Slashdot Mirror
US House Democrats Unveil a Health Care Plan
gollum123 sends in this piece from a political blog in the NY Times. Here is the text of the bill in question (PDF). "House Democrats on Friday answered President Obama's call for a sweeping overhaul of the health care system by putting forward [an] 852-page draft bill that would require all Americans to obtain health insurance, force employers to provide benefits or help pay for them, and create a new public insurance program to compete with private insurers — a move that Republicans will bitterly oppose. ... But the chairmen said they still did not know how much the plan would cost, even as they pledged to pay for it by cutting Medicare spending and imposing new, unspecified taxes. The three chairmen described their bill as a starting point in a weeks-long legislative endeavor that they said would dominate Congress for the summer and ultimately involve the full panorama of stakeholders in the health care industry, which accounts for about one-sixth of the nation's economy. ... House Republicans, who have had no involvement in the development of the health legislation so far, quickly denounced the Democrats' proposal as a thinly disguised plan for an eventual government takeover of the health care system. ... The House Democrats' plan is one of three distinct efforts underway on Capitol Hill to draft the health overhaul legislation. In the Senate, both the Finance Committee and the health committee have separate bills in the works, and in recent days those efforts seem to have stumbled."
"If you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it's free."
Itâ(TM)s no secret that the healthcare system (Along with the education system) is broken and needs work, but weâ(TM)re in a deep recession here and now isnâ(TM)t the most appropriate time to start spending billions. The primary goal should be to repair the economy first and then when everythingâ(TM)s kosher start disquieting about the other stuff; you canâ(TM)t do everything all at once.
If only the Obama administration wasnâ(TM)t so pedantic and feels like it needs to play God.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
"But the chairmen said they still did not know how much the plan would cost..."
I'm not sure the politicians care how much it's going to cost since it's not their money.
Healthcare is screwed up because of the various regulations and monopolys the govt has created.
If we had a free market instead of the quasi-socialist/fascist system in place now, the market would set fair prices.
No one ever talks about health care in laize-fair jurisdictions. Last time I was out of the US I paid $65 for a doctors visit and two prescriptions TOTAL. Open system. No govt price fixing. No government subsidies. My friend had a tooth extracted there, cost $150. My father just had the same in the US, cost $800.
Get the government the hell out of my life!
Will this bill stop the pre existing condition BS? Let you buy any plan that you want? UN tie it from your job?
How about having a Bankruptcy that is just for Health stuff and does not show up on any back round check?
Not let people ask about you medial history before offering your a job?
Make it so you can not be dropped by a insurance provider.
It seems obvious from this look into the early stage of a house bill that 'democrats' and 'republicans' are acting as either side of a polar debate, one proposing knowing it's plan leans far too far one way, confident that the other side will try as hard as possible the other way, reaching a stalemate.
it's kinda like the game my brother and I would play as children splitting a piece of cake , one cuts - the other chooses.
Of course, what happens when there is more then two ways to look at a problem, i don't know.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
Is that the House Democrats are essentially following the blueprint for Healthcare provided by Republican Mitt Romney in Massachussetts. So far, the Massachusetts model has pretty much worked, in that, they did reduce the number of uninsured significantly. However, costs for the state provided side of the plan have come in way more than anyone either promised or expected. Quite frankly, the expansion of the health insurance pool did not increase the economies of scale and drive down costs for everyone. Now everyone just has procedures that they cannot afford done.
The other irony is that Obama's said to be considering the McCain plan's idea of taxing health care benefits and requiring employers to purchase it.
This is my sig.
I suspect congress will look at all the examples of socialized medicine around the world and end up picking the worst elements from each of them.
I ain't registering for a goddamn thing
.
In the glorious and free country of the United States a citizen's decision to register for government-mandated healthcare is absolutely and completely voluntary.
Being forced to pay for those that do register, however, is another story.
Seriously. I can't understand why anyone would expect a decent economic discussion on a semi-technical website full of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists, Ron Paul anti-government Libertarians, and other zealots who interpret forceful opinion as actual fact.
Economics IS a difficult subject to understand, let alone interpret correctly. Even professional economists who do nothing but study the economy often get things wrong. Yet, everyone talks about the economy as if they are the expert and they actually know what's going on, even if they've had zero education on the subject.
The question you have to ask yourself is, do you think access to health care is a right or do you think that it is just another commodity to be bought and sold. If you say health care is a right then you have to be willing to pay for everyone to have it, it will be expensive, very expensive. If you think it's a commodity then you need to admit that poor people don't deserve to see doctors, or deserve a substantially lower quality of care from understaffed and overwhelmed free clinics.
I happen to think health care is something society needs to provide to everyone equally. I know where the money can come from without raising taxes too. I have my eye set on the bloated defense budget. Cut the military fully in half (by dollars spent) and we'd still have the best armed forces in the world for DEFENSE of the nation and we'd have the money to take care of every sick and injured man woman and child.
There are other things we can do to reduce costs as well such as approve the use of drugs that are already available in Europe and Canada and have been proven safe, and reform the liability insurance system.
which is private providers who are paid by the Canadian government out of a health tax. If the United States had a single payer system we could save $350 billion a year. It would be a huge boost for small companies.
Will this bill stop the pre existing condition BS? Let you buy any plan that you want? UN tie it from your job?
Actually, no the bill won't do any of that. Are you sure you are not asking for someone else to pay your medical bills? I agree that employers should be untied from medical care and all insurance should be
privately purchased. But I think if you have a pre-existing condition you should be shuffled into a government program that covers your costs since you most likely cannot cover them yourself.
Take, for example, HIV treatment. Most people probably couldn't afford the cocktail that keeps them alive. But I don't think its too terrible to throw in a couple bucks of year in taxes per person to help another guy stay alive, as long as he doesn't bitch about Republicans, in which case, I'd vote to cut him off.
How about having a Bankruptcy that is just for Health stuff and does not show up on any back round check?
Nope. Why should it? I would think that, as a lender, paying back your health loans first would be the thing that they look for... you know, do the logical thing and pay the people to keep you alive.
Not let people ask about you medial history before offering your a job?
Quite frankly I think any credit check should be off limits when applying for a job or a place to live.
Make it so you can not be dropped by a insurance provider.
That would throw too many programmers out of work. Besides, the whole point of insurance is about risk management. If an insurance cannot manage the risk, it cannot operate as a company. Quite frankly the thing to do would be to deregulate all the coverage provided by insurance and get rid of all the various state mandates that make it more expensive.
This is my sig.
Legend! http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/socialism.asp
Don't be hating - we bomb your white European asses, too.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Because under a socialist government everyone gets paid the exact same averaged dollar amount per year regardless of what job they do and how good/efficient they are at it right? No one is advocating that kind of system, not even the real socialists nutcases.
What you described is not socialism or socialist policy and it's intellectually dishonest to call it so.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Yeah, spending all the money you decry, spent in the 12 YEARS of Bush, being spent in the first three MONTHS under the current administration is however enlightened and useful.
You *really* need to get caught up.
If the congress and the PolitBureau really wanted to pay for hospital services, they would pay the "going rate" of hospitals. Instead, they pay $36 for a $500 procedure, causing hospitals to charge $8 for aspirin. Congress is WHY the system is broken, not the cure.
The plan is to crush as many industries as possible with legislation, then arrive as if uninvolved and claim "Capitalism did this!" and "We need more regulation!
Then, the Fed, despite the strict outlines in the Constitution, controls everything in exactly the same way as Communist governments. (Where life universally SUCKS.)
This is a means to secure control. Banking, Mortgages, Car manufacturing, everything but Hollywood is getting a "bailout" and then finding themselves so bound to do the WRONG thing, they don't want it. It's instead a "BUY OUT".
These are the end-times for the America of freedom. And in the next world war, there will be no one to save France, Belgium, Luxemburg, and all the other countries we've saved twice in the last two.
The problem with Republicans is that they're not Conservative; McCain and Obama had nothing on which to disagree- both loved the idea of central control, sweeping the Constition under the rug, and consolidating power.
Sorry, but this is where we stand. Thank the media, on our way to hell.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Anti-government I am. Not an economist by far. But even a fucking moron can see this tripe is designed with the insurance companies profits in mind. Screw the BS. Go ahead and kick the private insurance companies to the side and make it truly government supplied health care. Single ayer with no private companies taking a cut from the pie. There will be waste and corruption no matter what, but leaving private companies involved will double waste, corruption and cost at the bare minimum.
The whole point of insurance is to have other people pay for your problems, you dumbass. If insurance doesn't do that, it is a scam that takes everyone's money and does not help people when they need it.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Can anyone point out for me the mechanism that is going to require ALL citizens to buy health care coverage? I can't seem to find it. What happens under this plan of someone does not?
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
If anyone had any questions why the US health care 'system' continues to be a complete joke compared to the rest of the Western World just read this single post from this fucked in the head wacko.
Miserable little fucks screaming about people getting a free ride while wasting their own 'precious' money on more than 50 percent extra on health care costs in the US compared to every other modern aka 'Socialized' health care system.
Democracy's fatal flaw. Too many people are just fucking stupid like jstork.
We see what you are doing here. Government provision of services, by definition, is the exact opposite of free market competition. When you take money from people by force and give it to others, that is NOT competition. Please stop saying that it is.
would still cost much less than what we spent on banksters.
Um....in Massachusetts, on your state income tax return, they ask whether you are enrolled in either the state program or private insurance. If the answer is no, then your taxes go up by the cost of the state program and you are enrolled. No choice---unless you want to perjure yourself, of course.
First, it appears to requires universal coverage. This is good. I remember a long time ago when universal coverage was not the norm for automobiles. All these irresponsible people would drive around, damage other peoples property, and then not pay. What was more they often continued to damage other peoples property with little consequence. This meant that those who were responsible had to pay higher premiums. Now everyone has to have proof of financial responsibility. One consequence of this is that I can get coverage against the irresponsible motorist for very little money. The benefit of health care should be similar. No more irresponsible people going to the hospital without health insurance. This should mean that those of us who actually pay for medical treatment, instead of expecting others to cover the bills,
Second, there will be a public option. Auto insurance in many states has the same option. Most of us do not use the public option. Most of us still pay private firms to carry our insurance. The public option is used by those those who cannot or chooses not to afford private insurance. Sure this public option costs money, but not nearly as much as having some irresponsible asshole crash into your house in his SUV, then discovering he has no insurance or assets because all his or her income went to pay the note of the truck. Every uninsured person costs us money. The public option will insure that hospitals and doctors get some money for every patient, so they do not have to gouge the rest of us.
Third, and this is what I hope, that they reform payments and set standards for care. For instance, it make no sense to pay 80% of a standard cost for a procedure, when in most cases doctors charge double the standard costs. Pay 100% of the standard cost, and don't worry about co-pays. The co-pay is built in with real and opportunity costs. Likewise, set minimum standard for diagnostics. Hospitals are spending money on proton accelerators rather than prene care. We can live without proton accelerators and other machines that go beep. What we need is care.
And this is what I think many people are afraid of. That medicine is going to go back to giving care, rather than huge returns on investments for the HMO or funding for lavish and extravagant building and equipment that rich people can then put their name on because they paid half. Or, as mentioned, we might be concerned that in the US we have a higher infant mortality rate than Cuba or Hungary, the worst in the developed world.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Er, slight factual inaccuracy. They make you pay a penalty each year if you're not enrolled in insurance.
I've been paying for my own medical insurance out of my own pocket since I was 23, now 36. A few months ago, my automatically deducted premiums jumped from $290ish to $530ish a month. Why?
Because Medicare sent my HMO (Group Health) a message indicating that I was on Medicare, and so they automatically combined the billing, without notifying me. I'm not even on Medicare! I may get a refund in Mid-August... meanwhile, I'm scraping by, because I saved some money for emergencies... having this happen during my regular period of unemployment (MSFT contractor 'break') makes it extra painful.
Make healthcare more affordable, so more people will choose to have it. NOT mandatory, involving buerocrats that'll screw it up even worse. Offer tax incentives, etc to businesses to cover their employees, don't cram it as another effective mandatory tax.
Any time an unpopular social program is established, the government tries to sell it under "special" tax provisions, e.g. only those that enroll have to pay.
Once the issue is mostly forgotten, the program inevitably merges with general government spending and starts drawing money from the general tax pool (e.g. your and my tax dollars).
This ALWAYS is going to happen for a simple reason: if everyone who wanted to enroll in the program could afford to pay for it, there would not be a need for a program in the first place. The sole reason for it to exist is to get those who don't use it to pay for those that do (that is the concept of welfare).
NEVER vote for a program on the basis of it having "special" tax provisions such as pay-as-you-enroll. If you are not willing to accept a government program under the understanding that it will be paid for with general tax dollar's, don't vote for it at all, since that is inevitably what is going to happen after a while.
If the goal is truly to do some good for the country, then the place to start is the FDA. They need to seriously rethink their views on health and nutrition and what should be allowed in the foods sold in the U.S. There are nations with a fraction of the health issues (per capita) of the U.S. and they also have better policies regarding the contents of food. The corn syrup has GOT to go for starters and they should take with it all of the aspartame and any of the dozens of other things that do not belong in our food. And let's not get into farming, dairy and livestock practices or we'd go on for days. Monsanto has GOT to go. Hormones and antibiotics on "healthy animals" have also got to go.
There is so much wrong going on in with U.S. food system that it just makes me sick... it makes us all sick. Get rid of that stuff and we will see a LOT less need for healthcare and a lot less obesity.
It's a huge pity, really. We in the US are far better at being anti- or pro- state than we are at being anti- or pro- free market.
Thus, we get grotesque situations where, in order to avoid charges of "socialism" government functions are essentially "laundered" through private sector intermediaries that take their big fat cut and, all too often, deliver seriously subpar results. We would be much better off if we abandoned that charade and, instead, let the state attend to state functions, the private sector attend to private sector functions, and avoided the incestuous interrelations of the two.
It's so much more complicated than that. It's a debate where two sides can argue opposite points, and both be absolutely correct. Here is an article that addresses one side of it:
Short answer: there's no easy fix. Medical costs are rising for several reasons:
* Rising costs and quality of medical care (30 years ago there were no MRIs, hip replacements).
* Corrupt doctors, ordering tests because they are profitable (read the article, it goes into great detail on that point)
* Corrupt insurance agencies (sometimes charging 30% overhead)
* Incompetent government (a point which you outlined)
* Clueless patients wanting every possible test (I can't blame them for this, it's not like we have medical degrees) and not taking care of themselves (Safeway for example managed to reduce health insurance costs by 40% or so by encouraging their employees to take care of themselves)
* Oh yes, and how can any such list be incomplete without including pharmaceutical companies and medical lobbies? Many problems there.
I'm sure I'm missing some. The good news is with all these problems, there is lots of room for improvement. The bad news is that these problems exist, and the path to fixing them isn't entirely clear. I am not sure that I favor this bill, but I think it is good we are having a debate about it. We should have had this debate 10, 20, or 40 years ago.
Qxe4
Then he sent all of them this note: "A socialistic government will also ultimately fail - because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed."
Actually, the real lesson is that a socialist government will fail when you let a tinpot dictator practice collective punishment to advance his own political agenda as happened in the USSR under Stalin but didn't happen in Sweden under a democratic government. This is really more of a fable about college professors pushing an agenda and punishing students' grades when they disagree.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Except that national health care is highly unlikely to be unpopular. In countries that have national health care, again such as Britain and Germany, the national health care program is enormously popular. This is part of why the Republicans are fighting the idea so hard; they know that, much like Social Security, once a large national program is established to provide for everyone something that they want (cheaper health care), it will be impossible to kill again later.
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
As a graduate student without support, I basically have no income...I don't have health insurance because I can't afford it. How can you force everyone to buy health insurance? What about people like me? If this is really how it is then I'd like to take back my vote for Obama :(
You forgot the alien mind-control rays, unmarked helicopters, mention of 'jack-booted thugs,' and blaming the U.N. But otherwise, nice conspiracy rant!
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
Let's require that whatever bill they propose, that all of the US government, especially congress & house, have to operate under that bill for one year before it can be forced on the rest of us. Whatever plan they currently have is gone. They are not allowed to work outside of their proposed system. They have to use only what their bill contains, and the funding has to come as a deduction (tax) out of their salaries. The money used to provide their health care services must come from whatever they paid in, and if (when) it runs out, nobody gets any more services until more funding is available. Also, any government employee who goes outside the system must declare it on some specified national forum, so we can know about its deficiencies before it takes effect on the rest of us.
This will show us if it is a viable plan, and that it is has enough money coming in so that extra funding is not hidden in additional taxes. Let's see how they like their own plan before we're forced into another stupid plan.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
There are two sides:
1. The entire modern world that has low cost universal health care
2. The Democrats and Republicans on the other side with Republicans off in 'teh free market' la-la land and Democrats too fearful of the 'Insurance' company lobbying/campaign contribution dollars to propose any real long term solution
How is this geek centric news?
Just give me one Government program that works, isn't in a shambles, isn't broke, or isn't full of corruption, and I will go for this. I am sick of the Government mentality that we are too stupid to think for ourselves. Several are, but not me. Please let me choose.
And also in the Wall Street Journal, here is an article about Mr. Burd, of Safeway, going to Washington to lobby regarding how the market can rein in costs:
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I would argue that Ron Paul anti-government Libertarians are much better equipped to debate economic issues than their progressive counterparts. Progressive's simply don't understand economics, most libertarians I know make it a point to study economics in detail. The fact is a free-market economy is the ONLY type of economy on the planet that actually works. Any other system has to be constantly managed, controlled and monitored. It is this management and control that causes problems such as prolonged recessions, over supply of money & credit, devaluation of money and the list goes on...
Also, bear in mind that the readership of this site is heavily skewed towards males age 18-34 with a college education (or attending college now). These people will have proportionately far fewer medical issues than the population at large, esp. the poor and elderly. Many here probably take no medication at all (except perhaps recreational), and haven't been inside a hospital for years. So from their perspective, what good is government-guaranteed health care? But the perspective may change as they grow older, raise a family, and have possibly ailing parents to look after, with all the visissitudes that come along the way.
I like Singapore's system, and would prefer to start there. We already have people using Flex Spending Accounts, and could gradually shift there over a 3-5 year period. http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/01/singapores_heal.html
http://takingnote.tcf.org/2008/07/health-care-in.html
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
What you really need to have is a health care center that works more like the DMV does in Delaware. Basically, everyone goes in and gets a ticket. There are separate lines for separate things. you might have some nurse look at you and determine if you are obviously dying, and have a special line for that. Then, you have a line for people with colds and coughs and stuff, and so forth. You wouldn't need to schedule an appointment, everyone could walk in, just, if you walked in for a stupid reason, you would wait a long, long time.
This is my sig.
well. there is one thing in economics that is rather clear. profit.
if ANY private organisation is involved in your healthcare you will pay (a lot) more than in actually costs. hospitals, insurance, medicines. you'll pay (a lot) extra to make the shareholders happy.
see. it isn't that hard to understand.
Privacy is terrorism.
One thing you can say about us Ivory Tower progressives - we know how to use punctuation :)
Economies have been around in many forms for thousands of years. Very few of them could be considered free-market in the sense you described. Many of them worked. Yes, they were constantly managed, controlled and monitored. Yes, they had problems. That does not mean that they are or were not worthwhile. There are costs, true, and we are willing to pay them.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Except that national health care is highly unlikely to be unpopular. In countries that have national health care, again such as Britain and Germany, the national health care program is enormously popular. This is part of why the Republicans are fighting the idea so hard; they know that, much like Social Security, once a large national program is established to provide for everyone something that they want (cheaper health care), it will be impossible to kill again later.
Wait? People like Social Security? That pit my employer and I throw money into every month? You realize in the United States there is a huge industry to actually save for retirement because we have no illusion that social security works right? If I could opt out tomorrow I'd be waiting in the queue before dawn. 15% from me, 15% from my employer and 100% worthless.
And yet, despite the right-wing horror stories (with their purely anecdotal basis), Canada's national healthcare system remains extremely popular, with Canadians expressing high levels of satisfaction with the care they're getting. See? Only about 90% of Canadians express satisfaction with their system! There has to be something wrong with it!
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
It's a huge pity, really. We in the US are far better at being anti- or pro- state than we are at being anti- or pro- free market.
Thus, we get grotesque situations where, in order to avoid charges of "socialism"...
Most US Americans seem to have no clue at all about what socialism or for that matter communism actually is. Every time they start throwing those words around on Fox News, accusing their various political opponents of being "socialists", it makes me laugh.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Canada has a completely-free universal national healthcare system.
It is also a country where...
The average life expectancy is two years longer than in America.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Ron Paul has a lot of good points. He was the only 'no' vote this week on a Congressional resolution slamming Iran for its voter fraud issue - and while denouncing the fraud seems like a good idea, it really hurts the anti-theocratic movement by letting the mullahs scream that the reformists are American stooges. But economics is not one of his good points. 'Unmanaged' economies are, at best, like the Gilded Age in the US, and at worst like Somalia. The boom-and-bust cycle of the Gilded Age was catastrophic for large percentages of the American population; toning it down via regulation and trust-busting was a major breakthrough in the development of the American economy.
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
You missed the biggest and most expensive reason.
We have socialized provider system, but a private payer system.
Anyone can get care in the US, no matter their ability to pay, especially with emergency care. The cost of providing this care is passed on to those who can still afford to pay for medical costs or insurance.
There are a huge number of people who make to much to qualify for government programs, but not enough to afford private insurance and are not provided with insurance through an employer or do not qualify due to pre-existing conditions. The number of people in this category at last estimate is around 45 million. These people still use healthcare services, a few can pay for it out of pocket, but many end up getting the bill forgiven through bankruptcy or other means.
If all these people became payers into the system, at any level, it would bring down costs for those who can still afford to pay for insurance. It would not bring down the overall costs as much as other measures, but it would spread the cost for a health care system much more fairly. It can bring down costs in that people will be more likely to seek cheaper preventive care instead of waiting until a problem requires much more expensive emergency care.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
Cant wait to hear from people with government provided, free health care, how government provided health care is bad and no one should want it.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Joseph Schumpeter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Schumpeter is an economist from the Austrian School once wrote, in a previously unpublished and still obscure paper this:
"The fundamental evil that the science of economics suffers from is that current discussions of economic questions almost always displays the sad fact that some and occasionally all who take a hand in it do not know what they are talking about." (please note "science of economics)
Schumpeter, Joseph A. "The "Crisis" in Economics - Fifty Years Ago", Journal of Economic Literature, 20, 3, (Sep. 1982), pp 1049-1059.
He wrote that in 1939. It was published in 1982. You could say, in a nutshell, nothing has changed since 1939.
I also encourage you to read Schumpeter's works. In my mind, he is the most brilliant economist to have ever lived. He just wasn't and still isn't an attention grabbing diva.
AnonCow
You have any bright ideas about whom else is going to fix it? Or are you just going to bitch and cherry pick things that the government doesn't do well while sitting on your couch with cheetos acting smug?
Provide something useful to the debate of GTFO. Please, I'm waiting for your suggestions...
The beloved health care in GB is great.. as long as you don't get seriously ill. What bean counter is going to say "you sr are not worth a kidney transplant" and "no, we do not need to buy our Alzheimer's sufferers medication that will improve the quality of their lives". source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1581576/Author-Terry-Pratchett-attacks-the-NHS-over-Alzheimers-policy.html
The government is not a moral actor, it is a utilitarian actor. If it where moral we would have no war. If it where moral then I could trust it not to come to Orwellian conclusions after it controls medicine.
The problem with Health Care isn't that the poor can't get care. We have Medicaid and Medicare. Those 47 Million people without care obviously don't WANT care. After all, if you're healthy, in your middle years, and not rich, why spend money on something you don't need? The US already offers health care to those who need it. This bill would just force is on those who don't want it.
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
Progressive's simply don't understand economics, most libertarians I know make it a point to study economics in detail.
You mean they study Austrian economics, a system decidedly out of the economics mainstream and without much intellectual merit. Austrian economics rejects most quantitative assessment of principles and instead relies on 'praexology,' essentially an axiomatic system that appears on its face to be sound, but is actually extremely superficial and non-rigorous, and is thus subject to error. Its axioms are ambiguous, its terms ill-defined. If you don't believe me, show one of their foundational books to a mathematician and watch as you are laughed out of the room. Unfortunately, one false premise in an axiomatic systems causes the whole thing to fall flat on its face, which Austrian economics does quite regularly. In other words, the whole of Austrian economics is a pseudo-logic designed to support the (previously held) libertarian beliefs of its founders.
