Speech, maybe. I wouldn't say freedom of religion is a socially-granted right. The freedom to choose your own belief system is as intrinsic a human characteristic you can get. Even if you have the most hypothetically totalitarian regime possible, they can only control the physical actions of their constituents; not their thought process. They can try to take away your freedom of religion (or opinion/outlook/thought, which is really the same thing), but there is absolutely no way to enforce it. Maybe openly granting freedom of religion may be a relatively new creation, that freedom itself is built into humanity.
The distinction, I guess, would be that speech, copyrights, etc. are all detectable in some way, while beliefs can be completely hidden from any detection whatsoever.
You don't have to pay for social problems if you get rid of them. And charity works just as well as the government. I can't remember which politician said it, but "we fought the war on poverty, and poverty won."
Funny, I always thought it meant just the opposite. Death and illness are part of life. Life does not just mean "being alive." And we're only guaranteed the pursuit of happiness, not happiness itself.
Besides, I think liberty trumps both... What good is life without liberty?
If I must point out where you mentioned "C", I will:
This is just the UK, by the way, which ranked 18th in the WHO rankings, compared to our 37th. It is also a country whose per-capita GDP is about 30% lower than ours, and whose per-capita expenditures on health care are far lower than ours.
There. You made the WHO rankings part of your argument. Equity is included in the WHO rankings. If you don't want equity to be part of your argument, don't quote the WHO rankings.
And the flat earth analogy is quite poor. Funny you didn't address the part about why I consider the statistic inconclusive, but I guess you wouldn't be able to use your silly flat earth analogy, hm?
(a) How much would BMS have been able to develop the drug for had they paid for it rather than the government? Was government research actually more effecient, or would we have been better off just having BMS do it?
(b) How many unsuccessful drugs have BMS have attempted, and how much have they lost persuing them? How many of those drugs were unsuccessful because the FDA didn't approve them, even if there are people for whom using it would be worth the risk? Generally, how much money is spent by pharmaceutical companies on unsuccessful drugs for every successful drug?
(c) How many drugs does this scenario actually relate to? Is this exception or the norm?
I think you have to ask all of those questions before concluding that the government is a useful vehicle for sustainable medicine development.
I presented you raw data. I'm asking you to interpret it sensibly, not depend on the WHO, and certainly not a bunch of talking heads on the radio or TV.
I did interpret it. I said it is inconclusive and next to useless. And I think any decent statistician would agree. The raw data only indicates that people in the US die more often. It doesn't say anything about causes. It doesn't say what the people were doing when they got hurt, whether they live a sedentary lifestyle, what kind of background they come from, how often they get in fights, or really anything other than how often they die. I don't know how you can use that statistic to make any kind of conclusive statement given how many variables there are. The fact is, the US has a completely different culture than Europe. It's silly to completely deny the culture's influence on mortality rate.
Right, none. So your long rant about equity was what, a red herring, right?
It has every bit to do with the WHO's ranking, since these statistics are included in the WHO's ranking criteria. So, really, that was a red herring, right?
Atlanta's problem with drug and mental health service has absolutely nothing to do with the US health care system. That's an underlying social problem. It's a cause rather than an effect.
You don't say, "Look, this social problem is preventing people from getting health care! So let's give them health care!" The smart thing to do would be to tackle the underlying social problem rather than its effect. Another smart thing to do would be to make health care cheaper and more efficient, not more bloated and expensive.
OK, why are those other characteristics important? Why is "safe" care important? If I want to undergo an inherantly risky procedure, shouldn't I have the ability to do so?
And no, equity has nothing to do with quality. Is the quality of a car dependent on how many people get to drive it? Is a Prius a worse car if it is only available to a few people? Absolutely not. Availability of health care is certainly a positive things to have, but people in the US not having health care does not mean the health care system is inherantly worse. Maybe there's a different problem that causes health care to be inaccessible to some, but that is not a problem with the health care.
Because the homeless people in Atlanta don't have access to government welfare benefits? Oh right, they spent it all on crack. My mistake.
