The information you got is either wrong or very short sighted.
I smoke and I've researched this issue into the ground. Its pretty accurate. There's a reason why the "smoking benefits" timeline doesn't have a reduced cancer risk on it. It takes too long for lungs to clean themselves after you quit. It's like asbestos... once those particles get into your lungs, a lot of them are not going to come out. So, quitting smoking now significantly reduces your chances of having a heart attack and stroke, keeps your COPD from getting worse, but, because your lungs are already covered in tar. By the time you go through the decades it takes for your lungs to really clean themselves out, those little particles of doom will have deluded a cell to mutate differently, and you are screwed.
They don't publicize this, because of course, people will get the idea that you may as well keep smoking because you are going to get cancer no matter what you do, which is pretty true, but, they overlook the heart attacks, COPds and other bad things that can happen.
All this overhead adds up to about 30%. So you immediately slash one third of expenses just by killing insurance companies. Then you'll need to slash administrative overhead in medical facilities by moving to electronic records. That'll give you another 10%.
And see you are hopelessly wrong. Your citations of a left leaning blog or wiki do not impress me one bit. AS a historical rule, liberal promises of cost reductions through nationalization have been all wrong. I seem to recall that the original cost of medicare was going to be a comparitively small amount of the US budget. When you have your people already saying that the end game is socialism regardless of the cost, your cost savings are pretty much guaranteed to be completely made up, and they always have been. It doesn't matter if it is better or it is worse, ultimately, to liberals, just so long as it is socialized.
The truth of the matter is thus. Health care costs are climbing roughly exponentially because care is getting more complex. In order to actually
divvy up the pie, pretty much, you have to not pay for some treatments, and basically block new medicines and new technologies from hitting the market, and that's really what government will do. Ultimately, that's the essence of statism. It doesn't matter how good it is, so long as everybody is the same, except for the pigs that run the government.
Look, the study also says that this has applications against lung cancer as well. This is good, because, even if you quit smoking, you don't actually reduce your chances of getting lung cancer.
I know a lot of people are down on the idea of sending people to the moon, or to mars, or to any other place outside of earth's gravity, for the sake of doing so. I think that is exactly why we should do something. In the short term, there is no logical reason to put people in space. But in the long run, we know that we must go there, and thus, we must make halting, childlike, inefficient steps to learn how to get there.
As a species, our first craft to traverse the waters with were not 70,000 ton container ships, 100,000 ton aircraft carriers, or 200,000 ton oil tankers. Most likely it was a crude piece of wood that floated. Later, we would learn to hollow things out, or put pieces of wood together. It took us many years to get from those days to now.
There does not need to be a contest of manned exploration versus unmanned science. At most we are quibbling about an additional 5 to 10 billion dollars per year. Out of a federal budget of several trillion dollars, this is chump change. I would shocked to find that as we have achieved some sort of victory in Iraq, we cannot use some of the nearly 700 billion dollars a year in military spending for this purpose.
At best, assuming you eliminated all profits from insurance, you would only be getting a 12.5% cut. Now, since health insurance costs are rising by 10% a year, give or take, that would roughly imply that all things being equal, you would eat up your profits.
I would ask, in any country that has socialized medicine, are there caps on malpractice. In the UK, you certainly don't have much rights to sue, and in France, many of those rights were swept away in 2002.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone has to make compromises in life. For me, I had a big compromise when I said "I do." I'm a staunch Republican. My wife is a staunch Democrat. We glower at each other in line at the DMV, which has motor-votor registration. And sometimes we try and rip up each other's voter cards. One year we found out that we were donating equal amounts of money to George Bush and Al Gore, then, after swearing that we'd never do it again, expressed great surprise that we were donating to George Bush and John Kerry...
Anyway, I have to say that this is the finest thing I have ever done. I have enjoyed so much being married to a liberal wife, and having that hard difference of opinion. I am not only happy but I am grateful to the stars above that I've had the opportunity to meet all her liberal friends, and she my conservative ones. It's a great life, to discover your liberal wife is a better shot with an assault rifle than you are! I've gotten hammered with all of her nutty liberal friends and I have to say that I am better for it. When you leave politics out the window, we're all pretty much the same, and yes, that includes gay couples too.
Now, the great compromise we have, of course, politically, is over single payer health care. Our deal is thus: My wife will always buy American products, but I will have to come around and support single payer health insurance. SO here goes.
It is utterly foolish for Democrats to support the kind of health care reform they are proposing. Single payer is completely the way to go.