And as a way to redistribute money, insurance is pretty lousy. If insurance was a tax, it would be a very regressive tax and burden those with lower income a lot more than those with higher incomes.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Here are the real differences between a single payer public health care provider plan and the hodgepodge private health care/insurance system we have now:
1) under a public plan, your health care is decided by a government bureaucrat sitting in a government office. While in a private system, you health care is decided by corporate bureaucrat sitting in a corporate office.
2) under a government plan you, or your employer would send hundreds of dollars in tax money each month to the health a agency to cover care. Under private plans, you or your employer must send hundreds of dollars each month to insurance companies each month to get coverage.
3) Under a government plan you a guaranteed coverage. You are not under private plans.
4) Under a government plans you are essentially covered for life. Under private plans you are limited in the number of claims you can make.
5) From what I have seen, government plans overseas control costs by focusing on preventative care and reward doctors who get patients to quit smoking and lose weight for example. Insurance companies in the us drop patients and increase deductibles.
6) Under a government plan, you and your doctor would have to fill out government paperwork to get benefits paid. Under the private system, each insurance company has it's own form to fill out which requires staff, meaning non-medical overhead, to proper fill out and file the forms in the proper manner.
There, those are are the real differences.
Basically, there are some problems the private sector is poorly equipped to solve. Medical care is one of them. Medical care is less of a free market choice and should be thought of more as an essential public utility. Market forces do not work very well do to the complexity of medical care and the urgency of catastrophic cases making comparison shopping impossible.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Neither am I. However, see section 401, where you'll find that if you don't buy health insurance, you have to pay an extra 2% in taxes. Ain't income redistribution larceny grand?
This is the kind of right-wing idiocy that has left the Republican party in its current state. Democratic areas do have more access to abortion clinics as it stands now, and yet the demographics that associate with Democrats are growing faster than the demographics that associate with Republicans. Democrats, far from sobbing and calling it 'genocide,' actively seek to expand access to these clinics on the basis that government should not be intervening in a woman's personal medical decisions. The vast majority of pregnancies that become naturally viable are not terminated; most abortions are for cases where the fetus would not survive for one reason or another (including that the mother might not survive delivery). Most of the rest are because the prospective parent is not ready or able to provide a stable family life, but many do go on later in life to have a child when they are better able to provide for one with a decent quality of life. Republicans have a stupid idea that Democrats 'want' to have abortions. Democrats want to make it an option for people who, for whatever reason, need one.
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
Interesting, a waitocracy.
Table-ized A.I.
You don't seem to understand the word "mandated".
FanFictionRecs.net
The sugar tariff is because of the US sugar producers, not Iowan corn farmers. The US sugar industry makes a profit with the tariff in place. They would not if the tariff goes away. Therefore, they are incented to spend money, even large portions of their profits, to keep the tariff in place. The rest of the country spends small amounts more and does not notice any individual expense, so is not strongly incented to demand the end of the tariff. Thus, the tariff remains. Oddly enough, Johnny Mac did not propose ending the sugar tariff, and he received large donations from the US sugar industry. Yay, integrity!
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
If you really think most people, conservative or otherwise, actually hate people who are poor, you've been completely brainwashed.
It's the liberal equivilent of calling everyone who disagrees with you unpatriotic.
FanFictionRecs.net
Oh, I'm sorry. I just had poll results saying Canadians were happy with their care. You have unsupported anecdotes. Clearly I should accept your premise, Anonymous.
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
I think the fear is more that, like Social Security, they don't trust that it isn't going to completely fuck us later BECAUSE we can't kill the program.
FanFictionRecs.net
Let's test the hypothesis that Social Security is popular. You would expect, therefore, that when the President of the United States proposes making adjustments to it, this would be loudly and vigorously denounced. Lo and behold, this is what happened. Yes, Social Security is very popular in the US, and only small minorities (yes, including many Libertarians) want to do away with it.
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
Just an aside to the editors: this is not science.
The health care industry is presently 1/6th of the US economy. Without significant changes it will double in 30 years to 1/3 of the economy. Its size is due to the involvement of the government sanctioned Ponzi schemes and cash flow tidal pools known as insurance companies. Contrary to the report generated by the government that is being used as the rationale for the "improvements" in the health care industry, forcing the insurance companies to take on even more will result in more and faster growth. By 2040 health care would be around half of the US economy.
A government run operation that competes with the commercial enterprises won't improve things. We already have that in Medicare/Medicaid. The mandated low payments and customary federal employees' gross mismanagement only result in more costs passed to patients and insurance companies as well as denial of services as more providers opt out of accepting these. The growth of these programs has resulted in increases in taxation without concominant increases in service. With growth unchecked, and with the demographic bubble of baby boomers draining it outnumbering the younger work force, by 2040 it will require the younger people to have 2 full time jobs just to pay the taxes that keep those programs afloat.
The US pays more now for health care than most others, without better results or satisfaction. This will only get worse as the present system grows, and will get worse still if it is forced to grow even faster. The only rational solution is to remove the middleman carcinoma from the health care industry. That is, get rid of insurance and mandate reduction in the artificially inflated medical care costs that they promote.
My advice is to drop any insurance and keep the money. If you need care, either get the same rate from a provider they offer to insurance, or if they refuse, get care and don't pay. Become medically indigent. That will help cause the present system to collapse, the sooner the better, the later the greater damage to the rest of the economy. That advice came to me from the professor and hospital administrator teaching history and systems of the health care industry for my master's in health care administration. He also told us that by the time we got our degrees that we may not have jobs, and even if we do, we probably won't retire from the same industry, since the present system is not sustainable. For me this became academic, because by the time I graduated I realized I had too much conscience to be able to hold peoples' health hostage with a protection racket.
On a more recent note, if you think insurance companies are the sort of responsible entities to be tasked with self-oversight and watching out for your best interests, look back a week or so in the news and find out how many of those companies have invested how many millions of dollars in tobacco companies. That only looks like conflict of interest. Their real interest is in handling your money when you get sick, so they'd just as soon you get sicker sooner, so in this instance they are being entirely responsible to those to who they exist to be most responsible to -- their shareholders.
Trying to fix this problem by requiring those responsible for the problem to take an even greater role is simply shooting the economy in the foot. I have to drive 70 miles one way to get medical treatment at the closest Veterans Administration facility, and do so several time a month. And I'm glad to, so that I don't have to participate in the travesty called the health care "industry". God love the care givers, they deserve all respect, but God damn the "industry" that helps create the problems it makes money from supposedly solving.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Right, we have forty-seven million healthy, middle-aged, rich people who are the ones not getting insurance. Working poor who, for example, don't take their kids to see the doctor until they've gotten seriously, seriously ill and in need of expensive publicly-paid treatment when cheap preventative care would have nipped the issue in the bud if they could afford it... why, they just don't want health care!
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
A significant portion of those 47 million people can't afford it. But depending on the source, they're only about half of those who don't have health care; the rest can afford it but don't want to pay for it. I forget the proportion, but some of those who cannot afford it and don't have it are between jobs, or have changed jobs but have to wait a few months for health insurance to be available.
The picture is far more complex than it is often portrayed.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
One possible solution is to split treatments into "standard" and "enhanced" (for lack of a better word). The pool of money for the enhanced treatments would be fixed. For example, let's say it's 50 billion a year. Those waiting for enhanced treatments would be reviewed by a panel to see if they qualify for a treatment that would be funded from that 50 billion.
It's not perfect, but at least it's clear how it works, who decides, and what's at stake. Fuzzy procedures are more likely to piss people off and seem like a sea of red tape.
Table-ized A.I.
Health insurance and nationally run health services do not have to be mutually exclusive. In New Zealand we have a national health system and yet people still get private health cover in order to look after the points you highlighted.
Why would someone waste mod points on a comment by an AC?
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
Eh? Now you're going on a biased rant. Those who are conservative argue that in rationing health care, you won't have the option to go for some critical operations: transplants, care over 60, etc, because the care will shift over to what the majority needs: care for chronic obesity and substance addiction (alcohol and cigarettes). Their mentality is why should 60-80 year-old who's been living in relatively good health be of a lower priority then a 30-40 year-old whose afflicted with heart disease and liver disease due to poor life choices.
The factors of this argument are not solely based on rich vs poor, but on the dynamics of economics in social medicine vs private medicine. Social medicine is about rationing health care to everyone at the expense of the tax payer. Private medicine is about those who can afford it do get healthcare. To put it in another light, would you give up some life-saving operation for a family member, in exchange for distributing 100 cold-&-flu medications to bums on the street?
You should try considering the other point of view to this argument and not just the one corresponding to your gross bias. Otherwise you'll end up sounding as bad and impassioned as the pundits on Fox news.
If it is so popular there should be no need to mandate participation, right? People will just opt in because they love it so much.
Public healthcare, while seemingly free (most people do pay for it in the end) but I'm not sure such a lawsuit friendly country can handle being told you have to wait months for treatment or that you can't have a certain treatment because it's not cost effective.
People just assume that free healthcare means everything stays the same except it's free. That's not true.
Granted, the healthcare I receive in the UK isn't bad. My local doctor definitely has room for improvement but my previous doctor was perfect. I just hope I don't have to deal with cancer in the UK. Despite probably being in one of the better areas as far as the whole post code lottery ordeal goes, it's always a concern I'll be told "tough luck, we're low on cash".
When I was in the US, despite not being jobless, the hospital and state government (PA) was actually quite helpful and I only had to pay a tiny fraction of what it would have cost. Even for someone in a transitional job, which was low paying, it was quite easy to pay off. Certainly better than the $20,000+ I would have had to pay if I didn't seek help from the state and hospital.
My case might be slightly biased since I was in a decent area of the state and the hospital doesn't deal with a load of poor people begging for free care but even with free healthcare, being in a poorer area of the UK can mean not getting a treatment someone else would get in a better off area.
I just hope people realise that neither system is perfect and going to free healthcare will not solve everyone's problems.
My then-89-year-old grandfather had to have triple-bypass surgery just a couple of years ago. Medicare denied him, saying that his odds of surviving the operation were too low. His private insurance wanted a second opinion, and my mother was able to use that to help convince him that even at his age, he could survive it. The man was working 40 hours a week by choice.
It's anecdotal, yes, but an example that has led me to mistrust government bureaucracies. I've also learned a little from the local NPR station about how much of the Medicare budget is handed out as giant, multi-billion-dollar grants to regional companies who handle the distribution of the monies to claimants. In one such case, billions of dollars are missing and cannot be accounted for, and this grows by a billion or two each year. What I have not yet been able to ascertain is how much administrative overhead this effectively adds, since the claims of Medicare's very low overhead percentage are one of the arguments used by those backing a single-payer system.
I also worry about a UK-style system showing up. The budget for the NHS has tripled in the last decade to over 100 billion pounds, and yet the NHS is pleading poverty and saying that if they don't get another seven billion pounds next year, massive layoffs could be in store.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
government should not be intervening in a woman's personal medical decision
How can you say that a medical decision is personal if she cannot pay for it? I would agree, that your body is inviolate so long as you pay for its upkeep, but once you start waving the cup around for someone else's dough to take care of you, the placer of the coin in the cup has more say than you.
I disagree with every single one of your posts but I'm not going to fight with you as its pointless and pointless arguing is not a good example for ourselves or for the readers of the board. Let us try a different tack.
Quite honestly, the thing that is causing abortions more than anything else is free trade and its attendant destruction of the middle class.
If we did not have disintegrating cities and skyrocketing unemployment and random destruction of industry, then we would have stronger families. We've almost reduced ourselves socially to hunter-gatherers, running from city to city in search of work, tossing aside 10,000 years of the evolution of our civilization in the name of a few trinkets shipped in from overseas.
I'd be willing to bet that if we cut off most imports, supported to some extent workers rights, we would have a manufacturing base again, marriages would go up, abortions would go down, and so on.
In the meantime, I would have no problem spending taxes for federal marriage counselling services and I would have no problem allowing gay unions and gay adoption. I'd rather see a child get adopted to a gay couple than get flushed down the toilet.
But if you are against abortion, and pro-family, then buy American. That's what I say.
This is my sig.
Ban all forms of Medical Insurance, even malpractice insurance. Insurance is the elephant in the room. Costs for medical care didn't begin to skyrocket until medical insurance began to cover all points of medical costs. That meant that there was a payer that would always pay no matter what the cost and when you have that much money to throw around, you have inflation. Amazing and unlimited inflation. If you take away the money, costs would be forced down because otherwise, they would lose all their costumers. Of course there will be a lot of waling and nashing of teeth from the Insurance companies if we did this.
There's also many who cannot get it at any cost due to various maladies - yet make too much for current government (state or federal) insurance. My mother and sister are both in this boat.
It's unpopular among the younger people who can see that there likely be nothing left in the system by the time it's their turn, but among older people it is extremely popular.
The 55+ year old portion of the population is what has primarily stopped social security reform. They happen to be a very large voting block, and it is hard to get past them. The people in this block either are currently drawing social security or will be drawing it soon, so they certainly don't want to remove it. Also, people in this category tend to be more active voters than other categories, so even politicians who may otherwise be amiable to removing or revamping Social Security won't dare touch the subject.
It's a self perpetuating problem; more people are drawing social security than can be supported by the younger workforce. These people rely on it, and so will adamantly fight anything that jeopardizes that income (imagine if the government tried to slash your paycheck, and how adamantly you'd fight that, it's the same from their perspective). Combine them with idealogues who can't see past their ideology to see that the system is unsustainable and WILL crash at some point in the near future, and you've got a voting base that is nigh unsurmountable.
The fact is, there are more people who are pro Social Security, at least more people who vote anyway, than there are anti Social Security. This is pretty much the definition of Popular.
What we need is a welfare reform that fixes the problem without harming the people who currently rely on the system, or those who are currently expecting to be able to use those funds in the near future.
I believe it is doable, but a plan hasn't so far been presented in a way that it reassures the people at the highest risk.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I disagree only partially here. If you kick out private insurance entirely then you get some of the horror stories Canada grapples with. Instead leave the private insurance industry legally able to operate... then compete against them with the Government. If the Government can do it cheaper and more efficiently then the private insurers will either all go out of business until the government gets bloated and slows down or (more likely) they'll all cut their massive profit margins and start actually operating efficiently.
I am not in favor of this bill of any further government regulation of health care but your statement is factually incorrect. A substantial portion of those 47 mil CANNOT get health insurance at any price, due to previous medical history. If you are not covered by a group plan (such as self employed, unemployed but not dead broke or over 60 or under whatever, and do not have a spouse or somebody to cover you) good luck getting private coverage. Even minor problems such as acid reflux are enough to make you not profitable enough for insurance companies to insure.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Except, of course, with those millions of middle-class taxpayers who's tax bill is going to go up to pay for health insurance for homeless people and welfare mothers. Of course, they're too busy trying to make ends meet to spend any money on campaign contributions, so they don't matter, do they?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
The problem with the US health system is that there is no negative feedback of any sort to control costs. Places like Massachusetts actually made it worse because the state has become the policeman for the insurance industry. I have heard comparisons of health insurance and car insurance. A car is optional. Health is only optional if you are dead.
Another point people are confusing is health *care* and health insurance. They are completely different beasts (even though they overlap a bit).
I believe most people (in congress) who preach free markets have no idea that a free market system should have some negative feedback somewhere in the loop. The few proposals which have cost controls will not make it anywhere (sigh).
It has nothing to do with 'hating' dimwit. It has to do with The Great Chain of Being. Still very much believed in to this very day by the right wing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chain_of_Being
'Socialized' medicine is a direct assault on The Great Chain of Being. It means nothing that other countries have universal coverage with massively cheaper costs and better care. Flattening the hierarchy so that those at the very bottom have the same access to quality health care as those on the top is a direct assault on The Great Chain of Being.
Clueless patients wanting every possible test
Not to mention:
Doctors who are forced to order every possible test because if they skip one and fail to detect a 1-in-10,000,000 condition, they're subject to a $20,000,000 lawsuit and the end of their career.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Economics IS a difficult subject to understand, let alone interpret correctly. Even professional economists who do nothing but study the economy often get things wrong. Yet, everyone talks about the economy as if they are the expert and they actually know what's going on, even if they've had zero education on the subject.
Well, I'm no expert, I've seen video footage of people saying nothing was wrong even to just before the GFC, and others that were warning of collapse even decades earlier, Ron Paul being a notable example.
So you don't know why people expect a decent economic discussion here. I don't know why we allow our financial systems to be controlled by people who have just demonstrated their incompetence. What result are we expecting from this? What exactly is it you don't like about listening to people who have demonstrated understanding? Why do you prefer those who got it so wrong they crashed the whole worlds economy?
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
Actually I posted the arguments my parents have made whenever the topic has come up. My point was not that socialized medicine wasn't feasible or couldn't work, but rather there's a counter argument that's not based on rich people hating poor people. Personally, I don't know enough details about the US plan to know how the distribution of healthcare will pan out. I just think a discussion on the topic should be done more rationally by outlining the pros and cons rather than pointing fingers. Otherwise you get into an argument over irreconcilable ideals because all parties refuse to listen/communicate with one another.
I read a bunch of slashdot comments, and the only logical conclusion i can find is that all healthcare systems suck and don't work for shit. I wonder if this means we need a completely new healthcare model. Or slashdotters just like to argue. Either way.
Thank you SO MUCH for not saying "incentivized" or "incentivised." Sorry for the off-topic, grammer/spelling oriented comment. But I just had to say it because I hate the word.
Actually to be fair, government budgets are not spent over months, they are budgeted for the next year, and then, maybe spent. If you were to make an accurate statement, you would say as much money has been spent over the Bush administration as went spent during the first year of the Obama administration.
While that is the Rush/Hannity/ORealy line, it is not accurate either, on many levels. First we have pretty good growth in GDP. In the 12 years of Reagan/Bush the GDP more than doubled. In the eight years of Clinton, rose over 60%. In the 8 years of Bush, the GDP rose a little more than 50%. The amount we spend rises accordingly. A good budget seems to be a little less than 20% of GDP. What this means, according you the alarmist rhetoric, is that Bush II was an exceedingly bad president because he spent over 50% more in 8 years that Reagan/Bsuh did in 12. This off course is stupid, and anyone who says such things are either incredibly stupid or simply liars.
In fact, one of the only sensible way to look at the budget is in terms of the tax base, which can be measuring in our productivity, which can be measured by the GDP. Using this measure Regan/Bush were budgeting failures as they consumed 22%+ of the GDP for big government. Clinton brought those down to historically sustainable levels of 18% of GDP, then Bush brought us buack up 21%.
What Bush also did was raise the national deficit to perhaps 75% of GDP. This is like a family making $50,000 a year owing almost $40,000 in credit card debt. No matter what the conservative talking heads say, it was the irresponsibility of Bush building debt, 5 tillion dollars all told, that is going to kill us.
In terms of numbers, theree is little that said in comparison to Bush's budgets. Adjusted for GDP, bushed highest budget year was only 10%, maybe 20% below the Obama budget. What this means in terms of GDP is that Bush was spending 21% of our money every year, while Obama is spending 26% this year. If he can follow Clinton's polocies, we can expect this number to drop to 18%. This will mean, ike clinton, he will tax and spend less than republicans. Therefore to make any decisions we will have to wait to next year.
But history gives us hope. While Reagan/Bush pushed the total deficit from 35% to 65% of GDP, Clinton lowered it to below 60%. It did takes him three years to start lowering the excessive Republican spending, and in that time the deficit rose another 3 or 4%. Of course in four years Bush II killed all the progress Clinton had make, and in another 4 tacked another 10% on for good measure. This indicates it take a year or two or three to control the Republican urge to rape the public coffers, and bring sanity to the budgeting process. Of course, Obama has correct a whole new level of corruption. We are not simply dealing with drug dealing and the treason of giving weapons to our enemies in Iran to better kill our brave American children. No, we are talking about an attack on the core of our capitalist system, an legal structure that made it legal, as it was in the late 1800's, to steal and endanger live for a small increase in profits. I know all you kids thought it was bad when the president got a blow job, and the Republican congress appropriated 40 millions dollars to get the details of that blow job, but this is really serious. And it might cost more than 40 million to get out of.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
You don't get it. People will never take care of themselves beyond what is there in front of them and what they have time and energy for. Furthermore, the fact that people will not take care of themselves is a tremendous weight on you and me and people who actually do take care of themselves. You really need to accept that people at large will not do the right thing or the thing that is good for them. They just won't. And the sooner you accept that fact, the sooner you can begin to see ways to solutions instead of sitting around blaming people for having "human nature." The best solutions are the ones that accept people for their faults and works within the framework.
There are lots of reasons for the high fructose corn syrup and the other crap that goes into our highly processed foods and most of it has to do with maintaining a long shelf life, getting more out of less, or otherwise filling the foodstuff with extra fluff and fillers that make food less healthy and boosts various profit margins.
government should not be intervening in a woman's personal medical decision
How can you say that a medical decision is personal if she cannot pay for it? I would agree, that your body is inviolate so long as you pay for its upkeep, but once you start waving the cup around for someone else's dough to take care of you, the placer of the coin in the cup has more say than you.
You're conflating the thread (public health care) with the specific point there (access to abortion clinics). Abortion clinics exist in the places where they have not been forced out because they meet a demand that exists today and doctors can make a living at them, even under today's health care system. Democrats generally (though not monolithically) assert that a woman who needs an abortion should be able to get one without interference from the government. This principle is able to stand on its own, regardless of payment. A separate common Democratic assertion is that anyone's access to medical services should be a given, not only because of the moral position but also because of the aggregate reduced cost of making preventive care available to people who would otherwise try to wait and hope it goes away on its own and end up with expensive, serious conditions. These are separate principles.
As for free trade, we are again mostly in opposition. Isolationism is, economically speaking, a terrible idea. Environmental, financial and labor issues certainly need to be more prominently considered in trade treaties, but shutting out imports would be devastating to the US economy. We already have a manufacturing base; the largest one in the world by a wide margin, in fact. The US is better able to take advantage of an interconnected world than any other entity on the planet partly because of that manufacturing base, which can import raw materials and export (or produce for domestic consumption) higher-valued goods. Buying American is nice, but we just don't produce everything we consume anymore because it's not economically efficient for many lower-valued goods.
I'd be interested to see your basis for relating marriage and abortion rates to trade; there doesn't appear to be much correlation between rich areas of the country and areas with higher marriage rates, for example.
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
It's popular with the people currently receiving benefit from it. Social Security is a complete ponzi scheme. Every generation it takes more and more workers to support the people receiving benefits, and the system will eventually collapse. This is not a secret at all, and the government is well aware of it.
So yeah, it's popular with the elderly (a major voting block) because they get SS checks every month, but it's unpopular with every who's oh, 50 or younger because we're literally paying for grandpa with no expectation of having SS actually take care of us when the time comes.
One has to wonder if Canada benefits disproportionally because the research for their healthcare (Drugs, methods, etc) is primarily bankrolled by the companies in the United States.
"I disagree only partially here. If you kick out private insurance entirely then you get some of the horror stories Canada grapples with. "
Oh please. I don't know what you've heard but it's probably on the order of the things we hear about the states, that is, if you walk any street at night you'll be mugged there.
I've in the states for a decade and the rest in Canada. There simply is no comparison. It's overpriced lunacy down there, the embarrasment of the world.
I'm sure you can find people that feel hard done by by the Canadian system. And for each of those there are a plethora of problems with the American system. It's so bad poeple makes movies about it.
Last year in the US the health sector spent $3.4 Billion lobbying, the only sector that spent more was the finance sector. That's 5X than defense lobbyists. They don't want to kill the gooose that lays the golden eggs.
Cite: http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=c
Need Mercedes parts ?
But you only liked to an article *about* the poll, not the actual poll itself, which reveals:
So .. the statistics you have quoted are, for the most part, almost totally irrelevant to a discussion of a healthcare industry.
I would also rate every family doctor I have ever had good, and one as 'excellent'. However, I would not rate the hospital care I receive the same way. I can usually afford the doctor bill, I can never afford the hospital bill.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
The USA is the richest country in the world. Surely you can do better than Germany, the UK, Cuba, Czech, Canada etc?
We would be much better off if we abandoned that charade and, instead, let the state attend to state functions, the private sector attend to private sector functions
I don't think anybody would disagree with that, but the whole problem is the disagreement on which is which. If you ask a libertarian (such as Milton Friedman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PaN9M4WwHw) the government has no business being involved in just about anything except providing and enforcing law and order. If you ask a socialist, there is practically no limit to government control, in fact a central tenet of socialism is government ownership of all the means of production and therefore complete control of the society. Most people are somewhere in the middle.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
...and how many people didn't vote for (or voted against) Obama because of the colour of his skin? It works both ways.
If schools are so popular, there should be no need to mandate participation, right? People will just opt in because they love it so much.
