Beyond Health Care

This chapter argues that this book’s examination of the American health care debate has revealed larger lessons. Latent in our discussion is a whole new approach to debates about the social minimum—one that can prove useful during inquiries into any part of the social safety net, not just health care, and that can be applied to debates in any country, not just the U.S. Specifically, the discussion in the previous chapters has hinted at a way of understanding a conservative point of view about distributive justice, one that is usually overlooked. This chapter describes it more thoroughly and explains why it is philosophically significant. The chapter then identifies the parts of the conservative view that progressives might challenge, thereby building up a picture of the progressive view itself. The chapter closes by explaining why it is valuable to frame debates over the social safety net in this new way.