1) People prefer simplicity. No longer will people believe that health insurance companies will somehow give a better service than government. After the last twenty years, they cannot give a better service than anybody. With single payer, I don't have to do a damned thing, but see a doctor when I want. That's pretty powerful.
2) It makes American companies more competitive. One of the chief reasons that GM went belly up is because their interiors of their cars were not as good as their foreign counterparts. Why the difference? Well, GM had to pick up a $1000 difference per car and that translates to health care costs. IF we had single payer, corporations would not have to pay for health insurance. There would be no need for corporate plan administrators, and so forth.
3) More privacy. There's no need for your corporate boss to know about your health care.
4) Better risk management. We've watched insurers merge one after the other, to get better economies of scale and also to have a better risk pool. Size matters in insurance and the chief complaint against any federal plan is that health insurance won't be competitive. Geez, that's some argument. Its one thing to say that government sucks and isn't as good, but its quite another to say that private people have some right to not compete against the government when the delivery of a service is at issue. If UPS can win against the Post Office, then Aetna needs to quit whining about an expanded Medicare.
5) Rationing should be democratic. We all know that ultimately we, me, you and I, are driving health care into the ground. We're Americans and when one of our loved ones is dying, we don't say, gee, that's too bad. WE grab the doctor by the throat and say "save him!" Our desire to save everyone we know, regardless of the cost, is what makes us a great people. Even if we cannot, we are better for having tried, because, as we try, we learn, and some day, we will. In the meantime though, there are sometimes that we must say no, and it is more fare that such times should be held to a vote among all of us, rich and poor, citizens all, than, some stuffy boardroom with insurance doctors picking random things that stuff the balance sheet.
6) Government is not evil. You cannot say that you think Government is evil when you support our military. Our Army is socialized weaponry, and they kick ass. We got 4300 empty helmets on rifles in Iraq, of people working for the US Government. Show me the p
Srawman? People already die _now_ because they can't have access even to _cheap_ treatments. Never mind expensive ones.
Oh really? If they were cheap, they could buy them, and there would be no need for public insurance now, would there?
You should actually think my argument through. If you did, you would find that I'm handing you a slam dunk shot for single payer. After all, if health care has gotten so expensive that we must choose to who lives and who dies by virtue of cost, isn't that really the responsibility of the government, and the government alone, and not the private sector?
I'm trying to help you out here, in a goofy sort of way. I am beholden to a treaty this conservative person made to an arch-liberal wife. In order for her to swear to buy American products wherever possible, in particular, American cars, I have to ultimately support Single Payer. It's just tough working up to it.
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.
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.
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".
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
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.
If the answer is yes, why should universal health care be different?
It is different, because ultimately, if an invader attacks me, a fire gets me, then, we should be united to fix that.
You could make the argument that roads are not only economically inefficient, but they are an inefficiency multiplier. Just have a look at your federal government spending thousands of dollars per mile to pave a road to the middle of nowhere, so that we can spend even more ridiculous amounts of money to deliver a letter to the middle of nowhere, have electricity in the middle of nowhere.... at some point, if you really wanted to make the USA cost efficient, and this is the great secret Republicans do not want to face up to, is that you need to put everyone in medium sized cities.
Most of my friends from work go to their doctor whenever they have a cold...
My wife does that. She suffered from a severe anxiety problem, most likely from marrying yours truly, but, she would have such a sense of doom and dread that she would often wind up in the emergency room.. she would wait for hours...
on the other hand, I walked in with atrial fibrillation. The nurse took my pulse and I was admitted immediately. No standing in line.
Bottom line is, if you are waiting in line in an emergency room, there is likely nothing wrong with you.
Massachusetts alone may not be large enough of an area for that.
The fallacy is that they are trying to solve a problem of exponentially increasing costs with a linear solution. Health care reform cannot possibly work unless you start throwing out expensive treatments and letting some people die. It's just a simple economic reality.
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.
It wasn't that the guy was gay that made me suggest not paying taxes for his healthcare, it was that he was a Democrat with a disease that happens to be terminal.
But here's the flipside. What if we sponsored a plan to provide taxpayer funded abortion clinics but only opened them in areas that were heavily Democratic. The idea would be that you would try and get Democrats to abort themselves out of existence, but you could always sell it as providing a service for the needy or something like that. How could any Democrat argue that this would be a sort of a genocide, when they say that abortion is not killing at all?
Why am I not surprised to see a Republican openly proclaming that they'd vote for someone to be killed for not liking Republicans
Uh, its a joke.
Although, you do bring up an interesting point...