People will tend to do the default thing. Schools are mandatory so that people will send their kids and not incur the social cost of uneducated, low-value workers later in life. Social Security is mandatory so that people will defer those monies and not incur the social cost of homeless, impoverished elderly. Old poor people were a major social problem in the early 20th century. Social Security dramatically changed the face of old age for millions, and was made mandatory because the costs of those who chose to risk not saving up were higher than the benefits of those for whom the risk paid off.
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
Which works well, and is thus the target of right-wing wackos bullshit-filled attacks such as this one:
Bullshit. Every procedure that is urgent is performed as fast as possible. The wait may be longer than in the US, but that’s because we do not discriminate in favour of the rich, everyone is on the same footing up here.
Bullshit again. Life-threatening conditions are treated right away. This is why the morons who come to the emergency room with a headache have to wait 15 hours: they pass the urgent cases before them.
More bullshit again. The prescription is given right away, and the pharmacist takes care of the coverage.
That troll does not clearly understands how a doctor works. And in the US, the doctors have to take as much cases as possible, thus making it much more likelier that they’ll only spend 2 minutes per patient.
This is called CIVILIZATION, as opposed to the barbarity that is so common in the US.
That's not the job of the FDA. The FDA is just to decide what medications are and are not fit for human consumption, they do not force it on people. Furthermore, there is really no good evidence that the FDA is any better or worse than similar agencies in other regions. There are issues, but it's with congress not the FDA.
As for the hormones, there is no evidence that the hormones have any effect of any sort of milk. There are issues of animal wellfare involved, but none of safety. To date there has never been a test devised which could tell natural milk from hormone enriched cow's milk.
As for aspartame, it's completely safe, there has never been any research which suggested anything else. Aspartame when taken in massive quantities by rats has somewhat increased the incidence of cancer. There is absolutely no evidence that humans get cancer from consuming quantities of aspartame that one might actually be able to ingest. In fact it's safer than sugar, since aspartame doesn't cause diabetes.
The big issue is that the FDA ought to be segmented up into Food, Drugs and Supplements and then let those handle the items that come into their jurisdiction.
You forgot to mention that doctor's have to cover their asses by ordering every test imaginable whenever someone comes to see them otherwise, if they miss something, ANYTHING at all, they are liable to be sued for hundreds of thousands/millions of dollars. The major driving force behind the higher health care costs is the litigious society in which we live.
You owe me a new keyboard! :D
If 25% of those who can afford to pay do not, it dumps their costs and a higher portion of the costs of those who cannot pay onto me. Why? Because in the end, you're going to get the care either way.
Your freedoms do not include the freedoms to burden others.
The only debate then, is over denying all care to those who do not pay their own way. As a society, we have long since decided that isn't acceptable. Show up at an emergency room, and you'll get care. It will be the most expensive, least long term successful kind of care, but it will be care.
Unless you plan to argue that this should also be stopped, my only response is quit whining and pay your part.
Oh -- and PLEASE don't give me the "nobody helped me, I'm a self made...." like of crap. We live in a society where it is POSSIBLE to be successful only as a result of the sacrifice of all those who came before and all those around you sharing in the building of such a society. Taxes are how you pay for the upkeep of that environment in which you excelled. Consider it greens fees.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Now ... repeat after me ... correlation does not equal causation.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Roads - should be privatized ($x/mile driven)
Water supply - should be privatized ($x/gallon taken into the house)
Sewage treatment - should be privatized ($x/gallon taken out of the house)
Police - should be privatized ($x/call to 911 etc)
Fire department - should be privatized ($x upfront to have your fire put out, but the neighbors can chip in so their houses won't be next)
Army - should be privatized (don't want that North Korean missile landing in your backyard? I hope you have the money to pay for it)
Schools - should be privatized ($x/day of school, and of course for missing school, turning in homework, missing homework etc)
Power (including lease of the lines that feed your house) - should be privatized
Street lighting - should be privatized (why not charge neighborhoods for the privilege of light?)
Garbage collection - should be privatized ($x/lbs of garbage, extra charges if you don't sort everything perfectly)
Ambulance - should be privatized (got mugged, wallet and ID stolen, head smashed in? Too bad - if you don't have the cash or picture ID to show that you're covered, the EMTs won't help you)
I wonder what other publicly provided services I left out.
I agree that drawing the line is tricky, and I don't have any good solution to that. I'd just like to see us draw a line, and not have things straddling it, which so frequently seems to go badly.
In particular, I am suspicious of the trend of "pseudo-privatization", where a given function is treated like a government function(in that it is paid for with public money and not designed to function in a market; but the execution is farmed out to some contractor and then everybody acts like great gains have been made(and they have, if you are the contractor). This doesn't mean that the entire supply chain behind some government function must be part of the government, it is perfectly logical for inputs to government functions to be purchased on the market; but situations where corporations becoming de-facto government branches is called "privatization" are absolute madness(i.e. there is no reason that the army needs to own farms, or even make MREs; but when they are buying 13 billion worth of logistical support packages from KBR, they've been pared well beyond their correct scope).
Based on my personal experience, there are people who make enough money to purchase healthcare, who choose to take the risk to not have it. I personally know of two single middle-class people, one about 50 and the other about 60, whose employers offer health care, but do not carry it because 'it's too expensive' I had to talk my daughter into getting it her first job because 'it was too expensive, I don't want to pay that'.
.. the health care industry is broken. And until Obama does something to reduce the amounts hospitals and medical professionals are charging, changing the industry system won't do shit. Something has to be done about the high cost of malpractice, which isn't even being addressed.
I have had it offered from every employer I have ever worked for in the last 30 years, and have always paid for it, because the cost of not having it is too high. I recently had a foot broken in a motorcycle crash, just a simple fracture of the fibula. Hospital cost??? $43,000 for a three night stay. The first night because it was late, operated the next day, and kept me two more days for reasons I do not understand.
I fail to see how Obama can offer a health care plan that will not compete with private insurance for the above three people. If it's cheaper, then it competes. And based on how the government runs medicare (lower and later payments to providers) and the the VA hospitals, I want no part of any health care system they offer and doubt that they can create one that won't significantly increase my taxes without decreasing the quality of my care. There are already doctor and nurse shortages, this will only make it worse. GPs are already in short supply because they can't make it on what insurance makes. Hospitals take money from accident victims insurance settlements to cover the difference between what health insurance pays and what they bill. I know, they are trying to do it to me. (Arizona allows medical providers to place liens on insurance amounts, and court cases allow them to recover up to the original billing amount, not just what the patient owes. For example, the hospital billed $43K, but insurance only paid $12K. They want the $31K difference from the insurance company of the person who hit me, leaving me with zero because she only carried $25K in liability.)
Yes
Obama is catering to the populaces in preparation for the next election rather than doing what is really needed. He isn't up to making the difficult decisions, only the popular ones. He is a orator, not a leader.
What is happening now is our punishment for some people being stupid enough to vote for him.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
The GP seems to be suggesting a system like that in the UK (See: NHS, National Health Service, www.nhs.uk). The government directly pays for hospitals, doctors, nurses, and everything else (I think the NHS is the world's largest employer).
Private healthcare exists, but to get people to pay for it companies have to add a lot of value to compete with "free" NHS care. Things like luxurious hospitals (they're like 5* hotels), promises of shorter waiting times and easier access to specialists. About 8% of people in England have health insurance (and they won't necessarily use it -- for something minor people might choose to use the NHS, and in an emergency there's only the NHS, no private hospitals do emergency treatment).
I think this is a much better system than requiring people to buy insurance from a company.
I agree, that is a serious and important cost to pay attention to, but as the article makes clear, doctors are not entirely innocent in the matter. They profit from the tests as well. It is a complex interplay that draws attention to how difficult a solution really is.
Qxe4
Which is, suprise!, how emergency rooms work in Canada: a nurse sees you and assess the priority your cas shall be given. (It’s called “triage”, for the word “trier” [tree-ay], which means “sort” in french).
In the US, women receive more cancer screenings than any other country in the world.
Their cancers are caught earlier.
They receive treatment sooner.
They have a higher survivability rate.
Even if they don't have insurance.
Little tiny Sacramento County ( 2 million people) has more MRI machines than all of Canada.
In Canada, there is no medical or pharmaceutical liability, zero malpractice lawsuits, that's about 10% of the cost in the US.
It is important to remember that the US population is about 15% Black people, and unfortunately Black men have a very high death rate to diabetes and heart disease, most die before 60.
The US is also about 20% Mexicans, and they have shorter live expectancy that Caucasian people.
Canada has a very high Asian population, and Asian people have a much higher life expectancy than other groups.
In the US, homeless people call 911 for a free taxi ride (in an ambulance) to the emergency room in order to warm up. I saw it myself twice while doing volunteer work in an ER.
And where do the hell do Canadians or Kiwis or British get off telling us how to run our own country?
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
This is a guess, but I reckon I've filled out a lot less forms when registering for NHS care in the UK than I would have done purchasing insurance in the USA.
If you move house here, you're supposed to register with a local GP (Americans seem to have a different word for this -- family physician?). I did this a few months ago. The form wanted:
- My NHS number (or alternatively, my name, place and date of birth, previous address and previous GP's name and address)
- My new address (presumably so they know where to send the doctor if I need one)
I've moved house twice now, so I've filled out a total of 2 forms for the NHS. (I assume my mum did something to register me when I was born, but she would have been seeing the GP regularly while pregnant anyway.)
"Healthcare Industry" = Bloodsucking industry in your country, united states. what does it take to understand that something does NOT work ? eternal damnation ?
Read radical news here
dont talk if you havent actually encountered the costs of your healthcare system yourself idiot.
one of my clients had to go see a doctor because of some pain in his back, and it took $500 for the doctor to tell him that 'he had something'. it turned out later that it was a kidney infection.
so, you get minor surgery for $1000. in which united states and in what alternate dimension ?
Read radical news here
Thank you SO MUCH for not saying "incentivized" or "incentivised." Sorry for the off-topic, grammer/spelling oriented comment. But I just had to say it because I hate the word.
Yes, that word leaves me positively incensed.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
and your medieval healthcare system practically KILLS poor by neglect, or treatment that arrives somehow too late ?
Read radical news here
How do you express dislike for the only thing you know? Its like saying to dial up customers in the '90s if they were satisfied with 56K downloads. Being as they didn't know anything else they would say sure. Today would be a different story because people have had more speed and would be appalled to go back to dial-up. Another thing is, other than protecting citizens from force and fraud what else have governments been able to do successfully? Not much. This is true for all governments throughout history.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Yah, only because they have been dumping money in it for most of their working life. I like to get what I paid for, thank you very much. However, I'm sure for people who haven't worked much such as anyone younger than 25 would probably be overjoyed to get the extra $ back in their paycheck even if it meant not getting it* when they turn old.
*assuming that social security hadn't gone bankrupt
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
As for free trade, we are again mostly in opposition
I am so opposed to free trade that were I a Republican Senator I would seriously entertain the idea of enacting a single payer national health care system if I knew that I could argue that it be financed through tariffs on imported goods. Historically speaking, free trade made the northern united states into the manufacturing powerhouse that it was.
I'd be interested to see your basis for relating marriage and abortion rates to trade; there doesn't appear to be much correlation between rich areas of the country and areas with higher marriage rates, for example.
What I look at is the decline of the African American middle class over the last 40 years. There is not a stastistician on the planet that would say American blacks are doing the same as whites in this country, and the question is why?
I think it is a foolish oversimplification to say that race is the whole story and quite frankly I think the reason is more economic. There is, in the steady ruin of urban blacks, a poignant warning about economics to anyone willing to listen.
If one person becomes poor, you can say, probably, they ruined their lives. If an entire class of people become poor, then you have to question a national policy. While a government is certainly not responsible for holding people's hands, it is equally certainly responsible for creating a legal framework most conducive to the enterprise of all involved. It's that life, liberty and pursuit of happiness thing. Therefor, its reasonable to look at Black America and not view them as somehow a dysfunctional society, but, as a canary in the coal mine, which due to its already extent economically vulnerability warns us of troubles we all face. A sand castle always gets washed away before a sea wall is threatened.
A good reading of industrial history is worthwhile. Recall that a large portion of American blacks migrated from the south to where there was work, and up until the 1970s, this meant the great cities of the North. It is no coincidence or communist plot that the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, and so on all have large black populations. All of these cities were enormous manufacturing centers and so a lot of black americans ran from the south not to escape just the civil rights woes, but also the poverty. One dirty little secret of the black activism is that many blacks found the north to be almost as racist as the south.. in that, you would be hard pressed to get a slot in the UAW or the Teamsters if you were black, and this economic exclusion fueled the civil rights movement almost as much as did the more visible injustices of the south.
Anyway, you have millions of blacks moving up north on a prayer and a shoestring, some just about getting jobs working in factories, and what happens? The USA opens the doors of free trade, and suddenly you see rubber factories in Akron shutting down, Detroit laying off, Cleveland and Pittsburgh steel mills shutting down, textile plants in Philly going under and shipbuilding in New York taking the plunge. In a blink of an eye, the country says that it is transforming to some other society, pats itself on the back for its handiness, but in the meantime city budgets get gutted, and those areas that used to house the great manufacturing centers become ghettos. Those whites who have the means move out, because they have houses they can sell, but many blacks are essentially trapped, because they rent and have not nearly the assets.
poverty ensues. wages at best stay flat or decline for decades. the kinds of opportunities that existed for a middle class, those unskilled jobs that could be a ladder up, are shipped off overseas, and the entire country goes on thinking everything is ok except that people avoid the "bad areas"
But drive through those "bad areas". I guarantee you that if you drive through a poor black neighborhood in any northeastern city, you will find that they actually live in what was on
This is my sig.
A lot of the finest "government waste and corruption" stories are actually the stories of private contractors. This does suggest that the government either can't spec projects for shit, or can't keep contractors on task for shit; but it tells one little about the efficiency of direct government operation.
Stop repeatedly using his full name, as if you want to rub in how foreign it sounds. It makes YOU sound like the xenophobe. Why didn't you use Hillary Clinton's full name?
He is a orator, not a leader.
Who's the last president that was a leader?
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
You're flat-out nuts. There's no way around it.
Actually, I'm entirely right. People do not have families because children cost too much and because both parents need to work. That's the price of competition for you, the death of families. I'm not saying that the "man should work", but I am saying that children are easier if you have one person tend the the house and kids and the other work, and that's simply less possible since the USA became "more competitive".
Me thinks the price too high.
This is my sig.
Nowhere near 95%.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Now ... repeat after me ... correlation does not equal causation.
I don't believe I said it did. However, if you're going to complain about how awful Canada's national health plan is, you had better deal with the fact that, awful health plan or no, they live two years longer than Americans do. That "rotten" health plan, which costs on the average about half what Americans pay for health care, doesn't seem to be producing worse results.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Which is, suprise!, how emergency rooms work in Canada: a nurse sees you and assess the priority your cas shall be given
They have triage everywhere but its not designed to include routine health services. I'm talking like, anything you would schedule a doctor's appointment for, go to one spot.
This is my sig.
Wrong. Insurance helps to distribute high cost, low probability risks among a group. On average, each insurance customer is paying for themselves.
Slashdot, insightful? Really? I need to stop reading the comments.
Doesn't that assume that all Republicans are rich people? Bad assumption, and stereotypical.
Both offer lower quality service, with rationing, and less access to innovative procedures.
Does your insurance company pay for innovative procedures? Mine doesn't. They won't pay for anything experimental or unproven. I don't know of many that do. Perhaps you mean Canada and the UK practice standardized medicine, adopting new procedures as they become standardized. Nothing stops anyone in either of those companies from going out to get experimental treatments. You're not going to get them here unless you can afford to pay for them, or get your insurance through being a member of Congress. They get great care.
The way to reduce health care costs is to find waste in the system and eliminate them through process improvement.
It's been 40 years, why hasn't it happened? I build medical software, we improve process continuously but the prices never go down. The doctors eliminate jobs, keep more of their clinic billing but the costs still keep going up.
There is continuous process improvement in our health care system now. Our little ER in the local hospital has to call in a doctor. It doesn't get much more efficient than that. Not even a doctor on staff. But the prices never go down. The hospital charges more, does the same job with fewer people, the insurance company pays less, ships their call center overseas, efficiency happens but the prices keep going up. Service keeps going down. Your way doesn't work.
We tried it your way the last generation and it's a dismal failure. Keeping the system we have now is not an option. People who oppose health care reform remind of when my brother tried to take my toddler nephews dirty old blanket away from him. It was filthy, tattered and torn but he still threw a tantrum when they tried to replace it with a new one. I've never seen such a bunch of whiny, fearful, change resistant people in my entire life. Take a deep breath, it'll be okay. You'll get a brand new binky.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I think you've got the demographic wrong, at least the age.
Strictly anecdotal, but I'm 40, and I'm the youngster on my team at work. We all read Slashdot.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
Something like this.
I've not needed to use one, so I don't know how it works in practice.
(You can also phone 08 45 46 47 to talk to a nurse at any time, or use the online self-diagnosis thing, or go to a local doctor (or request a home visit), or go to a hospital if it's an emergency, or call an ambulance. I have done all of these, and so far can't fault the system in any way. But I'm only 23.)
While that would be a much better system, it would get so garbled up with "the government owns all the hospitals" and "communism" bits that even if it was done really well, the American people would hate it. It's is really bad when we do not realize in the majority that we hate almost every system we have, but can't put a better one together that doesn't get reformatted into exactly what is was before, with different people pulling the strings the same way.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
To put it in another light, would you give up some life-saving operation for a family member, in exchange for distributing 100 cold-&-flu medications to bums on the street?
This country is CERTAINLY rich enough to do both! And by distributing the flue shots to the bums we avoid having to pay for treating them for pneumonia or other respiratory problems acquired by having the flue untreated.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Yet somehow they manage to design, deploy, and maintain thousands of nuclear warheads over decades. You trust your government with nukes, but not health care? You generally have electric power. You probably have potable water coming out of the tap. Planes don't crash all the time. It does many things wrong, but you're also selectively ignoring many unglamorous things that go right day after day after day.
The government doesn't have to fix health care. Making it better would already be a good thing.
he best commentary I have read on this issue is this: ÃoeEvery choice (whether to have private or socialized medicine) leads to other choices. So if what the media tells us is true, that Ãmost people favor socialized medicine,Ã(TM) then what theyÃ(TM)re really saying is most people would rather be dead than bankrupt."
If we were really going to be honest about the whole thing, we should dispense with this notion that health care in the USA is either socialized or not. Health care is already subject to so many regulations, regarding manner of coverage, rates, who can be in or not be in, that's its almost more fascist than it is free enterprise.
This is my sig.
Something else that is popular in Canada is wait insurance. People are signing up by the truck load and most Canadian insurance providers offer wait coverage. In case you don't know what that is, it's where they guarantee the wait for procedures will be under a certain time or they take you to another country if necessary and have the procedure done there.
And yes, this was brought before Canada's high court because Quebec attempted to enforce it's no private insurance laws and the court said it was a fundamental human right to have the coverage because the lack of it would endanger the lives of the people it serves.
Don't sit there and sugar coat government health car as if nothing is ever wrong with it and everyone is satisfied with it's results. Obviously enough people aren't otherwise there wouldn't be a need for wait insurance and there wouldn't be a market so profitable in it that they took it all the way to the highest court in Canada or that every other insurance provider has a plan that covers wait times.
Despite all the common rhetoric, the welfare system, the social security system, and the medicare system do generally work fairly well.
There is of course, fraud. There are of course, abusers. Those cases make great news and are easily found and pointed out. What doesn't make the news much is what a small percentage of the overall programs that abuse and fraud actually represents.
I would be 100% in favor of specific funding for heath care and social security being held outside the general fund. I won't hold back support without that provision however.
It is my believe that the one thing we're best at in the country, is creating wealth through small business and the employment of our vast numbers through those start up ventures. Unfortunately, our health care system has held that power back for decades now. Small business owners (like me) will not hire people. Potential entrepreneurs cannot start businesses because they can't leave their big-corp jobs for fear of becoming uninsured.
Health insurance needs should not be driving the economic decisions of our entire workforce. If we can make health care equally available to anyone willing to pay at the same rate as anyone else willing to pay -- that alone would re-ignite the powerful economic engine our small business community. The only way to do that, is to make the pool truly universal. If you don't do that, then the "public" pool becomes tainted by virtue of having only the most expensive and difficult to insure. It creates two classes of citizen. Those who are insurable (which ties them to corporate jobs) and those who are not (which then must be taxpayer funded as a disproportionately high risk).
I can't say yet if I support the currently proposed plan -- because frankly nobody has read it yet. I do look forward to SOME plan.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Like, what the whole thing would cost the taxpayers, how many billions we'll have to pay to fund everything. Not what each person who joins up would pay individually.
Unless you were being facetious, in which case, carry on.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Part of the rationale behind Social Security is that people are too stupid to voluntarily put away their money.
The number of bankruptcies and foreclosures that took place over the past year should be sufficient to confirm this.
I don't like paying for irresponsible people any more than you do. However, the societal cost of widespread poverty would be far greater than the cost of the social security tax. Once again, the current economic kerfuffle is a perfect example of how the irresponsible decisions of a few have lead to the suffering of a great many.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I think the fear is more that, like Social Security, they don't trust that it isn't going to completely fuck us later BECAUSE we can't kill the program.
You mean, when humans stop requiring medical care?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I'm not convinced you've drawn the correlation between economic well-being and marriage rates; a lot of heavily white not-too-poor areas still have poor marriage rates, high divorce rates, and high abortion rates. But events IRL have, sadly, distracted me in a negative manner, so I'll just pass on further exploration of that, though I think we could have an interesting back-and-forth on it.
At this point, I think I have a reasonable handle on your position about international trade: the socioeconomic costs of displacement are sufficiently high that they outweigh the economic gains from trade, even if some of those gains are used to create a social safety net against the effects of displacement. Is that a fair summation? If so, then I think we've at least tacked down the bounds of what we're disagreeing on. I do agree that the social safety net was historically insufficient, particularly when coupled with the effects of racism. I don't agree that it cannot be made sufficient and still have a net gain.
My contention would be that the gain in overall standard of living as a result of the free trade was enough to, even with that poor safety net, still result in an improved standard of living over the status that America, including black Americans, would have had with an isolationistic trade policy, as much of that industrial boom came during a period when the US was very much a net exporter; without those exports manufacturing would not have boomed as much and both the black citizenry and the populace as a whole would have been worse off. But that's arguing a what-if situation, which is very hard to prove one way or another.
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
What a poor excuse for a human being. It is astounding to me what compels somebody to abuse anonymous commenting to spout such bail. Probably ruined every relationship in his live and can't tolerate the fact that others found lasting love.
It doesn't need to have 'nothing ever wrong with it.' What it needs is to have a distinct improvement over the alternative. The argument is that the set of problems inherent in a national health care system is preferable to the set of problems inherent in the current mess. If a public/private mix works best, great, go with that. But rejecting the premise that a national plan could be better due to ideological rejection of government programs is no way to make policy.
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
I'm not a republican...I consider myself quite indie.
But really...is this what we want? I mean, look how GREAT Social Security is working out...will be bankrupt by the time I reach retirement age.
I can see Obama-care going the same way, unless we start taxing pretty much everyone by 55% or more on all income.
Frankly, I'd rather them open up the HSA program for eveyone and make it easier to save your own money to pay for routine medical care, and just have insurance for emergencies.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Exactly.
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
Drawing the line is indeed tricky. If you're just tuning in, political theorists have been having this discussion since the mid-1800s, while the rest of the world has been pretty much content to sit by and ignore it.
Go read up on John Stuart Mill. He started formulating his ideas around the same time as Marx and Engels, in response to the same socioeconomic crises of the era. However, his core theory of government would be considered libertarian (and surprisingly relevant) by modern ideals:
The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right...The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns him, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.â
In my experience, this model tends to be popular with both modern conservatives and liberals. It doesn't place any explicit limits of the size of the government, but, rather places a more fundamental restriction on a government's purpose or function. In that regard, it actually allows for certain socialist ideals to exist alongside a relatively restricted government.
Healthcare often isn't an individual problem, but rather a societal one. If the state can provide a system of healthcare that serves the vast majority of the population better and more efficiently than a privatized system, the government reserves every right to implement such a system.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
It's not that conservatives hate the poor, but, rather that they strive for a society with a rigid class structure.
Effectively, this works out to be a very bad deal for the poor, leaving them in a situation that is literally hopeless.
Also, what about the mayors (usually republican) who round up the homeless, put them on buses, and offload them in other counties?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Didn't Hillary take about $850K to drop her push for universal health care around 1994? That is Michael Moore tells us, any Mikey is not exactly a right winger.