And, lest you forget, most of us are paying 20-40% of our paychecks to the government. How are you supposed to donate when the government is robbing you blind?
The WHO has a hell of a lot more expertise behind its indicators than the pundits who are criticizing their ratings. You can either trust an organization that works with doctors and public health experts, or you can trust the tripe spewed by know-nothings working in a think-tank somewhere, your choice.
The WHO can come up with all the data they want, but that doesn't give them the power to defy the principles of statistic, define logic, etc. They can say with as much accuracy is possible that mortality rates are higher in the US, but the interpretation falls squarely in the field of statistics and sociology. They're not infallible, and their interpretations of data is solely the opinion of people whose agenda is not completely transparent.
In your expert opinion? Even a lay-man can tell "number of people dying divided by number of people" is a pretty good indicator of overall health...
Even a lay-man can tell the people in the US are not genetically identical to those in Europe, and that they live in completely different environments and with different lifestyles.
Sure, but academic research institutions don't push drugs through the FDA. They don't do the expensive, time-consuming testing procedures. They certainly take part in scientific research, but it is the pharmacuetical companies that take care of the practical end. It's comparing a university computer science department to an Intel research team. Sure, the CS department will come up with all kinds of cool theoretical concepts, but Intel actually builds something.
You don't have to (actually, you can't) let the legislature decide what's frivolous, but you can force the losing party to pay all legal fees. As it is, it costs money to win a lawsuit, and that's really what makes frivolous lawsuits damaging.
War and Peace is a document. Volume A-C of the 1996 Encyclopedia Britannica is a document. The May 2003 issue of Mad Magazine is a document. The US Constitution is a document.
Well, I bet the Neanderthals looked out for their injured through charity rather than government force, but I'll let your bad analogy slide anyhow.
But the basic idea of a voucher system is that the government pays for them to have an insurance policy of their choice, rather than their having a mandatory government insurance policy. But even with a voucher policy, I think the temptation is there for the government to meddle and overregulate.
I'll bet they don't ever have this problem with payments.
I can see it now... "1300 Unopened Liberty Mutual Insurance Payments Found In Dumpster." Yeah, if they can keep track of the letters they actually want, they should be able to keep track of the ones they don't want.
First of all, why should we have that stipulation? I don't think people have a right to medical care, but whatever.
But were we to assume people should have that right, I'd issue a voucher system where people can be reimbursed for their privately-administered health insurance, thus keeping the government out of it. Also, I'd alter the FDA's approval process and revamp the legal system in order to greatly reduce the costs of medical care. If it's cheaper, we don't even have to spend more to get better care!
The fact that the WHO decided those criteria are indicators of good health care does not make it any more objective. Statistics on mortality rates are next to worthless when comparing highly industrialized nations (eg, US, UK, Australia, etc). Statistics on equity has nothing to do with the quality of a healthcare system (in fact, this 1999 WHO paper clearly has equity and quality as two orthogonal characteristics, and the US as 15th best, on the same statistical plane as most of Europe). On this report, they have the US dominating in really the most important category (and the only important characteristic in quality), which is effective care. There was another recent chart a few months ago which I can't locate that had the US on the second tier (with about five tiers), but the US health care system's worst marks came in equity, which has nothing to do with quality.
The WHO is ranking apples vs. oranges. They put the US at 37, so what? It's pretty much meaningless.
See, I don't think anybody would disagree with that. What is up for argument, however, is the mechanism by which that should be done. Government regulation, or otherwise? It is easily possible to have a capitalist system in which the poor are taken care of.
I don't agree, however, that people have an inherant right to not ever have anything bad happen to them, even if death is involved. Back before the turn of the century or so, if you got the wrong disease, you were done, regardless of how wealthy you were. Maybe a capitalist system don't protect everybody from the facts of life, but those people are certainly better off than they would have been before, and that still doesn't preclude poor people from receiving help even with a capitalist system. I think it could be easily argued that it would be even easier to take care of our wounded if the government were to stop taking all our money and spending it on crap, anyhow.
