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Can Technology Fix the Health Care System?
I was surfing through my usual tech sites for the latest news when I came across an article on Wired News. It turns out Steve Case is not alone in the quest to fix the health care system. I guess I don't get what the big attraction for these guys are.... I know the US's health care system is messed up, but I'm not sure technology can fix all of the aches, pains and dysfunction in our current system. I don't get why they don't just join a major company's board or start a hip/trendy start-up....
Those who care only for themselves, and have no consideration for the world around them, depress me.
Sometimes we pay to help those who need it. That's the way a community functions. As a Canadian, while I maybe don't have the health care that I need the instant I need it, it's still pretty damn good -- especially when there's an emergency. I pay for it, but I also live in a healthier society as a whole. Perhaps if you had better national helath care, you'd have fewer working poor, who can't afford health care, but make too much for subsidy, and get caught in the nightmare treadmill of constant debt because of a trip to the hospital.
Libertarians make me sad.
What does it mean to wake out of a dream
and be wearing someone else's shorts?
BNL, Born on a Pirate Ship (1998)
> Libertarians make me sad.
As a libertarian, I must say that as long as your hand is out of my pocket, I don't give a flying frak about how happy or sad you are.
Go somewhere random
The money doesn't go towards $3000 toilet seats. It goes towards $3000 worth of treatment given to an uninsured person, as the hospital is required by law to do. They make up for unfunded charity care by sticking it to anyone who has good insurance.
Over 75% of health care expenses (total) are at the beginning and end of life. I have no problem having Fed sponsored maternity wards, but I do have a problem with $5000-a-day geriatric care. Sure we have the tech to prop up a body that wants to die, but after the first 60 years I don't think we should. My parents are getting close to that age, and my remaining grandparents are well past it. When my grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer, leukimeia, and alzhiemers with-in one year, he made his peace and died in his own bed at home. When we as a culture accept that growing old and dying are natural and that "fighting to the end" is not always the best choice, then the costs of health care in this country can begin to return to reasonable levels.
We are all just people.
libertarianism is nothing but a code word for selfishness, dressed up in political signals and philosphical portents. but if you dress up a cheap whore in a fine dress, she's still a cheap whore. so it is with libertarians and anyone who spouts that nonsense
i put it this way: human nature is both altruistic and selfish. any political philosophy you present to the world has to address both sides of this coin, or you have built a political philosophy which is a nonstarter in the real world, because it doesn't jive with the nature of the humans you are attempting to impose it on
we all understand why communism doesn't work: it depends upon altruism, and doesn't address human selfishness. in a communist system, selfishness still exists, in the human beings in the system, but unaddressed by the system imposed upon them, and so selfishness eats communism apart from the inside
if you will, if a whole country suddenly went libertarian, you'd have the exact same problems as a communist country, in reverse along the axis of human selfishness-altruism. it would fail. as miserably and as surely as communism did. for the same reasons, in mirror image reverse
libertarianism appeals to earnest but naive college students with too many philosophy books under their belt, but without any real life experience, who build castles in the sky in their minds about how the world should or would or could work if people just started behaving in ways people have never behaved in any culture or time period since the dawn of mankind
it also appeals to rural folk, who don't understand how they fit into the larger world, and firmly believe themselves to be islands completely owing nothing to anyone else. what they are of course is coccooned within a larger country and system upon which the relative peace and quiet of their worlds depend. but it is hard to see that from the hinterlands until madness marches across the countryside, which it does, unfortunately, in societies that have abandoned the simple common human responsibility we have to take care of each other
and it appeals to 40 something selfish assholes behind on their alimony payments, corrupt and personally bankrupt about any give and take in their lives. nothing more needs to be said of such people. we understand them, and we understand why libertarianism appeals to them on a deep level
libertarianism is a gem of modern foolishness, and you are a glorious fool if you swallow the pap called libertarianism
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As long as you use any taxpayer funded service, good luck getting my hand out of your pocket. The thing is (and I'm sure you hate to admit this) to participate in any society, you need people's hands in your pocket. Suck it up.