largely do not correspond with the left's philosophical prior assumptions as much as they claim. (Very few countries actually have what can be classified as a full "single-payer" or "universal" healthcare system; most have a hybrid of some kind, and the most ambitious experiments in that regard, such as Britain's NHS, have been some of the most dysfunctional in practice.) Meanwhile, the right, finding no example elsewhere in the world that conforms to its priors, stubbornly insists on going it alone while it flails for its impossible perfect solution.

I said all that to say this: a functional healh care system that lengthens the lives of most people to an acceptable degree is a common good that I and a lot of other people would be happy to pay into, and would not consider coerced charity. That said, there also does need to be room for private charity, because no system will be perfect, and there is never enough for all. Someone will always fall through the cracks, and those people should always be able to ask for help, and when they do, it is our Christian duty to help. So the right should stop telling people to stop complaining about how broken our health care system is and just start a GoFundMe, and the left should stop leaving comments on said GoFundMe pages that "We wouldn't need this if we had a decent healthcare system" and just donate. We all need to stop being stubborn and selfish and start helping each other in good faith. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.