Funny you say the capitalist system is "all about making money no matter who gets screwed in the process." Ever stop and think of where all the medicines that are saving people are coming from? If you guess "The Government," you're wrong. Nope, it is from creativity that is motivated by reward. So yeah, pharmaceutical companies are making bank off of medicine, but where would we be otherwise (answer: we wouldn't have the medicine anyways). Ever wonder why the US has historically been at the forefront of new research in not just medicine but most every other field?
Those greedy capitalists, not working for free! How dare they turn a profit!!
The hilarious assumption you made is that people who are poor are just dying off because they don't have medical care. Last I checked, hospitals are actually forced to treat people without insurance. Looks like you have your socialized medicine already.
It cracks me up when people come out and denounce capitalism like it's the greatest scourge ever to come upon humanity, while basically depending on products and services that would not even exist were it not for "greedy" capitalists.
It's certainly true that some of the provisions "might have" prevented a 9/11 attack, but hindsight is 20/20. Granted I've only just started reading his work, but Sun Tzu clearly indicated that in order to successfully wage war when your force is smaller, you have to attack where your enemy does not expect you. That is the problem with this kind of war; you can defend against one tactic, but they'll simply adapt and do something else. Look at internet security--it doesn't matter how much Microsoft patches the operating system; they're still going to find a new way to get in. All these provisions will do is direct terrorists to other unknown avenues, at the cost of billions of dollars, our freedoms (which is what we are trying to protect), and our very way of life.
That, however, is only an argument for the futility of the Patriot Act. I would argue that the biggest problem, however, is its scope. Again, why would the Patriot Act dictate what documentation I need in order to open an HSA? Where is the sense in that? Do terrorists use the tax-free medical funds to finance terrorism? I didn't need any of that to open a bank account, or get a credit card, so why an HSA? The problem is that the Patriot Act seems to cover any kind of wild scenario that maybe someone could somehow, in some crazy unlikely scenario, use to even indirectly benefit terrorism. Hey, maybe the terrorists are getting $34/year extra on tax benefits by using an HSA (which, by the way, also requires them to have a HDHP)!
And that even says nothing about why we need to get really, really wound up over terrorist attacks on the US that have killed only a small fraction of number of people who have died of more troublesome causes, such as cancer, or the flu, or armed robbery, or drowning in backyard pools. If we look at it in terms of how much we're giving up in terms of dollars and freedoms per life saved, we're probably spending millions of times on terrorism what we spend on anything else.
First of all, there is no objective statistic that indicates that the US is behind on medical care. All of the "statistics" are based on certain very subjective assumptions that automatically penalize capitalist systems.
That said, it is certainly the case that the US health care system could use some fixing, but the solution is to take the government out of it, not add more government. We could drastically reduce health care costs by limiting frivolous lawsuits and government red tape. That way, more people could have health care and it would be better to boot.
Unbelievably, I think Rudy Giuliani is the only man in the world who could compel me to vote for Hillary Clinton. Hillary is a smart politician who is concerned about her legacy; as such, she'll probably avoid doing something mind-numbingly drastic and irresponsible, even if she does have horrible opinions now and then. I'm not sure we'll get that with Giuliani. As others have mentioned, he's as close to a fascist as we've had in awhile, and he won't think twice before running individual rights directly into the ground. But yeah, we will be stuck between a rock and a hard place, just like we have been since the nineties or longer.
Next on the todo list: throw out the rest of that abomination of a document that is the Patriot Act. It seems more and more often that document is affecting reach of life that go far beyond "national security". I recently had to provide multiple forms of documentation to open a Health Savings Account because of a Patriot Act provision.
Good work, Congress. Protecting our freedoms by removing our freedoms.
Since there is no real value to having someone clean your hotel room, you might as well do it, right? And cook your own burgers? Why do they have chefs, why not just have the customers cook their own etouffee? Maybe if we drive to Iowa to pick up our own corn, we won't have to push money around without adding value. From now on, I'm going to roll my own sushi!
