"This group of people from Maryland stood firm, and thus protected opportunities for the American experience with freedom to actually occur," Mr. Madaleno said, recalling Mr. O'Malley's remarks.
In his new book, Dream Hoarders: How the American Middle Class is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What to Do About It, Richard Reeves argues that we can do much more to protect opportunity for all and prevent the United States from becoming the very class-based society that early Americans rebelled against.
Accordingly, protecting health protects opportunity, even if it is not the only thing that does so.
We lack prior agreement on more fine-grained principles that tell us how best to protect opportunity in this context.
Various recent theories of justice, despite their differences, affirm that we have such social obligations to protect opportunity, and so they converge on the importance of protecting health.
Specifically, since meeting health needs protects the range of opportunities people can exercise, then any social obligations we have to protect opportunity imply obligations to protect and promote health (normal functioning) for all people.
The point is that institutions, including health care institutions, capable of protecting opportunity can be maintained only in societies whose productive capacities they do not undermine.
To say that these services have "high opportunity costs" means that providing them consumes resources that would produce greater health benefits and protect opportunity more if used in other ways.
The supplementary tier might undermine political support for the basic tier, for example, by undercutting the social solidarity needed if people are to remain committed to protecting opportunity for all.
Although a moral right to health is grounded in the general idea that we have obligations to protect opportunity by promoting normal functioning, its specific content is in this fundamental way system-relative.
Similarly, just what kinds of "tiering" or inequalities in services above the basic tier are compatible with protecting opportunity for all may not get specific answers from the general theory, though it will clearly supply constraints.