My guess is: the health care companies will give Obama a pile of money, and that will be the end of it.
It is not a dem vs repub thing (both parties are corrupt, IMO), it's just the way things work in the USA.
Lobbyists literally write the bills, which congress will rubber-stamp after the appropriate "speaker's fees" or "service fees."
Let me be clear: there hasn't been a *good* president since Regan. And there's no argument that Carter was anything but inept and worthless as a president. Especially since I was there; I remember it. We liked Bush I thinking he'd be a continuation; he wasn't. Bush II was even less. Voting for McCain required an act of discipline.
The underlying, unalterable fact is that we're so far in debt we're about to collapse, and Obama, in continuation of a Democrat plan (they were first to be seduced) they want to put in a few trillion for Healthcare.
We don't need it. No one (statistically speaking) gets turned away. And as soon as we can't borrow any more, we'll be inventing new "Depression Songs" because no one will be able to power our computers or boom boxes anymore: collapse is that way. And the only people to survive will be those with tons of power now, and government jobs.
Government never has to cut back. Never has to sacrifice; it's been that way too long.
They work for us; they're working for themselves just now, both Democrat and Republican. And surprise of surprises, it's the Conservatives that want to keep the Constitution rather than shred it. Surprise of surprises, the gunman at the holocaust memorial shooting was on Obama's side, not the Conservative side.
We've all been duped. Most on the Left, but many on the right. It's time to do something about it.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
One has to wonder if Canada's health care system is facing a particularly challenge due to the brain drain to the US that attracts medical professionals with higher wages (Canadian's are easily admitted for immigration due to NAFTA).
Great...how about everyone that wants Canada-care, moves to Canada.
I'd prefer the US to still be the land or free choice, and personal responsibility. Why shouldn't everyone save money for routine health needs just like you save for retirement, etc?
Insurance should ONLY be for emergency care ( like a heart attack)....
If it were easier for everyone to set up pre-tax HSA's to save for routine stuff, and insurance was ONLY for emergencies....it would cost everyone less all around.
Of course that would necessitate the typical US citizen learning how to be responsible, like we used to be a few decades ago.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I would agree, that your body is inviolate so long as you pay for its upkeep, but once you start waving the cup around for someone else's dough to take care of you, the placer of the coin in the cup has more say than you.
In other words, you only believe that people have the rights their money can buy and that once someone pays a dime to help you, that they own you. You might as well not have a right to an attorney if you're poor by that logic.
Frankly, I find this worldview abhorrent because it denies that people have any rights at all -- only that which they have the might to take for themselves. I can't think of any more anti-democratic notion than that right there.
Quite honestly, the thing that is causing abortions more than anything else is free trade and its attendant destruction of the middle class.
Actually, I'd argue that refusing to teach kids about condoms is probably causing more abortions than any other policy decision in America today.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Are you two douchebags sitting in red leather recliners with many a leather bound book at your backs, dressed in red smoking jackets with pipes in your mouths? If not, you should be - it would add nearly 1% to your pointless pomposity.
... there is fair and level playing field?
Hm. Not is it only a legend, but it's a complete misrepresentation of how a socialist government works!
Even In Soviet Russia, hard-workers were allowed to reap rewards for their labors. High achievers were placed into more desirable jobs, and given more attractive perks.
The Soviet system had a great many flaws, although it somehow managed to survive for 80 years, and transformed their country into a superpower. If the system actually functioned as the professor described it, the country would have collapsed within 5 years.
The problem described by the fictional professor could even broadly be applied to any organized society.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Well, no!
And I mean that with all due respect. The problem is that people are holding these other countries up as models as if they are flawless. The very real fact is that they all have their own unique problems that most of us find them just as unacceptable as our own current problems. Some of the problems are inherent in a government running health care instead of regulating it. Most people who are against government health car are so because the US federal government has no constitutional authority to provide medical coverage, it's stretching some authority to regulate it as it is. You can blow that off as a ideological reason but it's a pretty important reason.
This bill here is riddled with problems too. First, it sets a standard lower then current policies provide and mandates that anything extra must be billed and charged separate from it's mandate levels of coverage. Second, it kills any preventative treatments that cost over 5k a year for an individual and 10k a year for family coverage. You can be stuck paying for anything over that. It limits treatments to accepted treatments which mean that drug trials and experimental procedures and off label uses are forbidden and will have to be paid for out of your own pocket. Suppose you have cancer and there is a treatment already in use for genital warts that seems to work well on your cancer in fact, so far it had cured 9 out of 10 patients, you will have to pay out of your pocket for this less expensive treatment or suffer the kemo and so on until the treatment kills you or works. Those are just the few problems I saw before my eyes started hurting from reading the mess. The bill offers less of a quality of care/coverage then current medicaid and medicare program offers and it intends to replace that coverage. This part alone should be enough to raise some fucking flags but you want to tilt at windmills shouting idiolect injustice.
The bottom line is that the bill doesn't need to be complicated nor does it need to reduce the quality of coverage or care for people already with insurance. All they need to do is create a law that very plainly says, If you offer insurance across a state line then you need to offer a plan that has X coverage for with no lifetime max or disqualifications that can't have more then a 20% copay for procedures under $5000 or 10% copay for procedures over $5000 but less then $10,000 and not more then %5 copay for anything over that. Then make the premiums 10% or less of anyone's monthly income (household income for family coverage) for anyone making more less then the median area income and allow citizens to deduct the expenses from their income for tax purposes. You could even allow the insurance company to track any losses over this extra coverage and deduct them from their taxes owed to the government. As for mandating coverage, wait until someone needs medical treatment who is not insured and make them take this minimum coverage out for a minimum of five years from their last use of the insurance for retroactive coverage.
There you have emergency medial coverage for anyone who wants it, those who truly can't afford it will be covered by an existing medicare or medicaid program, and someone who decides to take the risk isn't left hanging but will have to commit when they become a burden. Policies that offer more coverage are covered, and a minimum standard is set.
And where do the hell do Canadians or Kiwis or British get off telling us how to run our own country?
Fuck, all you Americans do is run around telling everyone how to run their countries. Your copyright isn't strict enough, someone might watch a DVD they bought on Linux. Your drug laws aren't strict enough. We're going to ignore the courts that we agreed to follow in that treaty because we're bigger.
You guys are so hypocritical and so indoctrinated that you don't see your own flaws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
This oughtta be rich!
Actually, I'd argue that refusing to teach kids about condoms is probably causing more abortions than any other policy decision in America today.
Actually, I could see the point in that. I don't like that our society is so hypersexual, but the irony is, a lot of gay people that I've talked to, feel the same way. If sex was something kept in the closet, we would all be better off.
So, there needs to be a message that sexuality isn't everything, but, if there is, then, we should have birth control available, and, if, a woman does get pregnant, then we as a society need to step up to the plate and have cradle to the grave health services for her and her child. Kinda tough to say that you are pro-life, when you mandate that a woman who has a child has to starve or watch her child starve. It's kinda hard to want to be against abortion, and not be in favor of single payer health care.
As it is, I think abortion is terrible, absolutely, a killing of a person. But rather than demonize people I think the answer is to create a society that values life. It's time to ask ourselves, if you are so pro-life, than be pro-child.
This is my sig.
I hope you're not suggesting sugar, in and of itself, causes diabetes...
The problem with a state run insurance plan is that that the state has never made anything more efficient. Ever.
Except perhaps the fire department, post office and schools. In the last two cases, we have private and semi-private solutions competing against state based solutions, which seems to work well enough. I guess that means that one solution doesn't fit all situations.
On another note, it costs 11x as much to treat a broken leg in the USA than in Canada, purely from a billing perspective. Clearly the private insurance companies don't have sufficient incentives to keep prices low - perhaps because of a conflict of interest. So it seems that once again laissez-faire economics can introduce inefficiencies.
I'm 100% pro free-market, contingent upon when it works better. The history of public and private institutions shows that private institutions work better most of the time, but not all of the time. I thus support public schools, fire departments, police, libraries and health care. It's not perfect world.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
If you provide the recliners and pipes, I've got the book and the time! Let's do this, people!
All of this presumes, of course, that my esteemed opponent is similarly inclined (or reclined, as the case may be).
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Insurance (of any kind) is an exchange where you pay a higher average (i.e. expected value) in exchange for a smaller variability in the outcome (statistical variance or standard deviation).
For example, suppose that each year one out of ten people one will incur a $10000 medical expense while the others incur no expense. The average cost is $1000, but there is a wide variability ($0-$10000).
Now suppose an insurance company charges $1100. If you take the insurance your average costs would be $100 higher. However, you have also eliminated variability. You no longer have to worry about being surprised by a $10000 bill. Instead you know exactly how much you will have to pay each year.
For things that have only a small amount of variability (e.g. utilities), insurance does not make sense. However, for things (e.g. house burning down) where there is a small but very real chance (e.g. 1 in 10000) of a very high cost (e.g. $100,000), insurance decreases the risk of financial ruin in case you happen to be the unlucky 1 in 10000.
It's not irony. That's just being open minded. If MA's plan worked in MA, then why not try it out on a bigger scale?
I would rather have single payer. There. I said it. I would rather have single payer. Part of it is because of a political deal I cut with my wife and part of it is because I think health insurance companies are dicks anyway, but I think single payer is the way to go.
This is my sig.
Of course that would necessitate the typical US citizen learning how to be responsible, like we used to be a few decades ago.
no, that would require the average American to become an active consumer of health care -- something most of us simply aren't qualified for. (Quote POTUS: "We just do what you tell us to.")
The economics should align with the descion making power. I pay a set amount to a doctor or medical practice of my choice, and then they have responsibility for my health care. If it's $500 cheaper for me to have one procedure over the other, the doctor gets a goodly amount of that. (All, ideally. I already paid for it when I paid for his overall service.) Doctors would then buy insurance to cover extraordinary cases.
Part of the rationale behind Social Security is that people are too stupid to voluntarily put away their money.
That's a very naive and ignorant statement to make. The rationale behind social security is that if there is a system-wide resources pool created and maintained by tiny contributions by their members and managed in order to solve a specific set of issues then all members of that system will be able to easily deal with their issues whenever a need arises. That is due to economy of scale, supply and demand and suppression of redundancy. It's the very same system behind the entire insurance industry. Do you also believe that anyone, which may be a regular joe or a multinational corporation, "is too stupid to voluntarily put away their money" if they happen to sign up for some insurance? Are you also an idiot for signing up for car insurance or life insurance? Are you?
And the case for social security brings even more advantages than private insurance programmes, due to the fact that when you sign with a private company for insurance a hefty cut of your contribution will be misappropriated and misspent by the company managers when signing it off as "profit". As a national social security program isn't profit-driven then the system will be inherently more efficient due to suffering from less clutter and due to the fact that it doesn't lose resources on share-holder dividends an on management bonuses.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Erm, which country are we talking about here? The US which is currently experience:
... that must be some really nice shit you're smoking.
- Near economic collapse and worst recession since the great depression.
- The demise of its auto industry.
- A nearly 1 trillion in un-accountable bailout money.
- Excessive borrowing from foreign countries like China and Sweeden (who will probably stop loaning us money if they think we can't pay it back).
- 10-20% unemployement in many areas.
- The burden of supporting the day-to-day operations of a major military presence in Iraq.
- The rising costs of oil in an oil addicted economy.
- The immanent healthcare crisis in which a major population of the U.S. (the baby boomers) will actually transfer from working status to government sponsored programs.
So yes, which country are you talking about? And if it's the U.S., well
What is their diet and exercise habit? Where is your study that compares the same economic-socio groups.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You had me until this bombshell: Healthcare often isn't an individual problem, but rather a societal one.
How do you reconcile a statement like that with the quote above? Apart from special cases, such as epidemics, I don't see how on earth can you justify interfering with the individual's liberty (i.e forcing us to pay for the healthcare of others, forcing us to take part in the government's system instead of setting up a different one or opting out altogether etc)? If I am sick, how is that your problem, and what right do I have to force you to pay for my doctor's bills so that I can get well?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Actually, Canadians have ALWAYS been easily admitted to the states. They are one of our closest allies. Only UK rates above them. Until W, we had MANY joint operations occurring, such as NORAD.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If African-Americans were not racist, then at most 65% of them would have supported Obama
You, ah, DO realize that it's racist even to categorize those Americans of visibly african descent as "African American", don't you?
Yes, racism played a part in Obama's election. But you know what? we're stuck with it. If you want to run on a white-power platform, you can go right ahead and do so -- there is no moral bar, just politics, that keep you from doing so.
Oh, and btw?
Both Clinton and Obama are Democrats, and their official political positions on the campaign trail were nearly identical
By the time of the actual voting, there had been a half-dozen debates. And in those debates, Obama demonstrated a sense and intellect of a markedly different nature than Clinton. He was, in fact, even mocked for it. When the campaign started, I was going to vote for Clinton; it was only after seeing her performance in the debates that I changed my vote to Obama.
Political Primaries are not a contest of positions -- they are a contest of personality and character. And Obama's was simply a better match for 2007 America than Clinton.
In Canada you would of been out $50 for the ambulance. You'd also might have had to wait till morning to get your fibula set depending on the size of the hospital and probably would of been sent home that evening.
One of the big efficiencies in public insurance is only dealing with one insurer. In private land the various insurers seem to spend all their efforts trying to get the other insurer to pay. Often requiring judges to rule who was at fault. This creates a lot of paper work which leads to bureaucracy that makes governments look efficient.
I forget the actual figures though I'm sure Google knows them, it seems Canada's health system only spends a few percent on bureaucracy whereas the American system sees close to half spent on bureaucrats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Where did grandparent say that conservatives "hate" the poor? Nowhere. They simply said that conservatives want the poor to be poor -- i.e. not have anything.
That you think they said "hate" speaks volumes.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
15% from me, 15% from my employer and 100% worthless.
Bull Shit.
We save for retirement because social security is likely to be insuffucient to maintain the lifestyle we want -- not because it won't be there. That whole "retirement industry" factors it into your calculations -- in fact, there are even insurance programs you can buy that will help you transition over to a fully medicare paid-for life while letting you give your kids the home they grew up in.
Slashdot = Sarcasm
I believe he's talking about the United States of America. You know, the richest country on the planet, accounting for roughly a quarter of the world-wide GDP. I mean, you can go right ahead and cherry pick statistics to misrepresent this simple fact, but all it does is show you to be either dishonest or stupid... neither of which is going to sway the opinion of any rational person.
Sorry. Calling BS on this one. :)
OF COURSE its popular, its 'free' to the recipients, but when you ask the people who are actually forking over the money to pay for it its not so popular in that demographic. You don't fix health care by taxing more out of people, you let the system work like it should. Competition, kill the BS lawsuits which drive up malpractice insurance, kill the BS extended term patents on meds, make the insurance companies not try and bill everyone you ever knew on the planet when you have your teeth cleaned, 'just in case'.
The democrats plan always seems to just boil down to 'Well, so and so wants something for free and the best way to do that is to tax others more'
Thanks, but no thanks. I already pay a decent chunk for my families care, as well as other 'benefits' I will never see in my life time due to the system being broken and people wanting it for free. Fix the real problem, a litigious society and people wanting something for nothing, which I guess amounts to the same thing a lot of the time today.
Canada has a completely-free universal national healthcare system.
It is not free. For medical services in Canada the government collects payment in the form of taxes.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Pro-life (Democrat or Republican) advocates would probably agree with your statements about why abortions occur. That's not really the what the argument is about. The problem boils down to this--whether or not you believe that a fetus is a human being or a piece of tissue.
Of course, they're too busy trying to make ends meet to spend any money on campaign contributions, so they don't matter, do they?
You couldn't afford $5 and one hour of your time over a two-year period?
You, sir, are neglecting your patriotic duty to help choose your leaders. If you'd rather go watch a movie than help influence the government, then you have no right to complain.
You mean they study Austrian economics, a system decidedly out of the economics mainstream and without much intellectual merit.
The vast majority of Austrian economists predicted that we would have a very deep recession, way back when most mainstream economists were still talking about the possibility of a "slowdown" in the housing sector, which might spread to the rest of the economy. You can spew as much bullshit as you want, but you can't change that fact. The mainstream was wrong, and the Austrians were right.
Austrian economics rejects most quantitative assessment of principles...
You can't disprove a priori knowledge with "quantitative assessment". In other words, no amount of empirical evidence will ever disprove the Pythagorean theorem.
Its axioms are ambiguous, its terms ill-defined.
Are you sure you're not talking about Keynesian economics? You might want to check out this chapter, where Rothbard simply murders the "equation of exchange".
If you don't believe me, show one of their foundational books to a mathematician and watch as you are laughed out of the room.
Really? I'd be much more impressed if they were able to point out a flaw in the author's reasoning. But, laughing is much easier than engaing in critical thinking, isn't it?
I'm a staunch libertarian anarchist and the parent here is correct. Austrian economics is bogus, it is fetishism within the libertarian movement that needs to die. Most so-called "Austrian" libertarians don't know the first thing about its methodology or scientific methodology in general.
I do think that everyone having healthcare is desirable, however, I do not think a moral case can be made that you can force other people to pay for it--much the same way I feel everyone should be able to eat, but no one should be forced to cook for other people.
When applied to education, this is called a "voucher system", and Republicans love it.
You're all forgetting one thing. . . do you really want to put your health in the hands of the federal government? I don't know how many of you are veterans but have you been to the VA Hospital lately?
We have a health care system to overhaul??
It's still 2009 isn't it?
I love how the same people that laugh at government waste ($500 hammers, anyone?) can seriously think government-run healthcare would be anything but a complete disaster with respect to finances and efficiency.
you... well.... DO realize that the $500 hammer was a government contractor purposefully overbilling, right?
Or to put it another way -- it was PRIVATE ENTERPRISE causing the waste and greed.
Schumpeter is the greatest of those economist who understand that economics is a social science, not a kind of applied mathematics. But though he was very Austrian, his relationship to the Austrian school was a complicated one, and in many ways he was an outlier.
If so, then I think we've at least tacked down the bounds of what we're disagreeing on
We have.
I do agree that the social safety net was historically insufficient
I don't think that it could ever be sufficient, per se, in that, one's worth is ultimately related to what one produces in life. I would rather have some Americans paying slightly more for a consumer good to keep all Americans employed.
But that's arguing a what-if situation, which is very hard to prove one way or another.
Fair enough. That's why I like to look at the Civil War as a basis of comparison. The free trading south vs the protectionist north is rather definitive then and now.
My point is that economists do not consider the well being one gets when one makes things for oneself. In my mind, self sufficiency is the conservative value, and that, it is better to be self sufficient at the expense of some consumer goods than it is to be entirely efficient. I do not agree that freedom and living free automatically makes one the best or most productive society but I will argue that the best way to live is to live free. Self reliance matters. Personal industry matters. Those to me, are conservative values.
This is my sig.
The fact is a free-market economy is the ONLY type of economy on the planet that actually works
I recall a short sci-fi story I read awhile back. A bunch of academics created a computer, that would model real-world situations and allow for the accelerated projection of various laws and programs -- a kind of "super Sim City", if you will. The academics plugged in their free-market model, hit "compute", and let it run for a long-enough virtual time to let the virtual society adjust. The result, voila, was 100% employment! It was grand, and exciting. And then the academics started looking at the specifics, and saw a wide variety of careers such as "prostitute" and "Drug dealer."
The free market works perfectly -- so long as you have no moral compunctions about the type of employment being done, or what the maximum penalty of failure is.
I encourage you to investigate lovely things like "starving to death" and "debtors prisons" if you think a free market will solve all of our ills. What it does, it does perfectly -- but it can't do everything, and can't be trusted to do anything how we'd like it done.
"Providing private healthcare alternatives (for any of the above 3 cases, or any other case) is illegal."
I've long since supported the idea of nationalized healthcare system, but it doesn't have to come with a requirement like this, and I'd argue that it shouldn't.
No system is *perfect*, a private emergency backup (bad choice of words?) for the national system wouldn't hurt.
Furthermore, allowing private care would be a good way to defuse some complaints from the section of the population that *does* have the money for it.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Sorry to keep replying, but I enjoy a meeting of the minds from someone opposite apart of the political spectrum.
Have you ever been to a really good arts and crafts show? I mean the ones where you have dozens of artists and craftsmen making all sorts of things themselves and taking great care and pride in it. I saw a guy that made a chair out of a solid chunk of wood and sanded that thing finer and finer for three months until it was as smooth as glass. I have seen people blow their own glass, artists that make their own film. These are the people that I want my country to be about. I don't care if they are liberals or conservatives. I care that they are down there with their hands and their vision and their minds making stuff, making things work on their own. That's my America. I like the liberal old hippy with her garden and her hemp clothes. That's my America. I like the bikers that know how to run a machine shop and make their own bikes. That's my America. It's like, I don't care if what they do costs more... maybe, we can't have it all. But I like that there people that cannot help but make their own lives in my country to doing something... I just, I'm in favor of the artist.
This is my sig.
But even a fucking moron can see this tripe is designed with the insurance companies profits in mind. Screw the BS. Go ahead and kick the private insurance companies to the side and make it truly government supplied health care. Single ayer with no private companies taking a cut from the pie. There will be waste and corruption no matter what, but leaving private companies involved will double waste, corruption and cost at the bare minimum.
QFT
Many of the advantages I see in nationalized health care come from private insurers NOT being involved.
But something like this seems like a good first step/trial run/start in the right direction / etc
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
under the current us system, if you are poor, there are plenty of robust failsafes like medicare, medicaid, state programs, etc, that guarantee your health at no or very little cost
if you are rich, well, you're rich: you can pay for your healthcarte
but, and here's the big one: if you are middle class, and you get a major health problem, you have to declare bankruptcy. and even if you are well, you have nothing but grief: cobra has a time limit, preexisting conditions deny your healthcare, horrible deductibles, bureaucrats denying your claims (i love the argument that govt run healthcare will mean your healthcare will be decided by bureaucrats: HEY MORONS, WHO DECIDES YOUR HEALTHCARE DECISIONS RIGHT NOW? CORPORATE BUREAUCRATS!)
from a completely cynical point of view, healthcare reform makes simple political sense because the american middle class are being shafted in the current system, and they hate the current system. it makes simple obvious political common sense to address how much the american middle class hates their current healthcare system. that's really the bottom line here. the current system is politically indefensible... unless some lobbyist lines your pockets of course
represent the people, washington dc assholes, not the lobbyists. and the people's desires are loud and clear: govt run healthcare, a vast improvement over our current system
no matter how many problems you can find with govt run healthcare, our current system SUCKS FAR WORSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/health/policy/21poll.html
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I do a lot of government contract work, and in my opinion the main thing driving costs is that budgets and project objectives are not cost driven. For example, we analyze all our samples on a 24-hour turn around rather than a standard turn around in order to get the results sooner because they want the projects to be completed rapidly. Once one phase is completed, they sit on the project for a couple months while they decide what to do. It costs 50% more to expedite the samples, but it would only add one or two months to a year long project at most.
Another good example is doing things out of order. If you're going to build a school, it makes sense to remove all the buildings before you do the environmental remediation. However, if they feel the budget may be time-sensitive (as in it will go away if they don't spend it right away) they will go-ahead and start the remediation before the demolition is complete, effectively doubling the price do the added difficulty. The worst part is that they expect you to eat some of the excess costs even thought you told them it would cost more.
In any case, the government essentially contracts everything, so of course any example of government waste will include a contractor.
Social Security also normalizes risk across the whole population. A system that relies totally on individuals to save and invest would have a certain percentage of people ending up with no or negative return on their investment and some who overwhelmingly exceed the average (and don't think it's because everyone at the top "deserves" it - there's an element of randomness in markets). SS trims both tails off the curve -- preventing complete devastation on the left side at the expense of the fortunate ones on the right side. For those Masters of the Universe who feel slighted because you think you should be on the right side of the curve, I wouldn't worry about it. Fire up your E*Trade account make up for it with your investing superiority.
Progressive's [sic] simply don't understand economics...
The fact is a free-market economy is the ONLY type of economy on the planet that actually works.
Your ignorance is showing. Hereis a nice starting point for you. Start with
then move on to current examples such as
These are still free markets. The difference is who controls the means of production - the people who actually make shit, or others.
I have lived in Germany, the US and Canada (in that order) for many years.
I left the US for a variety of reasons. The fact that I can keep my health care here in Canada when I am between jobs or start my own business was one of the things that attracted me.
Can't say the medical service that my family and I received here wasn't to my satisfaction. Have one kid that was borne in NC and the other in Canada - the experience in NC was far worse.
In other words, we should force people to stop doing something because a forwarded email written by some woo-woo kool-aid drinker said that, facts be damned, it's bad? Brilliant health care plan you've got there.