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Speech, maybe. I wouldn't say freedom of religion is a socially-granted right. The freedom to choose your own belief system is as intrinsic a human characteristic you can get. Even if you have the most hypothetically totalitarian regime possible, they can only control the physical actions of their constituents; not their thought process. They can try to take away your freedom of religion (or opinion/outlook/thought, which is really the same thing), but there is absolutely no way to enforce it. Maybe openly granting freedom of religion may be a relatively new creation, that freedom itself is built into humanity.
The distinction, I guess, would be that speech, copyrights, etc. are all detectable in some way, while beliefs can be completely hidden from any detection whatsoever.
You don't have to pay for social problems if you get rid of them. And charity works just as well as the government. I can't remember which politician said it, but "we fought the war on poverty, and poverty won."
Funny, I always thought it meant just the opposite. Death and illness are part of life. Life does not just mean "being alive." And we're only guaranteed the pursuit of happiness, not happiness itself.
Besides, I think liberty trumps both... What good is life without liberty?
If I must point out where you mentioned "C", I will:
This is just the UK, by the way, which ranked 18th in the WHO rankings, compared to our 37th. It is also a country whose per-capita GDP is about 30% lower than ours, and whose per-capita expenditures on health care are far lower than ours.
There. You made the WHO rankings part of your argument. Equity is included in the WHO rankings. If you don't want equity to be part of your argument, don't quote the WHO rankings.
And the flat earth analogy is quite poor. Funny you didn't address the part about why I consider the statistic inconclusive, but I guess you wouldn't be able to use your silly flat earth analogy, hm?
(a) How much would BMS have been able to develop the drug for had they paid for it rather than the government? Was government research actually more effecient, or would we have been better off just having BMS do it?
(b) How many unsuccessful drugs have BMS have attempted, and how much have they lost persuing them? How many of those drugs were unsuccessful because the FDA didn't approve them, even if there are people for whom using it would be worth the risk? Generally, how much money is spent by pharmaceutical companies on unsuccessful drugs for every successful drug?
(c) How many drugs does this scenario actually relate to? Is this exception or the norm?
I think you have to ask all of those questions before concluding that the government is a useful vehicle for sustainable medicine development.
I presented you raw data. I'm asking you to interpret it sensibly, not depend on the WHO, and certainly not a bunch of talking heads on the radio or TV.
I did interpret it. I said it is inconclusive and next to useless. And I think any decent statistician would agree. The raw data only indicates that people in the US die more often. It doesn't say anything about causes. It doesn't say what the people were doing when they got hurt, whether they live a sedentary lifestyle, what kind of background they come from, how often they get in fights, or really anything other than how often they die. I don't know how you can use that statistic to make any kind of conclusive statement given how many variables there are. The fact is, the US has a completely different culture than Europe. It's silly to completely deny the culture's influence on mortality rate.
Right, none. So your long rant about equity was what, a red herring, right?
It has every bit to do with the WHO's ranking, since these statistics are included in the WHO's ranking criteria. So, really, that was a red herring, right?
So they do spend it all on crack...
Atlanta's problem with drug and mental health service has absolutely nothing to do with the US health care system. That's an underlying social problem. It's a cause rather than an effect.
You don't say, "Look, this social problem is preventing people from getting health care! So let's give them health care!" The smart thing to do would be to tackle the underlying social problem rather than its effect. Another smart thing to do would be to make health care cheaper and more efficient, not more bloated and expensive.
OK, why are those other characteristics important? Why is "safe" care important? If I want to undergo an inherantly risky procedure, shouldn't I have the ability to do so?
And no, equity has nothing to do with quality. Is the quality of a car dependent on how many people get to drive it? Is a Prius a worse car if it is only available to a few people? Absolutely not. Availability of health care is certainly a positive things to have, but people in the US not having health care does not mean the health care system is inherantly worse. Maybe there's a different problem that causes health care to be inaccessible to some, but that is not a problem with the health care.
Because the homeless people in Atlanta don't have access to government welfare benefits? Oh right, they spent it all on crack. My mistake.
