Question

The Affordable Care Act requires that all Americans have health insurance by March of 2014. Utilize your recently acquired knowledge of this new health care policy to answer the questions.

For this assignment (on a separate document), you will do the following:

1. Discuss how individualism applies to being socially responsible.

This 2 page paper must reflect your opinion and your thoughts. However, if you make an argument to a specific position, you will need to reference a credible professional source.

Answer 1

The world may be in trouble. On many fronts – from climate change to resource depletion, from banking crises to sovereign debt crises, from deficient education to poverty in the midst of plenty, from energy security to food security, from fragile states to weapons proliferation, and more – we are not successfully engaging with the challenges of the 21st century. Our economies are not overcoming the scourge of poverty, the inadequate provision of collective goods (such as public education, environmental services, fish stocks and rain forests), our societies are increasingly fragmented, and our governance structures are inadequate to the problems we face. We have probably gone this far as we can in creating win-win situations among self-centred, materialistic, rational, individualistic agents. The resulting cooperation is insufficient to overcome the growing problems we face economically, environmentally, socially and politically. The time has come to gain a profounder understanding of human potential for care and to explore the resulting opportunities for human cooperation. Through a better insight into whom we are we may attain more understanding of who we could become. On this basis, policymakers may need to redefine their objectives and instruments.

• There are more to economic policy than providing public goods, regulating common property resources, redistributing income, and stabilizing the macro-economy?
• How can policymakers promote the drive to cooperate by encouraging a spirit of care?
• Do market systems over-stimulate our competitive and acquisitive motivations?
• What social context can be created to bring these motivations into a more healthy balance with our caring and altruistic motivations?
• What are the implications for education, occupational training and business practice?
• What policies and institutions help widen our circles of moral responsibility?
• How can we build economies that promote people’s capacities to thrive, through close and satisfying personal relationships, opportunities for personal growth, and opportunities to put their distinctive abilities in the service of something larger than they are?

Factor analysis of 18 stratification belief items from the 1984 General Social Survey results in two dimensions—one involving social responsibility and the other economic individualism. Social responsibility is the more powerful predictor of redistributive policy attitudes. Individuals who place a higher priority on social responsibility than on individualism are more likely than those with the opposite priorities to support redistributive policies, but are also disproportionately low income, black, and less politically active. These results suggest that economic individualism appears a hegemonic value partly because of the lack of political influence and low socioeconomic status of those most committed to social responsibility beliefs.