I think the larger point is that health care is so expensive that we cannot afford to pay for it ourselves, and that, if an insurance company cannot operate profitably, it means probably that health care is too expensive for society as a whole.
I think it's possible that just as rising home prices were driven by rising practice of purchasing on credit, medical care costs may be getting more expensive in no small part because insurance makes them that way. It means that it's possible to charge costs higher than a market without it would bear.
Not that health care is much of a "market" really. It's darn near impossible to find out how much anything beyond an office visit and very simple procedures even cost, much less make comparisons and estimates of quality of service. I'm not sure if this is again a function of insurance, or if it's that the demand for care greatly outstrips supply, but it doesn't seem health care providers actually compete for patients.
Tweet, tweet.
I believe that is very much an illusion right now, which most U.S. citizens are shielded from due to rampant borrowing. The current U.S. debt is 82.5% of GDP (according to wikipedia : P). So I don't think I'm cherry picking facts here and it is fact very irrational to assume that the U.S. can maintain it's multi-trillion dollar spending spree just because it had a history of being wealthy and still has a bit of cash left over.
Both good posts.
once a large national program is established to provide for everyone something that they want (cheaper health care), it will be impossible to kill again later
No, it won't. They're doing it in other countries as we speak and it's going well. You see, because they are controlling it, they are messing it up so you are forced to go to private clinics if you want good health care. The worst part is, the national health care program is mandatory and crap in many countries. The good side is, it works better than the current private health care system in the US. I'm paying about 10% of my salary for the national health care program and I'm using about 10% of that (I rarely get ill)... but it's still cheaper and better than in the US. OTOH, my grandmother who has been retired for decades doesn't pay but she gets health care whenever she needs.
Please, US citizens, check out the details of this program and if it's very similar to the ones that are already going on in Europe, vote for it.
Face it the reason the US doesn't have public health care is because the political system is corrupt and panders to every big corporate group in existence. The will to make a profit over rides the health of the population. It is a model for a pandemic.
Your whole argument that SS isn't a ponzi scheme boils down to "hey, if the government finds other sources of money to pay into it, it's still viable!" You can tweak the system all you want, all you're going to do is delay the inevitable implosion. Social Security is inherently inviable program. It depends on more and more workers every year to support an ever-growing number of retirees. At the time the program was implemented the numbers worked out fairly well, but now life expectancy is WAY higher than it was in the 30s and as a result there are far too many people drawing SS checks than the system can support. This isn't just my opinion, this is well documented and EVEN THE GOVERNMENT admits the problems:
I hear that Social Security has a big financial problem? Why?
Social Security's financing problems are long term and will not affect today's retirees and near-retirees for many years, but they are very large and serious. People are living longer, the first baby boomers are nearing retirement, and the birth rate is lower than in the past. The result is that the worker-to-beneficiary ratio has fallen from 16.5-to-1 in 1950 to 3.1-to-1 today. Within 20 years it will be 2.1-to-1. At this ratio there will not be enough workers to pay scheduled benefits at current tax rates.
That's straight from the horse's mouth, at http://www.ssa.gov/qa.htm, BTW.
Depends on what you mean by "richest". In raw GDP, no question. But per capita, the US ranges from 10th to 17th depending on who you ask.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
The health insurance situation in the US can be vastly improved with one simple change: Make it ILLEGAL for any group (usually employers) to get preferential pricing from health insurance companies. Insurance should cost the same for any two people in the same situation, including taxes. I have my own business so I have to pay a lot more for health insurance. I know companies pay part of employees premiums, but the total of employer contribution plus employee contribution plus taxes is a lot less than it is for people who are self employed or work for a small business.
This one simple change:
1. makes health insurance companies compete - people will shop around instead of just getting a provider chosen for you by your employer.
2. makes everyone realize what they are really paying for heath care. When things come out of a paycheck like taxes, people seem to accept it more than if they had to write out a check for it each month. If people realized how expensive it is they would be outraged and more likely to shop around or get involved politically. Most people don't need the low deductible, cover-everything plans some of employers offer at low costs - they would probably lower their coverage if paying for it out of pocket. Anytime people aren't paying with their own money costs skyrocket (just ask politicians). "Oh look, he has good insurance, let's run this test and this treatment too, your insurance will cover it"
The issues of pre-existing conditions and people who can't afford any form of health insurance are different. If you let anyone get medical treatment without paying, and cover pre-existing conditions, then you are no longer talking about INSURANCE which is a hedge against unforeseen problems. Then you are talking about government-run health CARE, which would likely be the end of the private health insurance industry as we know it. Whether or not that a good thing is an a different argument, but with all of their lobbyists I don't see it happening anytime soon, so let's start by fixing health insurance, and go from there.
Open Source is Common Sense: http://groovix.com/
Two problems with that: first, I wasn't talking about myself and second, I worked the polls at every election for over ten years before moving, and would do so again if asked. I take my civic duties very seriously, TYVM.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
40% of white people didn't vote for Barack Obama because of the color of his skin.
If Barack Obama were white he would have gotten 95% of the white vote. The other 5% are just the ones with a slutty flight attendant fetish.
paintball
Ike.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
First, I do not sit on my couch eating cheetos, I am in really good shape. You can see me here fighting in black in the 40+ division:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ihNSNR04hI
Second, I have a genetic condition, and have a lot at stake in this debate.
Third, I am for universal care, but not designed by Ted Kennedy.
Fourth, it should be a catastrophic plan with high deductible. The poor will be subsidized. Singapore's plan would be the model.
you can now go back to your pringles.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
Yes, I am afraid he is. And that is the kind of misinformation that just makes things worse... worse that the people who think we have the best there is. Even Fricken Mexico has better Coca-Cola than we do in the U.S. (Just so you know, HFCS {high fructose corn syrup} isn't something the human body can process well. Sugar is definitely better for you.)
So add to the list of serious requirements in addition to reforms in the FDA, we need some serious education and unbiased research. We don't need the dairy counsel recommending higher and higher USRDA for milk every year as we do now. (Seriously, milk people recommend we drink more milk!! Can you imagine that?! The same guys who have been lobbying the FDA to change the definition of "organic" because their milk doesn't fir the description!)
I just watched that movie "Idiocracy" tonight... accidentally. But its message was clear -- what happens when business runs/owns government. Business interests aren't what's best for the people. The government is supposed do what's best for the people and at the moment, we have "immortal corporate persons" receiving pretty much whatever it wants at the expense of the people. It's a mess.
The FDA has the power to regulate what food stuff is sold to the public and so far they are getting rid of certain kinds of oils used for frying. It's progress but a LONG way is still ahead. It doesn't mean we don't get our junk food and crap. The junk food made in the past was a LOT healthier than the crap we are eating today... healthier and more delicious on top of it. We need to go back to the good stuff... well, a lot of it anyway. (not all)
Stop. We know you're lying.
The Canadian system doesn't work. We know that because we've been told so by our politicians , and they should know because they get a lot of contributions from the health care system and go to a lot of cocktail parties. And we've been told it so many times that we know it's true.
The approximately 20% growth health care stocks showed for at least a decade, back when I paid attention, was because they were so amazing and efficient and wonderful, not because they were siphoning off more and more of our healthcare dollars.
The paperwork is good because it generates jobs. Jobs we NEED. The American system is the best in the world. A Canadian-style system would cost us a fortune and kill us with crappy care. You won't get to choose your own doctor. You'll wait for surgery, the hospitals will fall apart and no one will ever become a doctor again. You should know all that. Haven't you been watching TV?
"Democrats, far from sobbing and calling it 'genocide,' actively seek to expand access to these clinics on the basis that government should not be intervening in a woman's personal medical decisions."
I don't want to hear that abortions are "personal medical decisions." That's like calling me murdering my brother because he's an inconvenience a "personal family decision." Abortion is murder, easy as that. It is not a "choice." A mother has NO RIGHT to murder their unborn child.The only time it is EVER justified is if the mother is going to die. Which brings me to your next point:
"most abortions are for cases where the fetus would not survive for one reason or another (including that the mother might not survive delivery)"
Abortion clinics do not need to exist to serve this kinda "need." If a doctor determines that an abortion is the only thing that will save the mothers life then the mother can have the abortion in the hospital. Now on to one of your scarier points:
"Most of the rest are because the prospective parent is not ready or able to provide a stable family life"
Holy (insert diety here)! I'm back to murdering my brother because he is an inconvenience! So, if you were sitting in the jury for my murder trial you'd see my deed justified? I'll be sure to give you a call! How can you justify killing an innocent VIABLE life just because the parents can't provide for him? Are you really going to kill someone just because their parents, in all likelihood, were too careless to use a simple condom? It's called foster care. There are plenty of alternatives to abortion.
So in short:
Abortion is murder.
It is only justified to save the mother's life. Stop getting mad at republicans for wanting to stop murder. I challenge you this: go attend an optional abortion. Watch the doctor end the life of another human being. Watch him remove arms, legs, and other body parts. Watch him place those bloody, translucent, partially-formed, parts into a bowl. Don't you dare turn your head away, watch it. Then come back and defend optional abortions.
P.S. I'm not a republican, I don't even pledge an allegiance to any kind of God, but I still recognize and despise murder when I see it.
I think the important thing is that that waste is OURS. We pay for that waste. So it ought to be the people who get the waste, not the investors of a corporation.
We pay $50. We get $20 worth of healthcare. The companies waste $20 and pocket $10.
If the gov gives us $20 worth of healthcare and wastes $20, it still only costs us $40. We get to keep the $10.
I'm a little tired of paying $50 for some disposable blue paper slippers in a hospital. I want the profit on that crap to go back in my pocket.
You are absolutely correct. And to add to this, those uninsured people only come in when they're critical, when it costs buckets of money to help them. They never come in for preventative care or advice. The system is designed to financially screw us and to keep them alive with lowest productivity. Perfect.
So what, having a debt:GDP ratio under 1 during a severe economic downturn just means we are REALLY wealthy. Also this is hardly an unprecedented level of debt for the US, we just recently surpassed the percentage we were at during the early 1960's. All of that is beside the point that we already spend WAY more than anyone else on healthcare as a percentage of GDP so it's likely updating our system would reduce our expenditures. Oh and reducing military expenditures from 20% more than the rest of the world combined to only equal to the rest of the world combined sure would free up some cash for other programs....
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
You can believe in whatever you want, but don't confuse yourself by thinking that has anything to do with reality. The US dollar is the world reserve currency. We borrow at better rates than any other nation, and debt happens to be one of our biggest exports. We have that privileged status precisely because of our GDP, and it won't be changing in the near future.
And please stop with the ongoing misrepresentation of debt statistics. We're in the early stages of recovering from the worst economic crisis in 60 years. Even if the year-end debt ratio ends up at 85%, it's still a whole lot better than the depression era peak at 120%. And the fact is that deficit spending is pretty much the only way to pull the economy out of a major low like this. Fortunately, the economy is already showing signs of recovery, and that debt ratio is going to drop back down quickly. But if we don't find a way to reduce health care costs over the next decade it's going to get a whole lot worse, and stay there permanently.
So, rather than waste my time paying attention to meaningless epithets like "multi-trillion dollar spending spree," I think I'll just stick with logic and established economic theory. You're welcome to keep believing in imaginary economics if it makes you happy though. But please strop trying to drag other people into your delusions.
We don't think they hate the poor. We just think conservatives view the poor as poor by choice. That if they just weren't so lazy like those damn Mexicans they would be rich like them. That the system is fair and balanced to give everyone a fair shot and that if you don't go to Harvard it was because you just didn't pull yourself up by your boot straps and work hard enough.
Liberals view the problem as largely one of an entrenched class structure in which upbringing and opportunities presented to the wealthy often aren't available to those born into poverty. They recognize that less than 10% of Americans rise up a class during their lifetime.
Well, I work with a few people who say that poor people shouldn't have health care if they can't afford it. "They should get jobs so they can afford it. They could but they don't because they're lazy." I paraphrase.
My coworkers don't hate poor people, they just want them to die if they can't pay for their own care. Because they're lazy and because giving them something would be unfair.
So you're right. Conservatives don't hate poor people. They just want the herd culled, which is good for everyone.
It's not that conservatives hate the poor, but, rather that they strive for a society with a rigid class structure. Effectively, this works out to be a very bad deal for the poor, leaving them in a situation that is literally hopeless.
I hope by your stated opinion above that you aren't implying that the rich are somehow responsible for making sure the poor aren't as poor as they could be if left to their own devices? If so, my first question is: who exactly dictated it is the rich person's responsibility to take care of everyone else who makes less than them? Secondly, it is one thing for someone to *voluntarily* give something to charity. It is another thing entirely for the government to *take* that same thing away from that person (i.e. their hard-earned money) through whatever means they think makes it look good (i.e. taxes to fund social programs) and give it to whoever the gov't sees fit (i.e. the poor) using the excuse that the gov't somehow believes they can handle a rich person's property (i.e. money) better than that rich person.
To all the rich liberals who believe the rich conservatives should be sharing the wealth, I say they should be willing to give all their salary first to be an example before they force others to follow suit. Maybe Obama should take a $1 salary and give everything else to all the people who thought that Obama was going to pay for their mortgage if elected? The U.S. already has programs for the poor that people can give voluntarily to in order to help those less fortunate. If the democrats want the same thing for healthcare then make it voluntary. I for one work hard for my money and don't want it being used without my consent for someone else's insurance.
I don't think that just because someone feels they *shouldn't* be responsible for everyone who is less fortunate it means they want a rigid class structure. For those with jobs, we all work hard at them to earn our income. Obama is basically creating a 2 class society: lower middle class and an upper middle class. He is doing this by arbitrarily stating that anyone who rakes in over $250k a year is now deemed rich by his personal standard. Who is he to say who is considered rich and is therefore responsible for others less fortunate? At least $250k includes himself unless he is exempt due to being president. That "rhich" person must now give some of his money, through taxes, to the gov't so it can be redistributed for whatever the gov't deems necessary. Currently that reason is for universal healthcare.
Why doesn't Obama propose an N class society based on various income levels just like the federal income tax brackets which already exist for purposes of determining who pays for who's healthcare? Every person in a particular bracket in effect passes their money down to people in the next lower bracket through taxes. Obviously the people in the lowest bracket get to keep all their money that others had to pay in to taxes that will eventually be used to pay for others' healthcare, plus they get free money from the people in the bracket above them. Now based on that scenario, don't you think all the people in the middle brackets would be pissed that they have to support the people in the bracket below them? That is how the rich feel now based on how they know the 2 class system will operate if implemented. In an N class society created to support universal healthcare, even some of the "poor" would complain. We don't have the luxury of them seeing the problem of having to support others with their own money in a 2 class society. In a 2 class society, you are either being supported with health insurance paid for by the rich or you are the rich having to pay for someone else's insurance. If some of the people who would normally benefit from this had to become a person who supported someone else in this manner we wouldn't have so many poor people supporting this idea.
To say the rich can afford supporting someone else is typical of a democrat who feels everything should be fair. M
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
The problem, as you point out, is with the Department of Agriculture's policies, not the FDA.
I can't believe this got modded.
If Ron Paul were president every major bank would be out of business and we would be in great depression #2. Doing nothing is what caused the great depression in the first place as 12k banks failed and everyone pulled money and stopped spending out of fear. Just let the market correct it right?
BoA and many other banks were tens of billions in red and own over a half of corporate and consumer bank accounts. Yes you can scream its my money do not give it to the banks! But the fact of the matter is we were very close to having a full freeze last fall.
Ron Paul favors a 20% national sales tax! Tell me how this would help create jobs and benefit everyone but the millionaires? He favors the rich who make 100x as much as yourself to pay the same amount in taxes and have you spend less to make up for it.
Supply side economics do not work. My economic textbook calls oldschool economists classical economists. They do not understand the marginal prospensity to consume. Basically this means the desire to purchase. Just because things get cheaper does not mean people will buy more when they are afraid their job might not be secure. Ron Paul would argue lower prices will have people buy more. Keysnian economics dictates deflation is the problem not the solution.
I dissagree and think they are cluess and motivated only by greed.
http://saveie6.com/
I'm pretty sure that if you were born in this country, that makes you an American, whether or not you agree with that person's policy positions.
Also, I don't see how a national healthcare system would keep anyone from obtaining private healthcare. If the gov't can't treat you fast enough then pony up and pay for treatment like you would have had to in the first place.
How do you reconcile a statement like that with the quote above? Apart from special cases, such as epidemics, I don't see how on earth can you justify interfering with the individual's liberty (i.e forcing us to pay for the healthcare of others, forcing us to take part in the government's system instead of setting up a different one or opting out altogether etc)? If I am sick, how is that your problem, and what right do I have to force you to pay for my doctor's bills so that I can get well?
Because you being sick is actually societies problem. Firstly, it makes you unable to work. Also, depending on what is up you may be contagious. People who have no healthcare are more likely to not seek treatment since it will cost them money, that will probably leave them ill for longer. So more time off work or more time when you go to work and infect your colleagues.
Anyway, the real con here is that the current medicare system is ridiculously expensive due to the way private insurance companies get to determine risk. By setting up a public, not for profit body that will compete with the insurance companies the idea is to drive down the cost of people getting health insurance. This is why the Republicans are so up in arms, they take campaign donations from the existing insurance companies that are going to suddenly have someone undercutting them if this bill is passed.
I dont read
Insurance companies are profit making entities. Yes they can save you sometimes. But their goal is to screw you anyway possible for a buck. After all, we are not their customers. Are employers our.
Before you think my views sound extreme let me give you some background.
Example I just paid $750 for care 7 months ago and I was insured. Why? My wife's former employer switched PPO's during the time of treatment. Each one cited it was the other ones problem and refused. I am trying to sue for damages in a small claims court. The paperwork says company X is responsible. Company X claims company Y handles all calls due to the contract and hangs up. Company Y says I was not part of their coverage yet so it was company X. My wife quit work 2 months later so company x is trying to comp out saying oh well she doesn't work for them anymore so we just wont pay.
Anyway this has been going on for months where one will hang up on me and hte other will say you were not covered by us yet. Turns out the billing for the services also involve 3 outsourced companies that much approve everything and one just bills the other depending on the care. Its a mess.
How many homes destroyed in New Orleans had insurance pick up the bill? 0. The insurance company claimed it was a flood while the flood insurance company claimed it was a hurricane.
Insurance companies hire tens of thousands of people each year to figure out clever ways to screw people by not paying what they claimed they are bond to cover. They even let people die by withholding life saving procedures until its too late. If the patient dies then they do not have to pay it.
They are a totally evil entity.
http://saveie6.com/
Are you implying that either the VA or Medicaid is GOOD?
Well don't that beat all.
The main reason for future in increase in health care spending is not the uninsured. It is the ageing population. In coming decades a smaller workforce has to pay for everything. Spending will increase significantly. For some info see I.O.U USA.
However there is a way to combat this. A shift in attitude is needed and it won't be easy. Here is my two cents:
People in the US need to pay more taxes. Don't kill me yet, I will explain.
Ever since the Reagan era election slogans have revolved around cutting taxes. This has made paying tax a larger mental burden than it is in most other countries. As the US used to be the land of milk and honey everybody believed that the US should have all basic social commodities usually associated with a industrialized state. The feeling however was that this could be realized without footing the bill. Now it is abundantly clear that nobody picked up the check and instead a needlessly money draining system is in place.
Looking to other industrialized countries with lower or similar GDP spending on health care and a more comprehensive health care system, the difference is obvious. These countries have higher tax rates. In these countries the notion that if you want to enjoy certain benefits like (infrastructure, health care, pensions etc.) they have to be paid for. I'm not saying people like paying tax, but it is not such red flag in front of peoples eyes.
In addition to paying more taxes a major overhaul of the system is needed. The free market principle doesn't have a humanitarian earmark. For services as health care this is sorely needed. As most would agree it is insane if in the US people would die in the streets just because they couldn't afford health care. This does not constitute a wealthy industrialized nation which upholds basic human rights. No sense in preaching freedom as a basic right when other basic rights are neglected.
Enough ranting. For a more eloquent discussion look up some of Jeffrey Sachs's views on the subject.
If I am sick, how is that your problem, and what right do I have to force you to pay for my doctor's bills so that I can get well?
You don't. However, most people do not know in advance if they will someday require a million dollar medical treatment. Therefore, it is to their advantage to pay a flat fee into a huge risk-amortization pool managed by US government. To avoid ethical questions about government's use of force, let people opt out of the pool and stop paying any related taxes. However, they will then have to rely on their own private hospitals for treatments, even in emergency. And organ donations made to public system will not be available for private transplants. Let them see if resources of 10 million mega-rich people can buy more MRI machines than resources of 300 million not-so-rich people. And rejoining the pool will not be easy/cheap as it's not fiscally sound to let people join the insurance pool only when they get sick.
So hard-core libertarians get to die on the road after a car accident, knowing that nobody forced them to pay taxes for a public ambulance service. And the rest of us, who think that government services are for emergencies such as fire, disaster relief or cancer and private sector is for extras like iPods, dining out or plastic surgery, get to have some peace of mind.
I thought the whole point of insurance was to protect me if something unforseen randomly happened, like getting in a car crash, that would really be a big financial strain.
Or like death, something that certainly will happen. Of course, insurance companies and libertarians may prefer to make sick people pay more, but just as well stores would prefer to get customers' money without giving them products. The world does not exist to provide them revenue, they exist to serve sick people.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The biggest problem that I have with nationalized health care is that it effectively guarantees that we're stuck with paying for health care using the insurance model for the rest of our days. The trouble with insurance is that, in theory, less money is supposed to be spent than is put in. This guarantees that there will always be profiteering and "waste" - that's why insurance works. If we didn't already legislate the insurance model so thoroughly already, market-based innovations like interest-bearing health savings accounts might be able to take a better hold.
In an ideal world, I'd like to see all health care spending be tax deductible. If my employer wants to spend money on insurance for me, great. If my employer wants to put money in an interest-bearing health account, like a 401k or something similar, so much the better, provided it's portable from job to job. Heck, if my employer just pays my bills directly - sweet! Let them earn their tax credit either way, and if I choose to do the same, well, let's encourage that, too. It'll never happen, though, especially if this bill gets passed. Besides, all of the market-based innovation in payment methods in the world isn't going to change one basic, simple fact:
Health care is scarce.
There is a finite supply of people willing and capable of being doctors and, due to generational constraints (fewer people in the younger generations than during the Boomer generations), there are fewer and fewer of them than there used to be. Meanwhile, more and more people are consuming more and more health care. This isn't just a case of the Baby Boomers getting older, though that's a big part of it. The other part is that the health care industry can do far more than it could in, say, 1950. In 1930, if you had an infection, they gave you sulfates and told you to start praying. Nowadays, we have books that list nothing but types of antibiotics. We can transplant organs, cure most kinds of cancer if we catch it soon enough, cure nearly any imaginable infection, and on and on and on. If I get an ingrown toenail now, I see a doctor (possibly even a podiatrist - specialist rates!). If I got an ingrown toenail in 1930, I probably would have grabbed a bottle of whiskey and a pocketknife. Simply put, the health care industry can provide far more services than it could years ago, increasing demand, while also seeing fewer and fewer people willing to provide the services. As long as that dynamic is true, it won't matter how we pay for health care. If we try to make it cheap, there will be increased scarcity, which means longer waits for procedures. If we try to make it plentiful, such that nobody has to wait, it will be expensive. That's just the way it is.
If you really want to make health care affordable, you need to loosen up who provides non-emergency health care. This might involve getting nurses involved, but they're nearly as scarce as doctors right now. This might involve robots - heck, Japan's been playing with them in health care for years. This might involve computerized quizzes - fill in some blanks (I have the sniffles but I don't have a fever) and receive a diagnosis (You have a cold or mild allergies). In short, think of it sort of like IT. You don't need to throw a CCNA or MCITP/MCSE at every infected workstation - why should you throw a doctor at every minor ailment? Yeah, I know - when you're holding a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, but there's some wisdom here.
In the end, no matter how you shuffle the cards around, it will never change the fact that, as long as health care is as scarce as it is (and there's no reason to suggest it won't be anytime soon), it will be expensive, one way or another. There isn't a Republican or Democrat sponsored piece of legislation in the world that will ever change that.
I encourage you to investigate lovely things like "starving to death" and "debtors prisons" if you think a free market will solve all of our ills. What it does, it does perfectly -- but it can't do everything, and can't be trusted to do anything how we'd like it done.
To be fair, starving to death requires a society where nobody has moral, religious or pragmatic convictions to feed you. If anything, rich may institute food programs to the poor as a way to quell crime and forestall a bloody revault. And, debtor prisons have nothing to do with free market economy. One position is that nobody is forced to lend you money and, if they do, they are on the hook for the consequences. Finally, what's wrong with prostitutes and drug dealers? These are services that people want and, with some pot and some love, economy would be quite a bit better today.