And, lest you forget, most of us are paying 20-40% of our paychecks to the government. How are you supposed to donate when the government is robbing you blind?
The WHO has a hell of a lot more expertise behind its indicators than the pundits who are criticizing their ratings. You can either trust an organization that works with doctors and public health experts, or you can trust the tripe spewed by know-nothings working in a think-tank somewhere, your choice.
The WHO can come up with all the data they want, but that doesn't give them the power to defy the principles of statistic, define logic, etc. They can say with as much accuracy is possible that mortality rates are higher in the US, but the interpretation falls squarely in the field of statistics and sociology. They're not infallible, and their interpretations of data is solely the opinion of people whose agenda is not completely transparent.
In your expert opinion? Even a lay-man can tell "number of people dying divided by number of people" is a pretty good indicator of overall health...
Even a lay-man can tell the people in the US are not genetically identical to those in Europe, and that they live in completely different environments and with different lifestyles.
What equity statistics did I present?
None, but the WHO includes them in their rankings
Sure, but academic research institutions don't push drugs through the FDA. They don't do the expensive, time-consuming testing procedures. They certainly take part in scientific research, but it is the pharmacuetical companies that take care of the practical end. It's comparing a university computer science department to an Intel research team. Sure, the CS department will come up with all kinds of cool theoretical concepts, but Intel actually builds something.
You don't have to (actually, you can't) let the legislature decide what's frivolous, but you can force the losing party to pay all legal fees. As it is, it costs money to win a lawsuit, and that's really what makes frivolous lawsuits damaging.
War and Peace is a document.
Volume A-C of the 1996 Encyclopedia Britannica is a document.
The May 2003 issue of Mad Magazine is a document.
The US Constitution is a document.
Well, I bet the Neanderthals looked out for their injured through charity rather than government force, but I'll let your bad analogy slide anyhow.
But the basic idea of a voucher system is that the government pays for them to have an insurance policy of their choice, rather than their having a mandatory government insurance policy. But even with a voucher policy, I think the temptation is there for the government to meddle and overregulate.
I'll bet they don't ever have this problem with payments.
I can see it now... "1300 Unopened Liberty Mutual Insurance Payments Found In Dumpster." Yeah, if they can keep track of the letters they actually want, they should be able to keep track of the ones they don't want.
First of all, why should we have that stipulation? I don't think people have a right to medical care, but whatever.
But were we to assume people should have that right, I'd issue a voucher system where people can be reimbursed for their privately-administered health insurance, thus keeping the government out of it. Also, I'd alter the FDA's approval process and revamp the legal system in order to greatly reduce the costs of medical care. If it's cheaper, we don't even have to spend more to get better care!
The fact that the WHO decided those criteria are indicators of good health care does not make it any more objective. Statistics on mortality rates are next to worthless when comparing highly industrialized nations (eg, US, UK, Australia, etc). Statistics on equity has nothing to do with the quality of a healthcare system (in fact, this 1999 WHO paper clearly has equity and quality as two orthogonal characteristics, and the US as 15th best, on the same statistical plane as most of Europe). On this report, they have the US dominating in really the most important category (and the only important characteristic in quality), which is effective care. There was another recent chart a few months ago which I can't locate that had the US on the second tier (with about five tiers), but the US health care system's worst marks came in equity, which has nothing to do with quality.
The WHO is ranking apples vs. oranges. They put the US at 37, so what? It's pretty much meaningless.
See, I don't think anybody would disagree with that. What is up for argument, however, is the mechanism by which that should be done. Government regulation, or otherwise? It is easily possible to have a capitalist system in which the poor are taken care of.
I don't agree, however, that people have an inherant right to not ever have anything bad happen to them, even if death is involved. Back before the turn of the century or so, if you got the wrong disease, you were done, regardless of how wealthy you were. Maybe a capitalist system don't protect everybody from the facts of life, but those people are certainly better off than they would have been before, and that still doesn't preclude poor people from receiving help even with a capitalist system. I think it could be easily argued that it would be even easier to take care of our wounded if the government were to stop taking all our money and spending it on crap, anyhow.