On the other hand, I don't consider free market to be the most economically efficient. It will be dominated by huge corporations that have suffocated competition and have no incentive to innovate.
No, it is paid for by customers worldwide.
I'm not saying that the ultra-rich should support the poor.
I'm saying that they shouldn't pay their workers wages that prevent them from doing anything above the bare minimum of supporting themselves.
And yes. It's the ultra-rich who make these calls, and are often the most distantly removed from the actual implications of these decisions.
Marx was almost certainly correct in suggesting that these sorts of abuses are inherent in a laissez-faire capitalist system. The ultra-wealthy justify their treatment of the lower classes by distancing and placing several layers of abstraction between themselves and those most greatly affected by their actions. (Disclaimer: Marx and Engels excelled at identifying and diagnosing the socioeconomic problems of 19th-Century Europe. Their proposed solutions were terrible.)
The very notion that 'ultra rich' should even exist as an entire class is troubling. I have no problem rewarding successes, although it's beginning to show that wealth is increasingly hereditary. Steve Jobs and Warren Buffet both deserve their wealth, being exceptionally good at what they do, and deserve to be rewarded for their successes. However, these individuals are most certainly the exception rather than the rule. Although the Bush and Kennedy families have both a number of exceptionally brilliant minds, they've also had a number of complete idiots who managed work their way into positions of power equal to or greater than their similarly-named relatives.
In a capitalistic society, wealth begets power. Unfortunately, the people being placed at the top very rarely deserve to be there. Nobody *EVER* suggested a complete and total equalization of wages, as it would indeed cause a complete and total stagnation of the economy. However, when the working classes have nothing to aspire to, you experience that same exact stagnation.
Additionally, once an ultra-wealthy social class emerges and entrenches itself, various other social problems begin to emerge, and we begin to see sweatshops and debters prisons reappear. This is an extremely well-established historical trend.
How is socialism in Europe failing to live up to expectations? I've actually lived in both Europe and the US, and can say (without any reservations) that the standard of healthcare I witnessed while living there was astonishingly higher than what I saw in the US. Additionally, the standard of living for the "average joe" seemed to be much higher.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The other part of the rationale is that government is *not* stupid and will save/invest that money wisely. That doesn't really hold up to scrutiny either.
If this passes and it makes health care mandatory doesn't that hurt the economy. This bill is going to cost the people about 1.5 trillion dollars. Forcing employers to insure their employees is going to hurt small businesses and may even bankrupt them which in turn will cause a loss in jobs. What about the people that will be forced to get a health care plan that in the governments eyes can afford it but in reality can't and on top of that with 1.5 trillion coming from tax paying citizens they are being hit twice once for paying for their insurance and again for the people who can't.
My COBRA coverage got pulled at about the 1/2 point because my old company was small and both of the spouses had coverage, so at the annual renew time, they just stopped offering health.
After talking with an Insurance rep that I have used for company insurance at a few places, it became clear that my family and I would NEVER get personal health insurance. Currently, I suffer from chronic foot pain (for the past 6 years), my oldest son suffers from depression and bi-polar disorder (for the past 4 years), and my wife gets migraines (from childhood). You can see why an insurance company would not want to touch us, but we still need insurance.
As my COBRA ran out my agent tried to get us on a temporary plan. We know that if we claim the meds that my son and I require, $2,000 to $3000 a month, we will also not be allowed to re-up the temp plan. We decided that we would not claim any of the chronic things that we have to deal with so that we have the plan if we have a major issue, but once we do, we no for sure that we will not be allowed to re-up.
For the temp plan we went with a carrier that haven't been covered by for over 12 years. But we were denied coverage by this carrier because they had on record that...
1) My wife had been treated for headaches.
2) One of my 2 sons had been treated for a sore throat.
OVER10 YEARS AGO!!
Those 2 reasons were all that it took to deny even temporary coverage.
We had to find a carrier that had never insured me and my family before just to get temp insurance.
We are still looking for a permanent option, but as we do our savings are being drained rapidly as we try and cover our ongoing issues. We need to minimize claims to preserve our temp insurance in case of a major issue. Because of that none of us are getting any ongoing treatment, so no one is getting any better. Were stuck with little chance at improving medically, and at this point we have not found an insurer who will offer us insurance at any price.
If you have now, or have ever had anything more that a minor medical issue, your chance of getting coverage as an individual are effectively 0%
I have been looking for work for 2 years, sending out, and following up on at least a dozen job openings ever month (12 is my self imposed min). While the economy is bad I have no idea if I will be able to get a job, and while I am in this catch 22 I am spending more and more of my time trying to find coverage.
In the mean time, I have one of my cars for sale, family jewelry is listed, and while our house is not under water, real estate is not exactly booming either.
I dunno. Does my government really want me to be broke, unemployed, and perhaps homeless, before I can get health care for my family?
Or can they come up with some way for people to purchase coverage, to allow them to get healthy, before they loose everything?
Eschew Obfuscation
The problem is that people are holding these other countries up as models as if they are flawless.
I don't recall ever seen anyone doing that. I usually see people holding those other countries up as models better than your existing one - which is absolutely factually correct.
The very real fact is that they all have their own unique problems that most of us find them just as unacceptable as our own current problems.
Is it really "most"? My impression was that health care reform was one of the talking points that earned Obama his office...
Most people who are against government health car are so because the US federal government has no constitutional authority to provide medical coverage, it's stretching some authority to regulate it as it is.
It's a valid reason, though only so long as one is only against federal healthcare programs (presumably state ones would be fine, no matter how "socialist") - but from what I see, most Americans who oppose public healthcare system oppose the very idea, and not any particular implementation.
In any case, in present-day U.S., where state rights are a joke, and have been for the last 50 years (and that's being very optimistic!), the point is moot. Given the de facto state of affairs, national federal health care system wouldn't really be much different from a lot of other stuff that Feds already do.
And where do the hell do Canadians or Kiwis or British get off telling us how to run our own country?
They aren't - they are merely responding to Americans' misguided comments on how badly Canadians/Brits/Kiwis run their countries (because they're "socialist", and generally don't do things like U.S. does them, etc).
And here I thought I was blocking Politics.
most libertarians I know make it a point to study economics in detail.
Most libertarians I know (and I was one myself in my uni years, so I did know quite a few) only study those schools of economics that concur with their POV, and ignore all the rest of it, or denounce it as "obviously wrong" without going into details - just because it clashes with their dogmas. Inevitably, economic theories that libertarians subscribe to are not mainstream. In that, they aren't really any different from Creationists, or, really, any other science freaks.
The fact is a free-market economy is the ONLY type of economy on the planet that actually works. Any other system has to be constantly managed, controlled and monitored.
I see plenty of those "other systems" that do, indeed, have to be "constantly managed, controlled and monitored" (just like any other complex system, really) around me. I do not, however, see any free-market (in libertarian sense of the word, not the original Smith's definition) economies anywhere, much less a "working" one. Care to enlighten us and point out any particular example of a large-scale unregulated free market economy that "works"?
In addition, it would be great to hear your definition of "working". It's a very ambiguous term.
If these companies are American, why do the documents and tax forms say they are based in Antigua?
Sweden isn't, and never was, socialist.
Socialism - by definition - is when you do not have private property on means of production at all (you still do have personal property, however). Any place where you can own e.g. a factory is not socialist. Any place where you can trade goods for money with other people for any price you both agree upon is not socialist. Amount of taxes paid is not a defining characteristic of a socialist state.
Actually - you're really on point. Let's take a look at the current government.
Roads - should be privatized ($x/mile driven)
Yes - we have this. They are called toll roads - see NJ turn pike, and may tunnels and bridges. The person using it pays, great idea. Honestly, the gas tax is also a roads usage based tax (hence the discount for farm diesel)
Water supply - should be privatized ($x/gallon taken into the house)
I'm sorry - you don't pay a water utility based on consumption now? Where do you live?
Sewage treatment - should be privatized ($x/gallon taken out of the house)
Check - my sewer bill is on the same bill as water. And my parents have a well and septic tank. No fee for them, because they are "off the grid" - More common than you think.
Police - should be privatized ($x/call to 911 etc)
Actually, that's a damn good idea if you bill them after the service. Police do this now in some states with the "accident fee" - call the cops to the scene of a car accident and you get a bill for 500 dollars.
Fire department - should be privatized ($x upfront to have your fire put out, but the neighbors can chip in so their houses won't be next)
I'm sorry - you've never heard of a fire department fee? Check your homeowners policy - your insurance company pays it for you. Many areas are still "subscription" - ever given money to a volunteer fire department? Yup - that's what you're paying for.
Army - should be privatized (don't want that North Korean missile [popsci.com] landing in your backyard? I hope you have the money to pay for it)
Actually national defense is one of the few responsibilities of a federal government - check the constitution when you get pouncing on it.
Schools - should be privatized ($x/day of school, and of course for missing school, turning in homework, missing homework etc)
Correct - I went to private school and so did my parents. Their parents worked hard to put 8 kids into catholic school. My grandparents went to catholic school too, they remember tuition cards that the nun stamped every week.
Power (including lease of the lines that feed your house) - should be privatized
Um - it is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland_Electric_Deregulation
Even before that I paid power bills to a private utility.
Street lighting - should be privatized (why not charge neighborhoods for the privilege of light?)
I see you've never gotten a bill from a homeowners association? What do you think that pays for?
Garbage collection - should be privatized ($x/lbs of garbage, extra charges if you don't sort everything perfectly)
Yup - we have to pay for that too, as I recall it's $100 every three months for the privilege of BFI to pick up my two cans. No charge for recyclables though.
Ambulance - should be privatized (got mugged, wallet and ID stolen, head smashed in? Too bad - if you don't have the cash or picture ID to show that you're covered, the EMTs won't help you)
I see you haven't taken a ride in one lately. A few weeks after, look out for a bill of about $1000.
The FDA is the gateway to mass consumer food. If there was one organization that could ban the sale of "X" to consumers in the U.S., it would be the FDA. Surely, the Department of Agriculture could play a role, but that would take cooperation and result in even more finger-pointing. The FDA is the single gateway. If the FDA says you can't sell it, the Agri-industrialists would have to comply or else grow for export only.
The brilliant health care plan is based on what causes people to have the massive problems we have in the U.S. today. Problems, mind you, that do not exist in significant quantities in nations that ALREADY regulate in the ways I am suggesting. If by some amazing feat, obesity and diabetes is reduced to being rare and unusual conditions, it would wipe out nearly every other commonly-linked health condition under the sun including common forms of cancer.
The fact that neither I nor my family haven't been sick since we've been more aware of what we take in could be merely coincidence and possibly even genetic. But when you see other nations practicing regulations that do not yet exist in the U.S. with nation-wide similar positive results, you have to sit up and take note.
When the vast majority of health problems we see today are closely tied to being overweight or obese, you have to start looking for a cause rather than looking for hundreds or thousands of separate cures and treatments. We are NOT going to be successful at adapting the human body to better handle the food we eat, so we will have to simply handle the food we eat better.
I have reviewed your posting and comment history and it is clear you're simply thoughtless and snarky. If it means changing or even considering anything other that "common thought" you have little that is nice to say. How's that for name calling? If you want to say "facts be damned" how about stating a few that counter my arguments?
If you don't like the duties of the federal government spelled out in the constitution - amend it. Don't ignore it.
#1 the healthcare isn't free as everyone in the country is paying for it via taxes.
#2 6 months to get an MRI after a 90kph motorcycle crash, happened to my friend who lives in I believe Ontario.
Legitimate estimates put the number between 8 & 10 million being uninsured legitimately.
That's effectively how it works in Canada. You go into ER, the triage nurse sees you, checks your vitals, takes your case history, and tells you to sit down. You get seen based on available resources (if you are having issues with your pregnancy, no sense handing you off to the cardiologist.
If you're there for stupid things, you're gonna be waiting for a while. That encourages you to see a doctor instead, as it should be.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
The very idea of Marx-style socialism is that the workers, rather than owners, should get the fruits of their labour. Communal ownership only enters the picture because it is impossible to run a factory alone, so it should be owned by all the workers who'd split the profits between them.
Ironically enough, if taken to its logical conclusion, this would effectively make everyone a private entrepreneur.
Any place where you can own a factory without working there is not socialist, or at least not communistic. Or, more to the point: any place where you can get money simply by owning something is not socialistic.
Trade, or any restrictions place on it, has nothing to do with whether a system is or is not socialist.
And yet whenever there's talk of using tax money to provide some service communally, that proposal gets branded "socialist". Yet when someone points to a successful socialistic country, that country is suddenly not socialistic. It kinda makes one wonder if the word "socialism" isn't simply a right-wing boogeyman?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
wouldn't homeless people and welfare mothers already be covered under medicare/aid ?? well what welfare mothers i know are. i don't know any homeless people so i haven't asked.
if they area already covered then are we not ALREADY paying for them??
It's not that conservatives hate the poor, but, rather that they strive for a society with a rigid class structure.
Wow, that's a load of bullshit.
You're free to your beliefs, as are people who think conservatives flat out hate the poor, but I'd highly suggest reading up on conservative politics. There's no focus on class structure or rich vs. poor or anything of the like. It's about letting people be free to make their own choices in life. The whole "liberty" and "freedom" thing you keep hearing conservatives go on and on about is related to that core principle. When the federal government forcibly takes privately earned money to pay for systems and structures that are not only unconstitutional, but unwanted by the person having the money taken from them, they're robbing these people as well as the unseen vendors and merchants where the money would have be spent otherwise.
You want to talk about rigid class structure? "They're rich, they won't miss the money, let's tax them!" -- the point isn't whether or not they'll miss the money, it's whether or not we want to justify ongoing government thievery, especially to pay for things that are not perceived to be better than their private counterparts. The "their rich they can afford it" argument is nothing more than a straw man distracting from the actual issue.
And popular equals good? Come on, this is slashdot. We're all aware that being smart isn't popular. I hardly think that you're going to argue that being smart isn't good.
Start googling what it would cost for a typical person to buy basic health insurance for themselves -- you'll see that it's typically the cost of eating out a few times a month, which yes, even most of the poor people could give up something (beer, smoking, fast food, etc) to pay for that insurance. The problem is that it's easier to cry for the government to steal someone else's hard earned money than to cut out unnecessary things to pay for health care.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
1) Build most of the architecture that has lasted through time
2) Build the infrastructure in most countries
3) Manger large services
4) War
5) Maintain records to a standard that private companies haven't come remotely close to
6) Create a 500 track record of a decrease in criminal activity, which while having infrequent bumps is rapidly declining in all respects
7) Create a regulated system of tariffs and tolls which has allowed for free commerce between nearby locals to prosper.
8) Insure the safety of most consumer products
9) Spread information about agriculture to the point that hunger is essentially abolished and food prices are fairly close to transportation costs.
etc...
That about sums it up.
This seems like an excellent system. An inexpensive system freely provided to all with an expensive system available for those who can afford it.
What we have in the USA is an expensive system provided to some some of the time.
I'd love to jump on the Republican-bashing bandwagon, but to be honest, there a good many Democratic legislators who, having taken large campaign contributions from health care vendors and insurers, are perfectly willing to sabotage any meaningful reform of our health care system. I'd love to believe otherwise, but I fear that what we are likely to get will be worse than useless when it comes to solving the staggering economic and social problem that is the health care compensation system in this country.
Without any disqualification you have created a great system for people to charge off all sorts of expenses as medical. I want to go on a trip to China, of course I'll need to fly there, stay in a Hotel and I'm going to be consulting doctors in several cities.
Total cost for the trip alone = $4000
total cost for the medical consultation = $500
amount I pay $900.
Slither forth to the damp, dark space from whence you came.
That is a large deductible system. The problem with that system is it discourages preventative care which is much much cheaper. The cost of giving everyone in the USA a routine physical every year (particularly if there were no billing issues) for free is a pittance compared to what it would save.
It is popular because of mandated participation. It isn't an individual savings system. It redistributes "retirement savings" from people who had long careers to those who got disabled and those who did very well financially to those who did not. The welfare aspects are what makes it popular.
A society as a whole can't save. It is really meaningless to talk about the Federal Government either "saving" or "borrowing" in a fiat currency system.
Indeed. But what you forget is that such "ponzi-based" systems have benefited many people for decades in many countries. If they didn't have such systems, the retirees would have needed to save more money in the past, or the workers would have needed to pay more money. You can make a social security system that does NOT depend on a ponzy-like scheme, but it takes more money. The same goes if you choose private insurance, you will need more money. So, once the worker-to-beneficiary ratio falls to a level where social security based in ponzy-like schemes systems, there will not be a big difference between the expensive social security system and the expensive private insurance.
Worst case scenario. Take what you currently pay for health insurance. The most reliable figure would be for a plan you pay for yourself. In my case, a plain-vanilla 80/20 from Blue Cross costs me $344 a month. Multiply that by 12 and then by 300,000,000. That gives you 1,238,400,000,000. That's 1.2 trillion dollars PER YEAR!!! And that doesn't even cover 100%. Okay so they say roughly 42.6 million are uninsured. That alone would be 175,852,800,000. $175 billion. Every year. Forever. That works out to over $586 in extra taxes that all 300 million of us would have to ante up just to cover the uninsured. But that assumes that every American pays taxes which we all know they don't. You could probably safely double that number. Figure around $1000 in taxes JUST TO COVER THE UNINSURED. That's a pretty scary number to me and that doesn't include the inevitable fact that government programs always balloon way beyond their initial projections. So you do the math. How would you like it if someone came up to you and told you that you'd have to fork over an extra grand every year for life? Show me where in the Constitution it says that you are entitled to free health care and I'll then suggest you read the 10th Amendment.
The vast majority of Austrian economists predicted that we would have a very deep recession, way back when most mainstream economists were still talking about the possibility of a "slowdown" in the housing sector, which might spread to the rest of the economy. You can spew as much bullshit as you want, but you can't change that fact. The mainstream was wrong, and the Austrians were right.
They're always predicting deep recessions in the near future. When one eventually happens, it doesn't mean they were right. Right now, I see them predicting hyperinflation; we'll see if that actually happens or not.
You can't disprove a priori knowledge with "quantitative assessment". In other words, no amount of empirical evidence will ever disprove the Pythagorean theorem.
No, it won't. But Austrian theorems do not have the same level of precision as mathematical ones, making them ambiguous and faulty. I didn't label specifics because frankly, there's too many to count. I've read the first chapter of Rothbard's "Man, the Economy, and State," and I was able to think of hundreds of counterexamples to the alleged proofs, or special cases that are unadressed, or words left undefined and therefore subject to interpretation.
Let's start with what is ostensibly the fundamental 'axiom' of Austrianomics: humans act. Well, what is a "human?" Is it just an adult person? What about children? What about the mentally retarded? What about the comatose? Does a corporation (which has legal personage) count as a human? If so, are its employees and stockholders "more" than human, because they are themselves human and are part of another human? These are not unimportant questions, because even one special case completely invalidates everything else. It's like those "proofs" of 0=1, which ultimately relies on the ability to divide by zero.
In contrast, the Pythagorean theorem can be expressed in a purely symbolic manner, derived only from the 21 axioms that include those of ZFC, first-order logic, and equality axioms. It requires no interpretation on the part of the reader, because a computer can understand them. Likewise, physics, chemistry, and Keynesian economics don't try to construct an axiomatic system to describe the world, because they ultimately use the same axioms mathematicians do, and the only other assumptions they make are in the construction of a mapping from the real world onto the mathematical one.
A good way to put it is that Austrianomics is to mainstream economics as philosophy is to physics. The fundamental difference between philosophy and physics is that in physics, the logic used to described the universe is separated from the model save for a few scant mappings, but in philosophy, the logic and the model are one. I think you'd agree that Austrianomics and mainstream economics share a similar relationship. While philosophers pondered the nature of the universe for millennia, they ultimately got nowhere, because their propositions were based on shaky definitions and uncertainties. It wasn't until Isaac Newton got down to business and invented physics that people began to make predictions which coherently described reality.
So, I ask you: if you wanted to send something into space, would you ask a philosopher, or would you ask a physicist?
Slashdot readers will remember that I was victim of medical malpractice in Quebec. If anyone wants to read my story, I posted it on ratemds.com.
The real question will be just how much of a "debate" there will be allowed to be, or will it be the "There's no time to read it, just pass the bill!" emergency we've seen all this year from Congressional democrats. I guess we'll have to wait until Wednesday when Charlie Gibson will ask the tough questions of Obama, right?
If you really think most people, conservative or otherwise, actually hate people who are poor, you've been completely brainwashed.
It's not hatred, just complete indifference. Literally not caring if they live or die, at least in the abstract.
Well, for most of the items I mentioned I do not pay a dime up front or through bills.
See, I live in a society where we believe that "society" means "everyone helping everyone". You'll have noticed that you brought up an example of a "society" - you just call it a "homeowners association".
Around here it means that instead of paying a "homeowners association bill" I pay taxes. Sure, that means that I'm paying for my neighbours million dollars hospital bills, but on the plus side it does mean that he gets healthy sooner. This means he can go back to work sooner. And pay more taxes than otherwise. And his taxes helped pay for my college education, so it all works out.
Oh, and if you're wondering, me getting a college education (for taxpayers' money no less) means I can make more money and thus pay more taxes. Funny how that works out. Brings us right back to "society" doesn't it?
Also amazing that the highly taxed societies of Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Sweden and probably Finland, but I don't know for sure) even manage to stay out of poverty. Not like they have any multinational corporations at all, like Nokia, Ericsson Mobile, Novo Nordisk, Mærsk (Maersk). Hell, they don't even have any car companies - mostly because Volvo and Saab were run into the ground while owned by other companies. Not sure what kind of societies those companies were from though ...
I just don't buy the premise: "Any time an unpopular social program is established, the government tries to sell it under "special" tax provisions,..."
OK then, I missed when they asked me if I wanted to opt-in to the armed forces.
Or if I wanted to opt-in to the 'bailout' of vastly wealthy bankers.
Maybe we need to discuss your concept of "social program".
Yeah, and those guys who work for private companies, man they rock. I wish everything in society could be run by corporations, it would be so awesome.
Who's with me?! I SAID... WHO'S WITH ME!!??
Yeah, whenever I leave the flue untreated, my houseguests tend to start coughing. From all the smoke, coming out of the fireplace...
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I don't think your paying attention then. This thread is riddled with people pointing out the _known_problems in other systems and people claiming they aren't problems or that the citizens in other countries are perfectly satisfied with those problems in place.
And no, it's not absolutely factually correct that some of these other countries are better systems. What is factually correct is that is that they are different and provide different coverages for different people. Better or worse is nothing more then an opinion.
Health care reform does not mean incorporating the failures of other countries into our own reforms. It means making our system better. How you got that to mean we were begging for long wait times, situations where the government decides your life isn't worth the cost of the procedure and makes you suffer the condition or pulls your government health care access when you find a way to have the procedure privately, or whatever else is wrong with the system that makes more people jump to medical tourism for necessary operations (non elective like plastic surgery) and treatments then what currently happens in the US as a percentage of the population, is way beyond me. Take Germany for instance, they recently ramped up their health care system in order to match the quality of care in the US and actually treat foreigner seeking health care better then their own citizens.
Yes, state run systems would be perfectly fine as the state possesses the authority to do so depending on the state constitution. It's also easier to change the state constitutions then it generally is for the federal constitution. The people who are still against government health care in that situation, are also against it because more US and state government run systems are wastes filled with bureaucracy and bloat.
Take the prevailing wage laws and unions for instance. These were originally intended to keep minority firms from undercutting the lush public contract going to whites. In my township we had contracted with a company to resurface a couple of roads at a discounted price. He/the company was going to treat is like a private job and give up a mile of road at costs for every 5 paved at the profit costs. This was a real contractor who has worked with the state and county governments in the past who lived within the township and knew about the financial issues it was facing. One of the employees found out they would be getting private normal pay ($16 per hour) (for things like shopping mall parking lots or driveways or whatever) instead of the prevailing wage ($28 per hour) for the job because it was a public job and made a complain to the state labor board. Now the contract will cost 2.5 times as much and there is chance that some cities will bar his ability to contract work with them because of a standing complaint over the prevailing wage laws even though no work has been done or money transferred.
When you
I'm not sure which system your talking about. Could you please clarify? Are you thinking of the systems introduced by congress or other country's systems?
I'm willing to argue that there are still flaws which are unacceptable in both with the Australian system being about the best of the bunch.
USA drug companies do research to make money. They'll happily take Canadians money.