Funny you say the capitalist system is "all about making money no matter who gets screwed in the process." Ever stop and think of where all the medicines that are saving people are coming from? If you guess "The Government," you're wrong. Nope, it is from creativity that is motivated by reward. So yeah, pharmaceutical companies are making bank off of medicine, but where would we be otherwise (answer: we wouldn't have the medicine anyways). Ever wonder why the US has historically been at the forefront of new research in not just medicine but most every other field?
Those greedy capitalists, not working for free! How dare they turn a profit!!
The hilarious assumption you made is that people who are poor are just dying off because they don't have medical care. Last I checked, hospitals are actually forced to treat people without insurance. Looks like you have your socialized medicine already.
It cracks me up when people come out and denounce capitalism like it's the greatest scourge ever to come upon humanity, while basically depending on products and services that would not even exist were it not for "greedy" capitalists.
It's certainly true that some of the provisions "might have" prevented a 9/11 attack, but hindsight is 20/20. Granted I've only just started reading his work, but Sun Tzu clearly indicated that in order to successfully wage war when your force is smaller, you have to attack where your enemy does not expect you. That is the problem with this kind of war; you can defend against one tactic, but they'll simply adapt and do something else. Look at internet security--it doesn't matter how much Microsoft patches the operating system; they're still going to find a new way to get in. All these provisions will do is direct terrorists to other unknown avenues, at the cost of billions of dollars, our freedoms (which is what we are trying to protect), and our very way of life.
That, however, is only an argument for the futility of the Patriot Act. I would argue that the biggest problem, however, is its scope. Again, why would the Patriot Act dictate what documentation I need in order to open an HSA? Where is the sense in that? Do terrorists use the tax-free medical funds to finance terrorism? I didn't need any of that to open a bank account, or get a credit card, so why an HSA? The problem is that the Patriot Act seems to cover any kind of wild scenario that maybe someone could somehow, in some crazy unlikely scenario, use to even indirectly benefit terrorism. Hey, maybe the terrorists are getting $34/year extra on tax benefits by using an HSA (which, by the way, also requires them to have a HDHP)!
And that even says nothing about why we need to get really, really wound up over terrorist attacks on the US that have killed only a small fraction of number of people who have died of more troublesome causes, such as cancer, or the flu, or armed robbery, or drowning in backyard pools. If we look at it in terms of how much we're giving up in terms of dollars and freedoms per life saved, we're probably spending millions of times on terrorism what we spend on anything else.
First of all, there is no objective statistic that indicates that the US is behind on medical care. All of the "statistics" are based on certain very subjective assumptions that automatically penalize capitalist systems.
That said, it is certainly the case that the US health care system could use some fixing, but the solution is to take the government out of it, not add more government. We could drastically reduce health care costs by limiting frivolous lawsuits and government red tape. That way, more people could have health care and it would be better to boot.
Unbelievably, I think Rudy Giuliani is the only man in the world who could compel me to vote for Hillary Clinton. Hillary is a smart politician who is concerned about her legacy; as such, she'll probably avoid doing something mind-numbingly drastic and irresponsible, even if she does have horrible opinions now and then. I'm not sure we'll get that with Giuliani. As others have mentioned, he's as close to a fascist as we've had in awhile, and he won't think twice before running individual rights directly into the ground. But yeah, we will be stuck between a rock and a hard place, just like we have been since the nineties or longer.
Next on the todo list: throw out the rest of that abomination of a document that is the Patriot Act. It seems more and more often that document is affecting reach of life that go far beyond "national security". I recently had to provide multiple forms of documentation to open a Health Savings Account because of a Patriot Act provision.
Good work, Congress. Protecting our freedoms by removing our freedoms.
Since there is no real value to having someone clean your hotel room, you might as well do it, right? And cook your own burgers? Why do they have chefs, why not just have the customers cook their own etouffee? Maybe if we drive to Iowa to pick up our own corn, we won't have to push money around without adding value. From now on, I'm going to roll my own sushi!
tl;dr