The question you should be asking is WHY the same drug can be so much cheaper in Canada vs the USA? Why are drugs so much more expensive in the that bastion of free enterprise? Why do USA drug companies spend more on marketing each year than on research? Most of this marketing is illegal in Canada so they don't waste as much money on marketing in Canada. Canada doesn't have huge private health insurance companies skimming huge profits, denying claims, and thwarting doctors from using what they feel is the best treatment. Why does virtually all health care cost more in the USA? Why does they USA spend MORE per person on healthcare yet still lag behind Canada in almost all indicators of health care like infant mortlity, and longevity?
Why do many USA citizens still want a good chunk of their health spending to be taken by private insurance companies?
Anarchists never rule
because that would require ratifying by the people, and they cannot be trusted to vote for the correct option.
Why would your travel expenses be covered?
No current US proposal covers travel expenses unless a commonly accepted treatment isn't availible in your area and to that much of an unlikely event, it's only a percentage of costs. With what I suggested, I don't remember implying that your vacation to some other country for the same accepted medical treatments that are availible in the US was a goal. Your treatment while in another country as long as it meets US standards could be, but I'm not sure how you got the trip to the other country or your stay in several cities.
You can already deduct medical expenses from your taxes under some conditions. Also, your confused to the type of tax deductions I suggested for the costs. If you made $100k a year and had an effective tax rate of 25 percent, all you would be doing is exempting yourself from paying taxes on the $4000 income used to go to china. You cost would still be $4500, you just wouldn't be paying income taxes on it. You savings at an effective rate of 25 percent would be around $1125 that you would have paid in taxes otherwise.
Now granted, the insurance company portion can deduct losses from taxes owed up to the amount of taxes owed under my suggestion but those losses would only be for the coverage of the mandated minimum policies and availability over the price controls. If they offer another policy that allows you to go to China, then it wouldn't count against the costs of the minimum policy.
Currently Blue cross/blue shield can offer small employers the ability to cover employees for about 150 per month per employee. They can do this because the pool of risks are large enough to offset the costs of treatments. If the reason people aren't carrying insurance is because of the costs or because an existing condition disqualifies them, then a policy like I suggested will create a very large pool to offset actual costs by providing affordable insurance for these people.
I love how every socialist / communist tries to claim that Stalin / Hitler / Castro "didn't follow TRUE socialism / communism". None of you ever stop to think about that fact that letting the government have absolute control over everything is be definition fascism. You can hide behind pretty lies and illusions, but it's not possible to have that amount of government control and still have freedom.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Too true. I know pharmacists making $100,000 per year (before taxes) that have to pay $20,000+ per year just for their malpractice insurance. That's completely ridiculous that they should lose 1/5 or more of their pre-tax income. Think of how much better use it could be put to (some of the pharmacists I know are religious and would donate at least a few thousand of that money to charities).
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
You are only off a little bit on those numbers; it is 15.3%, half paid by your employer, half paid for by you. I know because I do consulting work and have to pay both halves, also known as the Self-employment Tax. This on top of living in a foreign country.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
Dude, seriously, sticking your wallet up your ass, jamming your hands over your ears and shouting "mine! mine! mine!" would send the same message as your post in a much shorter space of time.
Dude, actually, it wouldn't. I'm not against voluntarily giving people money. I donate what I feel I can afford and hopefully it is on par with what others donate for whatever organization or cause is asking for money on any given day. I don't donate all the time though. But the key point there is that it is what I feel I can afford. I'm not rich but I give voluntarily. The government shouldn't be the one to decide who is deemed rich enough to be forced to give some of their money in extra taxes in order to pay for someone else's insurance or whatever. My original message stated there is a difference between giving to charity and having the government take from the rich to give to the poor. No where did I state that conservatives should be selfish and say "mine! mine! mine!". If you think that is what I said or if you just think that is how I feel, as well as other conservatives, then you either have a reading problem or a misguided worldview. Many rich people give to charity if anything because they do get a tax write-off for it. And for some reason Obama wants to cancel the tax write-offs. Maybe he expects the rich to give out of the goodness of their heart and if they don't then they are the bad guy. And as I stated before, if Obama wants the rich to give then he should be the first to donate his entire salary to help others. He will make over $400K as president this year and he has millions already; he can afford it, right?
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
It's an easy correlation, dipfuck. Malpractice caps are a reaction to insanely high medical costs. That explains the correlation very simply, doesn't it? Go cry in the corner.
I don't know why I'm responding, but as I pointed out, not only is there not a correlation between states with low costs and states with malpractice caps, but there also isn't a correlation between the rate at which costs are increasing. Texas implemented its cap in 2003, and its costs have risen at a rate higher than anyone's since.
As for the rest of your post, your evidence is still anecdotal, and while your speculation sounds like it could be correct, the lack of a rate vs. cap correlation still disproves it. Besides, doctors do not have a good "big-picture" idea of where the money is going anyway. That New Yorker reporter I mentioned earlier talked to the two hospital administrators in McAllen, and they had no idea that they have the highest costs in the country/world. Then they got really defensive and offered no explanations as to why their costs are so high. The kind of doctor that sets up shop in McAllen and profits from referrals doesn't see most of the costs of that transaction, because they get only get a relatively small fee.
I propose an alternate system I call "open healthcare" which basically amounts to "make health care like every other industry" There are 4 parts:
1. Forbid employers from sponsoring health care.
2. Eliminate enrollment periods
3. Eliminate tax breaks, or make them consistent
4. Require accurate labeling
5. Reasonable scope of coverage
Let me explain:
1) Forbid employers from sponsoring health care.
Employers don't sponsor cell phones, cable bills, car insurance, ... so why health insurance? It gives large companies a competitive advantage, and puts individuals at a disadvantage. People who switch jobs frequently, such as younger people, students, contractors, or low-skill/wage workers are penalized when the only affordable health care is via their employer. Employees are told that they will pay $100/month for health insurance -- but then when they switch jobs they find it was $500/month, with the employer paying $400 of it, and now they are stuck with really expensive health care that they didn't need. Part of that is caused by enrollment periods when they switch jobs.
It also makes it difficult to compare jobs. I just met a new hire who switched jobs for the benefits -- only to realize that in reality, he will be paying more. :-(
2) Eliminate enrollment periods
- Businesses often only offer health insurance benefits if the employee has been there for a month, 6 months, or a year. This means that if someone switches jobs, they are stuck with their old plan, but without the employer paying for part of it. So they either pay a fortune (under a system like COBRA), go uninsured, or get their own private insurance
- Individuals often can't get insurance without waiting for an enrollment period. Some people don't even realize that you CAN get individual insurance. But insurance companies are setup to work with groups, so they are often reluctant to offer it. Imagine for a moment if you went to a store and took a can of peas up to the register, and then were told that unless you were already signed-up, you would have to wait until the enrollment period (3 months from now) before you could sign-up to buy the peas. That's silly, and that supermarket would go out of business. But this is how health insurance works, and they get away with it because there are very few alternatives, and all the companies do it.
3) Eliminate tax breaks, or make them consistent
- Employers get tax breaks for providing employee health care. Yet individuals do not. That's not fair to individuals and small businesses.
4) Require labeling
- Imagine a grocery store with no prices anywhere. You must go to the counter, then give them $100 per item. Then, at the end of the month, they return the difference between what you paid, and the actual price.
- Capitalism only works if the consumer can compare products and services accurately. Labeling laws achieve this in other sectors, and those should be extended to health insurance companies. They must be required to provide accurate, detailed, pricing information in a form that can be comparatively shopped. They need to provide enough information that someone can put together a scenario and know the cost. "Suppose I join today, then get XXXX performed next week, then YYY performed the next month, then I come down with ZZZZ and need AAA medication -- what will that cost?"
- Scott Adams calls health insurance a confuse-opoly. Health insurance companies do not disclose their costs accurately -- even to doctors! For example, they say they will pay 75% of covered services - but not tell you what services are covered. And 75% of what? The insurance company has a fee schedule, and a doctor must adhere to that fee schedule, but even the doctors aren't given a copy of it! They have to bill a higher amount, then see how much the insurance company provides!
5) Reasonable scope of coverage
- Insurance companies should be required to provide
>>Bad news: your 15% figure is out of date. We're now spending 17% of our GDP on health care, and if the trend of the 2000s continues, we'll be at 30% by 2020.
Independent of the rest of your post, your rising healthcare cost trend made me wonder how much of that is caused by our aging 'baby boomer' population. And on a related note, I am curious if other industrialized nations have the same phenomenon, and if so, if it is as pronounced as it is here in the U.S.
Can anyone shed some light on this for me? Does France, Canada, Japan, et al. have an aging boomer population that is also raising the healthcare percentage of their GDP?
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
I'm not saying that the ultra-rich should support the poor.
Ok. Good thing I didn't assume too much then about your intent.
I'm saying that they shouldn't pay their workers wages that prevent them from doing anything above the bare minimum of supporting themselves.
I agree but what is the bare minimum? Legally they can't pay below minimum wage and the government of course sets that bar so unless a company is doing something illegal they are going to be at least paying people the minimum the government believes people need to survive, assuming the employees are in the U.S. As for sweatshops abroad, people choose to work at those jobs for that low wage because it is better than they can get elsewhere in their country. And because they are willing to work for very very low wages it actually means less Americans have jobs because they *can't* work for those same low wages because the cost of living in the U.S. is too high so the jobs are outsourced.
The very notion that 'ultra rich' should even exist as an entire class is troubling. I have no problem rewarding successes, although it's beginning to show that wealth is increasingly hereditary. Steve Jobs and Warren Buffet both deserve their wealth, being exceptionally good at what they do, and deserve to be rewarded for their successes. However, these individuals are most certainly the exception rather than the rule. Although the Bush and Kennedy families have both a number of exceptionally brilliant minds, they've also had a number of complete idiots who managed work their way into positions of power equal to or greater than their similarly-named relatives.
We shouldn't be trying to pick and choose how anyone becomes rich. It could be through inheritance and that original amount could have either been hard-earned or it could have been won through the lottery. It isn't anyone's business how someone is rich and whether they deserve it or not. They may not deserve it but that doesn't mean it should be taken away either.
Nobody *EVER* suggested a complete and total equalization of wages, as it would indeed cause a complete and total stagnation of the economy. However, when the working classes have nothing to aspire to, you experience that same exact stagnation.
I never said anyone did suggest that but that would seem to be a possibility using the logic that Obama and many liberals are using lately with their agenda. I would hope they would never be so stupid to attempt that but if they want everything to be fair in life that is one way to make it happen. It is just taking the fairness idea really far.
However, when the working classes have nothing to aspire to, you experience that same exact stagnation.
I agree when there are no aspirations you get stagnation but when are there no aspirations? THis country provides the ability for people who have the aspirations to achieve them. People came here 200 years ago with nothing or very little and built business empires or at least made a living here with no problems. If you are suggesting that the working class has a possibility of stagnating due to lack of appropriate wages then I say that it comes down to the individuals to change their life so they get out of their rut. There was a movie that Will Smith was in a year or so ago. It was a true story and he played a guy (forget his name) that was homeless but the guy eventually became a stock broker. He had a son and he said his inspiration and motivation came from realizing he had to feed and clothe his son. Point being that if someone can come from being homeless to being a stock broker then anyone can do anything they set their mind to.
Additionally, once an ultra-wealthy social class emerges and entrenches itself, various other social problems begin to emerge, and we begin to see sweatshops and debters prisons reappear. This is an extremely well-established his
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
I also saw several reasons for the lower cost of (superior) care:
Think global, act loco
Why do you think this? Insurance companies profit by denying coverage and accepting premiums. What is the benefit to the government in denying coverage? I lived in Europe and this shit just never happened.
Think global, act loco
I'm talking about the Canadian system with wait insurance. You were giving it as an example of a negative and I was commenting that good health care with rationing + wait insurance seemed like a good way to offer a low end system for free and a high end system for cost.
You are missing the point or I was misunderstanding you. I assumed you were proposing a government health care system based on a simple copay formula with no disqualifications. I was giving an example of the problems with such a system. Lots of stuff suddenly becomes "health care".
If the system does have disqualifications then it isn't simple anymore.
To preserve funds, just like insurance companies.
Obama is basically creating a 2 class society: lower middle class and an upper middle class.
AWESOME. I am not being sarcastic. That would be so much better a country to live in than what we have now.
Anyone who thinks they need a better lifestyle than "upper middle class" is morally bankrupt.
Yawn - the Constitution goes well past the 10th Amendment. You should try reading it sometime, you might run across General Welfare, which is mentioned. Twice.
The second problem for you is that much of our military and most of our intelligence agencies are just as "unconstitutional" as UHC, because while the Constitution mentions Common Defense in the same sentence as General Welfare, Congress only has the "authority" to raise money for an army and a navy. So the Air Force, CIA, NSA, Border Patrol, NORAD, and all spy satellites are as "unconstitutional" as Social Security and socialized health care.
It's almost like you're partisan hacks making arguments of convenience. Huh, interesting.
They're always predicting deep recessions in the near future.
The Austrian theory of the business cycle predicts that we'll eventually have a matching bust for every artificially created boom. So, if we are in the middle of a large, artificial boom created by the government, then there will either be 1) a deep recession in the "near future", or 2) an even bigger bubble in the near future, which will eventually result in an even bigger bust. The Austrians are always predicting that we'll go down one of those paths, and they're always right.
Right now, I see them predicting hyperinflation; we'll see if that actually happens or not.
Austrians say that if the government continues to print money, we'll either get stagflation or hyperinflation, depending on how fast the government prints money. Like you said, we'll see.
These are not unimportant questions...
I think they are unimportant. The bottom line is that the Austrian theories apply to actors; persons; beings who act purposefully. If you want to argue that the Austrian theory does not address comatose people, I'm fine with that. As far as corporations, Rothbard constantly points out that groups (e.g. corporations, governments, countries) are not persons. That's one of the major problems with socialism: It talks about "the people" wanting this or that. But groups are not persons, and talking about groups as if they are persons leads to many problems.
the Pythagorean theorem can be expressed in a purely symbolic manner...
That does not make it any more precise than Austrian theory. You should really read this paper. If that paper does not convince you that Austrian theory is precise, then there is no way that I can. I'm dead serious about this. I would love to include some of its quotes in this post, but they're too long.
if you wanted to send something into space, would you ask a philosopher, or would you ask a physicist?
If my question does not involve actors, then I would ask the physicist. But if the physicist tried to create a mathematical equation to model human behavior, and the philosopher points out that even though the equation is mathematically correct, it does not map onto human action that way the physicist believes it does, I would go with the philosopher. The physicist may continue to build upon his equation, but all of his conclusions will be wrong, because his foundation is flawed.
here's no focus on class structure or rich vs. poor or anything of the like. It's about letting people be free to make their own choices in life.
I'll bite. Under the current system, the poor have very few opportunities to make their own choices in life. If you're born poor, odds are that you're going to stay that way.
In fact, the routine costs of living for the poor are often higher than what the rest of us pay, creating a vicious cycle from which there is little chance of escape.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
So that 'one by one' response boils down to repeating several times your opposition to abortion at all. Got it. Fortunately, people are not forced to abide by your opinions. I take the point of view that a functioning human life requires an active human brain; we accept brain death as a distinction of the end of life, so the inauguration of brain activity can be taken as the beginning of a human life. Until there are alpha waves (or some other test for ongoing neural activity), I consider a fetus a potential life, but not an actualized one. This happens to take place around the end of the second trimester. There has to be some point at which there was not an independent life before and now there is one. Some people put this at conception, which means that birth control pills are a form of active murder, since they prevent fertilized embryos from implanting in the lining of the womb. I put it at the start of consistent neural activity.
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
This is true, and I'm absolutely willing to consider a way of handling such occurrences through regulatory fixes. However, it is not fair to the insurance companies to force them to provide insurance for such people in such a fashion that they can get it for a few months, paying in perhaps a few thousand dollars for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars of treatment, and then dropping away.
The uninsured need to be classified according to circumstance, and then the individual issues can be addressed. I am not opposed to, say, preventing those who do not have insurance simply because they didn't want to pay for it from getting salary liens if they are unable to pay for their insurance, and preventing most or all of the numbers from being discharged in bankruptcy.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Sorry if my paragraph spacings don't show up, when I hit preview they seem to disappear. Your entire position is based on the failings of the monetary system. Inherent to the definition of civilization is the need for human beings to work together. We can not survive without one another, even though this truth might be harder to see in our dispersed society where some roles seem to have no meaning, or little enough (fast food workers?). The monetary system is a great invention that allowed people to trade goods and services very freely and thus spur innovation. No longer did you have to find someone who would trade a couple of cows for your steam engine (not historically accurate) that you could then trade for dozens of chickens, produce, clothes, etc. Monetary system, great stuff. Until (you knew this was coming) some assholes learned how to game the system. Now, I don't fault the majority of rich people for this behavior since it has "become" a part of the system but it is true regardless. The fact in modern society is that you need money to earn money. If it weren't for social programs poor people would never get a decent education and would thus never be able to earn more money. You compare a CEO to a janitor here: "Maybe next the Dems in Congress will come up with the idea that everyone, from CEO to janitor, in every company in the private sector should be paid the same? That's only fair, right? Disregard the fact that the amount of work is different, the education required is different, the skills are different." While I do not disregard the human need for incentive, can you honestly say that one person should be earning literally thousands of times more than another? We all must work together to maintain our society, so why do we reward one set of people so insanely more than another? You said "That's only fair, right?", yet I think you do not understand the difference between "fair" and "equal". This seems to be a relatively new trend so don't feel bad. I won't comment on other socialist societies and how they perceive things, however fair is not the same thing as equal. The fair thing to do is guarantee every human being with the right to shelter, food, clothing, and health care. These are the basic things that every human being needs just to exist on this planet. The world as a whole can EASILY support this requirement with a "reduction" in "quality of life" for EVERYONE that NO ONE would even notice except possibly those exceedingly rich people who would have to buy small 4 - 8 person planes instead of Gulstream Jets for their personal use..... The whole concept that conservatives have (generalizing heavily here) of being "individuals" who EARN their way and have a RIGHT to unlimited wealth is abhorrent. It is the most greedy and self-centered viewpoint I have ever seen that completely disregards the fact that society is a giant web. Every rich person has gotten there from their own initiative, AND through the work of others. There are exceedingly few people who have become rich solely off the their own sweat and blood. To say that society must sit by and watch these people suck the life out of everyone else just because the technicalities of our monetary system allow the hoarding of wealth (takes money to make money, ain't that the truth) is RETARDED! Based of some innate idea that the rich are little islands that owe nothing to the rest of the world? L .... O .... L
And do NOT fall back on the idea that every person can make their own way and become rich, etc. etc. While this is true for a few career paths, once those paths are filled the option is gone for the rest of us. There is a limited availability. And, if you think people can just save up money and invest intelligently you have another thing coming. You have to earn well above the average salary in the US to even think of saving enough money to then make more money. At 75k a year my friend is barely able to support her mortgage. Eventually she will own the house and be
As someone who works in the healthcare industry, LMAO. I bet you, name one surgery that you could get for $1,000, and I will pay for it myself.
Whereas here, when my wife wanted to book an hour long regular obgyn checkup, she was told there would be a 7 week waiting period. I went to my doctor to see about an arthritis condition. Or I tried. I had to wait 5 weeks. What's your so-called point?
That does not make it any more precise than Austrian theory. You should really read this [mises.org] paper. If that paper does not convince you that Austrian theory is precise, then there is no way that I can. I'm dead serious about this. I would love to include some of its quotes in this post, but they're too long.
I didn't read through that in its entirety, but I skimmed enough to get the gist of it. Unfortunately for you, it completely confirmed my suspicions, as it reads like a philosophy paper, talking about epistemology and Kantism. Though I was happy to see that it brought up my sticking point about verbal logic versus symbolic logic, it didn't refute it. Instead, it is simply dismissed by appealing to Occam's Razor (pg. 61), which is really a shame. For one thing, Occam's Razor isn't an absolute truth, only a guiding principle. For another, I would consider a system of 21 axioms defined precisely and symbolically to be far simpler than any system that requires the use of the English language, which is vague, filled with biases, and can have completely different meanings depending on who's doing the reading and who's doing the writing. The proof is in the pudding: if you gave me a week, I could write a computer program to parse the ZFC axioms and understand thousands of mathematical theorems. At the same time, millions of computer scientists have been toiling for fifty years trying to create a computer program that can understand the English language. So, I ask you: which description is simpler?
If my question does not involve actors, then I would ask the physicist. But if the physicist tried to create a mathematical equation to model human behavior, and the philosopher points out that even though the equation is mathematically correct, it does not map onto human action that way the physicist believes it does, I would go with the philosopher. The physicist may continue to build upon his equation, but all of his conclusions will be wrong, because his foundation is flawed.
I don't much like talking about epistemology (too much philosophy), but you are absolutely right about the fact that the model itself may not be accurate. As I mentioned in my last post (and actually, something Rothbard mentions in that paper you linked to), the thing that sets Austrianomics apart from every other scientific discipline is the fact that it relies on empirical axioms rather than abstract ones, and this abundance of empirical axioms makes it imprecise and fallacious. The other disciplines still require a degree of empiricism, but they have reduced it substantially by tacking on the empirical axioms at the end of the logical chain, making them (almost) logically error-proof.
It might help if I used an example. In classical mechanics, as in all physics, the axioms of ZFC are held to be true. From them, you can construct the idea of real numbers, calculus, etc. in a completely symbolic and error-free approach. The only empirical axiom is that the positions of all particles are identified with a multidimensional real function of time, whose values obey the differential equation known as Newton's third law. Now, ZFC doesn't know what "position," "particles," "momentum," "energy," "forces," etc. are, because those things only exist in the real world. Is the model correct? No, because general relativity and quantum mechanics are better descriptors of the world. (Regardless, it's still useful.) More importantly, is it self-consistent? Almost* definitely. I cannot say the same about Austrianomics, because its verbal nature makes it so ill-posed that it's not even wrong.
I'm not saying that Keynesians and Chicago school economists are using the right model, but at least they tackle the problem with the right epistemological viewpoint. Now, you may object to my view of what is "right," but I would argue that this battle already played itself out when physics became the most successful descriptor of the universe we know, and philosophy became an esot
I think we'll have to agree to disagree, but I hoped you would get more out of that paper than just "Occam's Razor". Here are the points, about the differences between physics and economics, that I found important:
...But this is something fundamentally different from the constants of physics. It is the assertion of a historical fact, not of a constant that can be resorted to in attempts to predict future events."
"The economist starts with a knowledge of ultimate causes. He is already, at the outset of his enterprise in the position which the physicist only attains after ages of laborious research...."
"In physics the axioms and therefore the deductions are in themselves purely formal and only acquire meaning "operationally" insofar as they can explain and predict given facts. On the contrary, in praxeology, in the analysis of human action, the axioms themselves are known to be true and meaningful. As a result, each verbal step-by-step deduction is also true and meaningful; for it is the great quality of verbal propositions that each one is meaningful, whereas mathematical symbols are not meaningful in themselves."
"[The econometrician] cannot help admitting that there are no "behavior constants." Nonetheless, he wants to introduce some numbers, arbitrarily chosen on the basis of historical fact, as "unknown behavior constants." The sole excuse he advances is that his hypotheses are "saying only that these unknown numbers remain reasonably constant through a period of years."
"The highly praised equations are, insofar as they apply to the future, merely equations in which all quantities are unknown."
"In the mathematical treatment of physics the distinction between constants and variables makes sense; it is essential in every instance of technological computation. In economics there are no constant relations between various magnitudes. Consequently all ascertainable data are variables, or what amounts to the same thing, historical data. The mathematical economists reiterate that the plight of mathematical economics consists in the fact that there are a great number of variables. The truth is that there are only variables and no constants. It is pointless to talk of variables where there are no invariables."
With respect to everything everybody is saying, I'm Canadian, more of a Quebecers, but anyway. Even If sometimes you may have more specialized healthcare available to whom's willing to pay. I assure you, being 30 and have been sick like hell lately, I'm happy I didn't had to pay a Pennie for the millions bucks worth of care I received over the last 2 years. Yes some people may complaint, but most of those who complain are those who because of just a sneeze wants a doctor checking their temperature every minutes because it's free... And if you are worried about those who don't work and aren't willing to pay for them, stop worrying, it's nothing compare to the satisfaction of having nothing to care about if you are ill or not... Even better, BTW, if you score a good job, you will have insurance that will pay for private clinics so you can get your results faster, in 2 days instead of 5, or in 24hrs instead of a day. But the results will be less exhaustive than the free one!!! WOW! And your benefit, I should tell you that there's a bunch of researchers in Canada, that would disagree with you! We design a lot of pills and do a lot of research, and historically I think we have a lot of innovation on our hands, sure it's all American companies, but, It's all Canadian brain into it, yep!
-I swear by my life-and my love of it-that I'll never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another to live for mine
Let them see if resources of 10 million mega-rich people can buy more MRI machines than resources of 300 million not-so-rich people
I really wouldn't like to test that theory in place like the US, where (according to Wikipedia) 10% of the population holds 80% of the wealth.
As opposed to all the Americans who were killed by American insurance companies who voted in American polls.....
Actually, it seems pretty economical for me. The large deductible is no big deal...I will ONLY use insurance for an emergency.
For routine 'preventative' care..I just pay for everything out of my HSA that I load up annually pre-tax....and when I tell Dr's and testing facilities that I'm paying on my own...they usually cut at least 15% off the top of their fees they would charge insurance. Paying for you own routine care is not a big deal, especially if you do it pre-tax. Why should you not save money for routine care, just like you save for any other necessity of life?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The very idea of Marx-style socialism is that the workers, rather than owners, should get the fruits of their labour. Communal ownership only enters the picture because it is impossible to run a factory alone, so it should be owned by all the workers who'd split the profits between them.
Agreed.
Any place where you can own a factory without working there is not socialist, or at least not communistic. Or, more to the point: any place where you can get money simply by owning something is not socialistic.
Agreed.
Trade, or any restrictions place on it, has nothing to do with whether a system is or is not socialist.
And here I dare say you're wrong. By Marx, your goods have some inherent value, which depends on the amount of labor you put into them. Trading them above that price amounts to exploiting someone else. Effectively, any trade which yields a profit is exploitation.
And yet whenever there's talk of using tax money to provide some service communally, that proposal gets branded "socialist". Yet when someone points to a successful socialistic country, that country is suddenly not socialistic. It kinda makes one wonder if the word "socialism" isn't simply a right-wing boogeyman?
As used (in U.S.), it definitely is. Of course, socialism is also a proper well-defined word, and a working social system (I wouldn't want to live in it again, but it can definitely work even long-term).
The point of my original post was merely to point out why U.S. right-wingers throwing the "socialism" around randomly are wrong.
House Resolution 676 has more than 200 sponsors and calls for free, universal health care for Americans. It gets no press and will languish while these "reform" measures will pass with lots of media hubbub. Meanwhile, I (and 46,999,999 other Americans) won't be any closer to being treated like human beings instead of walking bags of money when we enter a medical facility.
To the libertarian f*cktard who will inevitably say "keep the government out of my medical decisions": Are you happy with bean-counters in a New York office deciding whether you qualify for coverage?
I lie awake at night, wide-eyed with fear over a slight stomachache, not from hypochondria but from the potential of financial ruin before I'm 30.
And Liberals are unpatriotic by the actual definition.
I guess the point was entirely lost on you.
FanFictionRecs.net
No, I was encouraging the government to stay out of the health care system and just mandate a minimum set of coverage with some costs restrictions for the people who would have the hardest time paying for it and the ability to retroactively join a plan with a long term commitment.
There would be a minimum set of coverage, most likely a miller test or similar which most state workers comp or medicaid programs use to determine treatment allowances.
But travel wouldn't be a medical cost just like it isn't a work expense when you are going to and from work on your regular shift.
Ok, I see what your saying now.
However, can't you see the irony there, you have government health and if you want prompt health care, buy insurance?
I'm having a hard time seeing how that is different from the concept currently in America. Those who can afford it and who doesn't spend the money on other things, will get the insurance and those who can't are still stuck with procedures being denied and long waits for medically necessary care. I know they will treat emergencies right away, same with America, and it's illegal for a hospital that takes federal funds (medicare/medicaid/VA reimbursements) to refuse emergency treatment for anyone based on their ability to pay- even if they already own them money. So to me, it's just the same to some extent.
This is not insightful it's -1 stupid.
The US GOVERNMENT through it's various institutes bankrolls 90% of all core medical research in the US.
Pharmacompanies research how to market and sell that research to Americans.
Your analysis of the origins of inner-city poverty in the collapse of the manufacturing sector are pretty much dead-on, and I'm impressed by the clarity of your narrative; where you (as a paleocon) and me (as a neo-Marxian) would disagree is that you believed that the old, protectionist system would be viable in the long term, and I do not: I think that free trade was inevitable, and that even without out, you eventually get into a crisis that makes the system break down. (If there's upward mobility, capital will insist on immigration or other tactics to keep labor costs low.)
Your original claim was about what governments were that government weren't able to do this list of things. You now are arguing that companies might have been able to do the same things. As for the comments about slavery... I'd offer the gothic period as a counter. This was a time when each and every individual was encouraged to self actualize bring their full talents to the craft. Each worker took pride in his individual work and while their were architects the creations represented the community in a way unthinkable to the builders of today. The exact opposite of slavery in every sense.
You are missing the point:
I get no subsidy for routine care.
I get a large subsidy for catastrophic care.
To simplify lets assume there is only 1 disease with a 1/1000 chance of effecting me that costs $1000 to treat if found early and $1,000,000 to treat if found late. Assume finding it costs $100. There are 1000 people in the population (so one person has it).
Scenario A: Everyone gets preventative care.
Individual cost $100 for 999 people, $1000 for 1 person
Total cost: $101,000
Scenario B: No one gets preventative care
Individual cost: $0 for 999 people and the deductible (say $1000 for one person)
Total cost: $1,000,000
Under a high deductible system it obviously makes sense for each individual to engage in Scenario B. But collectively it makes sense for the society to engage in scenario A.
Schools are for children, I was under the impression government was for adults.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
I wasn't aware that normalizing risk is now a legitimate function of government. Perhaps I was absent for that debate?
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
That's not at all what we have in America. Things like physicals are not performed particularly on the upper lower - lower middle class because insurance companies don't want diseases found before the person changes jobs. Things like vaccinations and flu shots are a total PIA because of "somebody has to be paid" where under a public system they could be administered en mass quickly and easily. Heck what would it cost to give every high school girl folic acid to keep on her dresser if she misses her period? $2 / per student, maybe?
No we don't have this system at all.
Yeah what saddens me is that GP was modded to +3 insightful at the time I'm posting this. +3 funny would be a more deserved moderation.
Thanks, I as I was re-thinking this in my head I thought it sounded high.
It's a good thing we don't have a concept like minority rights, I mean it'd be silly if someone could interfere with my life liberty or happiness just because more people on their side thought they were right.
Try and stay on topic, "If it is so popular there should be no need to mandate participation, right? ", that's the topic. The issue of whether taxation to support programs that don't distribute their benefits equally is justifiable or not is another entirely different topic. Though the USA has no shortage of laws that primarily benefit the wealthy at the expensive of the poor and middle class so I'm not so torn up about a few examples that run the other way.
I pay for my routine care out of my Health Savings Account.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Apologies for asterisks, the slashdot post box simply will not accept proper line breaks and mangles the post regardless of what text entry mode I set it to.
*
This is total bullshit. The big pharma companies have rolled this one out for years as the reason it is necessary to keep drugs expensive in the US where the same medicine in other counties cost less. It has nothing to do with research costs and everything to do with holding onto the goose that lays the golden egg: a healthcare system in a first world country that is exclusively set up to make a few people and companies rich. It has almost nothing to do with making people well, other than a side effect of making huge profits at the expense of people's health. They sell the drugs worldwide, at enormously variable prices. There is no shortage of research money at the prices and volumes sold outside the US. Also, not all drug companies are US companies.
*
They'll also claim that FDA certification makes the drugs cost more in the US, which is also FUD of the highest order. If it does have an effect, it's not enough to explain the ludicrous prices. If there is anything that affects the cost of drugs, it's the money that buys senators and congressmen, though not directly passed on to the consumers as a cost of doing business, certainly affects the price of drugs with their purchased legislation.
*
For a country that positions itself at the head of the world table, as a shining beacon and example to follow, the US healthcare system is a huge, nasty, malignant tumour that threatens to kill off a large portion of your population.
*
There are so many things I like about the United States, but the healthcare system is most certainly not one of them - a society is judged by how it treats its poorest and most disadvantaged members, and looking after their wellbeing is extremely important. I don't think anyone could make a case that the US Social Security system should die (the people would not stand for it) - the health care system is no different. The current one has very, very limited support for the people that cannot afford to pay artificially inflated prices for insurance and drugs, and have to fight a system that employs people (who are not doctors) whose sole job it is to overrule doctors who say you need some treatment and list it as "optional" or "unnecessary" so that they don't have to pay for it with the insurance (and by the way, that'll be another $550 this month in insurance premium, pay up so you're covered!)...
*
Even if you think the current US system is "fine" (which it clearly is not), there needs to be some system that runs along side it that helps the millions of Americans who simply cannot afford to sit at that table. For something like a fancy house or a fancy car it does not matter - if you can't afford one, you can go without, and perhaps envy the rich guy down the block who has a Lincoln Navigator. This is not true for healthcare though, since you simply cannot go without it, so you need to provide a system that they can take part in.
*
"Get a job with good health insurance" you may say, but it's not always that easy. Remember that health insurance companies exist for one thing only, and it's not making sure people get good medical treatment. If you are in a "good" program, that is normally expensive, where they just simply cannot legally get out of paying for the treatment you are insured for then you are lucky. You may not even be able to get minimal coverage - a huge number of Americans exist in a salary range that they cannot escape from (easily) and that provides them with insufficient money to afford good treatment or insurance.
If you do not enroll in a "qualified" health plan (and do not assume that your current health plan will qualify) and submit proof of enrollment to the federal government (i.e., IRS), then you'll be tracked down and fined (sections 3101, 6055). The fine will be enough "to accomplish the goal of enhancing participation in qualifying coverage" (section 161). Oh, and if you think the pain will be shared equally with the ruling political class, think again. Congress and federal employees are exempt from the tight, HMO-style controls in this bill (section 3116). Any American citizen who supports this bill as health care progress has to be either suicidal or filthy rich.
I have championed the UK national health service as a vastly superior system to the US system on these boards (I am a British citizen) many, many times and never have I said that is is perfect.
It has its flaws, as any large institution does, but these are flaws that are siezed upon by opponents and used as propaganda (check out the raft of TV commercials on US TV during Clinton's attempt to get a national system running in the US - "you can't choose your own doctor! you won't have access to cutting edge treatments! the doctors don't get paid a decent wage! you'll have to wait years for lifesaving surgeries!)
Now, in a system like the UK NHS you do have long wait times for certain things if the system is busy, and if there's one major criticism to be levelled at it, it's that it is a behemoth organisation with a lot of bloat in it, soaking up money like a sponge, yet still requiring huge investment with a lot of faults. It is still recovering from 15 years of neglect from a Tory government in the 80s, but it is coming around gradually.
Even with the horror stories that the newspapers and private healthcare shills love to jump on (I waited 4 hours in the ER when I broke my leg!), these are totally atypical of the experience, and even with these issues that arise (which do need to be addressed), it is still vastly superior to the US system which exists solely to make drug companies, senators, congressmen and other select individuals very rich and has nothing to do with actual healthcare, other than as a side effect.
Government is for everyone, or do you think that nothing the government has any part of applies to people under the age of 18?
I'm not really sure what your non-point is?
Unless you're somehow making the assertion that children, if given the choice, would chose not to go to school because of the short term benefit of more time to play and missing the long term benefit of an education, whereas adults would of course save up for their old age with a pension plan because they can see the big picture and turning 18 automatically immunises you from making poor decisions.
Adults are just as bad as children in this regard.
Futurama had it right:
Young Farnswoth Junior: Stupid old age people getting social security with my tax money!
Instantly aged Farnsworth Junior, not appearing 80 years old: I demand free money!
Read the scenario. Under the system you propose individuals acting fully rationally would choose not to get preventative care.
The NHS has bloat and problematic systems, but it is recovering from 15 years of neglect at the hands of a Tory government who would prefer to have killed it, but would have faced a revolt, so they did the next best thing - just neglected it enormously and it rotted, nearly to the point of collapse, and we are still paying for it today, many years later, as it struggles to find its feet again.
Where in the Constitution does the Federal government derive the authority to require & provide universal health care for citizens of the 50 states?
10 seconds in Google will show this the parent post is wrong.
Lol.. Most insurance policies allow one physical a year for all covered members. If your thinking 2 physicals in a row when someone things they are about to be fired or laid off, I have no sympathy. As for vaccinations, your reimbursed for the majority of it with insurance as long as it's one of the required vaccinations. If there is no insurance, the county health department usually has discounted shots at little to no costs based on your ability to pay.
I'm not really concerned if it's an inconvenience but most of the problems you mentioned can be easily remedied with changing a law to the current system instead of incorporating some all intrusive and equally flaws system that the federal government has no constitutional authority to get into. Christ, this current plan is expected to cost between 1 to 1.6 trillion dollars and only cover 16 million people in addition to those already with health care coverage and it's going to lower the standard of policies coverage for many of the people with existing health care coverage.
As for the folic acid. If it's just $2 a bottle, then why can't the high school student or her parents buy it? I mean seriously, that's the amount of money you can usually find in the cushions of the couch. They already get the feminine hygiene products so what is the big deal to where the federal government needs to provide this? Obviously they can inform the kid when they do the sex ed classes and explain about the monthly visitor.
Lately I've been hearing anecdotes from people unhappy with the way elections went in their country. Now I see this poll saying that their guy actually did lose by millions of votes.
I wonder who to believe.
Lately democracy seems to be based on the skybox, the Happy Meal box, the X-box, and the idiot box.
It was suggested that because Canadians live longer than Americans, it is their health care industry that was the cause. There are several factors that impact one's health ... genetics, nutrition, dieting, smoking, alcohol and drug use, stress, etc. There are many reasons why one group of people may live longer than another, on average. There are people with poor availability of health care who have lived into their 90s, so it isn't necessary to have outstanding health care to have a long life.
Show some proof that it was the health care industry that caused this extension of life. One could probably show that Canadians eat more seal blubber, on average, than Americans. That doesn't mean Obama should add mandatory seal blubber requirements to our health care.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Your tone sounds like you want to make medical care like the DMV, but visits to the DMV have shown me that I want nothing of the sort. I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or stupid.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
And what part of that is not true in different health care systems around the world? More importantly, what part of that was not true with Hillary care that was being pushed in 1993?
If by coming around you mean providing substandard treatments, denying treatment to anyone they can justify, and killing treatment for anyone who wants to pay the difference for better treatment, then I guess your right.
Read some of the links I provided above. This isn't a 4 hour wait for a broken leg. It's a refusal to provide effective treatment, long wait times for things like MRI scans and medically necessary procedures and so on in the various different health care systems.
And yes, it's so bad in Canada that it's economically viable for insurance companies to offer wait list insurance that will take you to another country is necessary to get treatment. Try taking a look at medical tourism where a lot of brits seem to be going to India and parts Asia if not just others parts of Europe for cheap medical coverage that they already have in the UK.
That, and we don't just let the idiots die. It's really expensive to keep an idiot alive.
Ah, sorry, no.
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/abreasons.html
"Actual percentage of U.S. abortions in "hard cases" are estimated as follows: in cases of rape or incest, 0.3%; in cases of risk to maternal health or life, 1%; and in cases of fetal abnormality, 0.5%. About 98% of abortions in the United States are elective, including socio-economic reasons or for birth control. This includes perhaps 30% for primarily economic reasons."
In addition, in many cases the actual medical procedure, even if it is performed in a properly sterile environment(rare) with proper follow-up (rarer), causes scarring that makes it difficult or impossible to get pregnant again.
Folic acid is for when they might be pregnant. And it is a good example. They could pay the $2, but they don't pay the $2. So what happens if something on the order of another 20-40k birth defects per year.
Same thing with the physicals. The problem is not that they aren't covered but that they don't happen. As for vaccinations they cost a fortune under the current system as contrasted with mass vaccination programs we could administer. The problem with the current system it is horribly inefficient.
Your plan would be ok except for the "huge risk-amortization pool managed by US government". Why should the government be used for managing it? Can you please show me the relevant section of the constitution that allows for that? If you can ensure that non members do not contribute one cent to the management of such a pool and that the government does not use its power to create an unfair competition to the alternative private options, then there is no difference at all between a government managed insurance and an equivalent privately managed non-profit organization. In other words, if the government does not use force at all to facilitate this system using money from non-members, then there is no advantage to the government insurance v. private non-profit org. except for the fact that if past experience with is anything to go by it will be mismanaged, mired in incompetence and corruption and eventually it will not be able to sustain itself and force will be used to keep it alive.
As for the silly comments such as "organ donations made to public system will not be available for private transplants" and "hard-core libertarians get to die on the road after a car accident" I am fine with that as long as it applies both ways. I am absolutely certain that in a competition on even terms (assuming government will be able to contain itself which is unlikely) the privately managed insurance will wipe the floor with the government managed insurance.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
It was suggested that because Canadians live longer than Americans, it is their health care industry that was the cause.
To the contrary. It was the original claim that the Candian health care system is bad ("greatly diminished health care," in the original phrasing). The life expectancy data shows that, if it is in fact true that their health care system is bad, that "fact" cannot be discerned in the life expectancy data. (Nor in the life expectancy data of other western nations with nationalized health plans).
The burden of proof is the other way: for people who are claiming that going to some kind of government health plan would result in a health system that's as "bad" as Canada's, given the fact of greater lifespan in Canada, what is the evidence being cited to show that Canada's system is "bad"?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink. Education and information concerning the effectiveness of the substance is the best you can hope for. For instance, we give condoms to teens for free or very low costs (the planned parenthood in my area will give you a bad of 30 or 40 condoms for $5.00 or you can get 5-10 free) and they don't get used. While over 40% of teens claim to have had sex before leaving high school, only around 7.2% (72.2 per 1000) of teen women between the ages of 15 and 19 get pregnant. Of those 7 percent, roughly 30% are aborted or terminated through natural miscarriages. That leaves us with an effective usage of 4.19 percent of teen women who would become pregnant between the ages of 15-19 who would benefit from a government supply of folic acid. I can't find recent stats, the previous ones mentioned were accumulated from http://www.thenationalcampaign.org/ a site under Teenpregnancy.org) but last I heard which was around 2000, half of the teen pregnancies occurred in women between 18 and 19 so they wouldn't even get the pills unless 5 year old folic acid is still good.
So anyways, you want to spend 2 dollars per teen woman per year that would be effective to between 2 and 4 percent of the teen population? Education is the key, not some social free for all that will end up with 90 percent waste.
your right, it is the same thing, leading a horse to water doesn't mean he will drink. I haven't had one physical that wasn't required by some activity I was participating in and mine are completely covered.
The current system may be inefficient but no other system seems to be more effective or efficient at the same time. Certainly not this one circulating congress which is estimated to cost between 1 and 1.6 trillion dollars while only bringing coverage to 16 million of the 54 million people reported to not have any coverage. And even with the mandated coverage, there is no guarantee that people will get physicals because they aren't getting them right now when they can.
Or are you suggesting we should be taking people's freedom away and grant them no control over their own bodies in order to force them to get physicals? I'm not sure that will fly constitutionally seeing how outlawing abortions didn't over the same reason- the government does not possess that kind of power over the US population.
All that means is that either SS tax needs to go up or retirement age needs to go up, which sucks, but makes sense, given our current demographics shift. It doesn't mean the entire concept is unsustainable or deeply flawed.
Alexey
I'll live with your numbers and for the purpose of argument lets make them worse. Say 99% waste, some girls don't do it even when they miss their period, say it goes bad after 2 years..... So I get girls who miss their period to take folic acid a week earlier on average (its those first 6-8 weeks which are critical) for $200. That a huge savings to the health system. So heck yeah I would totally support that.
What I'm proposing is a single payer system for low end care. Administered at places of work and schools. Provide universal preventative and low end care without concern for billing in the most cost effective ways possible with high participation. So yeah, go right to the work place: hearing exam, eye exam, breast exam for women, testicle exam for men, take some blood, take some urine, ask about any unusual symptoms, look for legions.
Say 5 nurses one 1 doctor can do 100 of those exams per day in a workplace. Total cost:
5 nurse days = 5 x $400 = $2000
1 doctor day = $1500
100 sets of labs = $2500
_____
total cost per patient = $50.
Say times 300m people = $15b
Total saving to the health system worst case well over $1T a 70:1 ratio.
In the schools, don't just give out free condoms give out free norplant injections , birth control pills and book a bus for girls who want a fitting for a diaphragm or an IUD.
Do a pass through for flu shots. 1 nurse can probably do 500 a day. Lets say 300 per day. Total savings are going to be in the ball park of another trillion.
I'm not trying to reduce people's freedom just the cost of medicine.
What are your criteria for which insurance is better? If you believe private insurance companies will post a higher profit and will provide more timely care at a premium for those who can afford it, I'd probably agree with you. But as far as decent care across the board, not downgrading preventative care, not incentivizing doctors and hospitals to perform as much tests as possible, not driving GP's into a an increasingly more difficult business, I'd say a big public plan would be better.
Alexey
Perhaps I was absent for that debate?
Probably, but that does it mean the debate is not on-going. You may have heard the concept deliberated it under its more common name: safety net.
It's still a matter of leading a horse to water. If you educate them enough to do it, they will buy it on their own, it's only two dollars. However, something I'm not sure if you are aware of is that the FDA started requiring the addition of folic acid to enriched breads, cereals, flours, corn meals, pastas, rice, and other grain products and these requirements took effect in 1998. This is in addition to the natural foods in which it is normally found in which a teen having sex would likely be eating.
As for the missing a period, this is also a problem, quite a few girls don't have regular cycles in their teen years. It can be 4 or 8 weeks already before they finally realize it isn't going to happen- especially if they are active with sports or similar and not getting enough caloric intake to support their energy expense.
The school nurse, at least when I was in school already did hearing and eye tests. As for the rest, just require a physical as a condition of employment. Here is the thing though, finding the problem usually isn't the expensive part, it's the treatment afterward. I used to take a DOT physical once per year and it did everything but blood tests (had to fill a cup up though) and it only cost $55 though the company doctor and roughly $80 independently.
But there are some problems with you numbers below. Fist, it only detects the discovery of the illness. Simply going to the doctor won't keep you healthy, him finding something wrong and treating you does. And again, leading a horse to water doesn't mean he is going to drink. Only the people who would normally get physicals and possible a few who are too inconvenienced by going somewhere waiting until your turn to get fondled by the doc just to find out if your secretly ill, who will not find it inconveniencing to show up to work or stay late in order to do the same at the office, will be the ones taking advantage of this.
Second, those costs aren't the total costs. You will need to cover malpractice insurance, cleaning and sanitation of the site, the possibility of over saturation and not meeting the quotas that bring the costs per person down, plus you are looking at either a couple times a year and the ability for the doctors and nursed to be mobile. Otherwise, that would be $50 (plus insurance and support serviced like billing and accounting) per day times 260 working days a year which brings the $15 billion to more like 3.9 trillion, everyone is covered, but it's only the detection of problems, it doesn't begin to address treatment.
There is a fine line here. Parents have a say in how their children are raised and what medical procedures they can have. The school shouldn't be taking these rights away from the parents and they shouldn't be assuming the liability of administering medications
indeed it depends on how thongs will be implemented, but having seen "sicko" (and knowing M Moore probably is biased too, it still seems the UK system (public healthcare) works fine and people get what they need.
But the point you make about malpractice suits is interesting too...
Privacy is terrorism.
This falls in line with what I often hear about laws mandating "perks" for employees: "OMG, what about capitalizm? Requiring businesses to spend money on their employees will hurt employers!"
NO.
By allowing companies to treat their employees like shit (no insurance, no sick days, no leave), we are actually creating an incentive for employers to treat their employees like shit, because it's cheaper. If we were to require all employers to give a minimum insurance, sick days and vacation time we wouldn't be upsetting the balance, we would actually be LEVELING the playing field by removing the ability to edge up the bottom line at the expense of workers.
Porquoi?
The difference between Obama and Clinton in the primaries was that he wanted to be sure every American has the chance to buy health insurance at an affordable price, and she wanted to force every American to buy health insurance whether they could afford it or not. Clinton wanted to fine employers who didn't provide insurance, and individuals who chose not to have it.
Clearly the Democrats favor the Clinton approach, and are intent on forcing another mandated lack of choice on the citizens, and if the cost of health care means you can't afford food or housing, at least you can get medical treatment.
The thing everyone seems to ignore is that even if you have insurance now, in many places you can't get health care! With great coverage and the means to pay cash if needed, an expensive trip to another part of the country may be needed to get care in a timely fashion. Any plan which doesn't include a means to increase the supply will only make thing worse. A plan must have funding to train doctors (not import them), stop closing hospitals in the name of cost control, and some incentive for people to participate in preventative care, like increased co-pay for those who don't.