Why should you be required to support the life of someone who openly hates your culture and is trying to get rid of it? Should a Jewish person be required to pay taxes and provide health care for someone who is a member of a Neo-Nazi organization? Should a black man be required to pay health insurance for someone who is a member of the Klan? Should a member of PETA be required to pay health insurance for a hunter of baby seals? You open up quite a can of worms, indeed, when you make health care a public issue.
Yes. If insurance was about nothing more than hedging bets on property, and we were primarily concerned with the health of the insurance industry, then this would be the move to take. However, since health insurance deals with human lives, and the people most likely to have the poorest coverage are those least likely to be able to absorb the costs of health care that is uncovered,
But here's the thing, if health care is so important, why can't people pay for it themselves? Do you not see the problem that we actually have? We have health care that is beyond the ability of anyone to afford it, and so foolishly people look at insurers as if they can magically make it affordable. They can't, and replacing them with government won't make it affordable either.
What's going to happen, really, in this health care reform, and why insurers are on board, is that the Administration is going to lower what it pays to doctors and will treat less diseases with less skill than was done before simply because it is too much. Private insurers will thus be able to point their fingers at government, and, if they want to offer premium insurance that covers more, they will be able to, dropping those that cannot afford it, knowing that the Feds have a plan for everyone else.
The point of insurance is to keep people healthy. If society can't provide that with the current system, it has to decrease the (now exorbitant) prices until people, taken as a whole, can pay for it. Insurance is merely an intermediate in this process -- if it can't operate with a profit, make it a nonprofit
The point of insurance is to provide a way for people to manage the financial risk of catastrophic health care costs. It is up to you to keep you healthy.
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. With health care costs climbing by 10% a year, it stands to reason that even if you completely wiped out private insurance, in a scant few years, those profits would be replaced by tax increases or additional borrowing as costs continued to climb.
The only sensible way to approach health care is to understand that we have created cures and treatments that we cannot afford, and the only way to have health care for everyone is to not have those treatments. That way, everyone could afford to actually pay for their own health care.
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The information you got is either wrong or very short sighted.
I smoke and I've researched this issue into the ground. Its pretty accurate. There's a reason why the "smoking benefits" timeline doesn't have a reduced cancer risk on it. It takes too long for lungs to clean themselves after you quit. It's like asbestos... once those particles get into your lungs, a lot of them are not going to come out. So, quitting smoking now significantly reduces your chances of having a heart attack and stroke, keeps your COPD from getting worse, but, because your lungs are already covered in tar. By the time you go through the decades it takes for your lungs to really clean themselves out, those little particles of doom will have deluded a cell to mutate differently, and you are screwed.
They don't publicize this, because of course, people will get the idea that you may as well keep smoking because you are going to get cancer no matter what you do, which is pretty true, but, they overlook the heart attacks, COPds and other bad things that can happen.
You should see another process floating out there. There's a root chrome process and another for the tab. Either that I have a zombie.
All this overhead adds up to about 30%. So you immediately slash one third of expenses just by killing insurance companies. Then you'll need to slash administrative overhead in medical facilities by moving to electronic records. That'll give you another 10%.
And see you are hopelessly wrong. Your citations of a left leaning blog or wiki do not impress me one bit. AS a historical rule, liberal promises of cost reductions through nationalization have been all wrong. I seem to recall that the original cost of medicare was going to be a comparitively small amount of the US budget. When you have your people already saying that the end game is socialism regardless of the cost, your cost savings are pretty much guaranteed to be completely made up, and they always have been. It doesn't matter if it is better or it is worse, ultimately, to liberals, just so long as it is socialized.
The truth of the matter is thus. Health care costs are climbing roughly exponentially because care is getting more complex. In order to actually
divvy up the pie, pretty much, you have to not pay for some treatments, and basically block new medicines and new technologies from hitting the market, and that's really what government will do. Ultimately, that's the essence of statism. It doesn't matter how good it is, so long as everybody is the same, except for the pigs that run the government.
Look, the study also says that this has applications against lung cancer as well. This is good, because, even if you quit smoking, you don't actually reduce your chances of getting lung cancer.
That's pathetic.
I know a lot of people are down on the idea of sending people to the moon, or to mars, or to any other place outside of earth's gravity, for the sake of doing so. I think that is exactly why we should do something. In the short term, there is no logical reason to put people in space. But in the long run, we know that we must go there, and thus, we must make halting, childlike, inefficient steps to learn how to get there.
As a species, our first craft to traverse the waters with were not 70,000 ton container ships, 100,000 ton aircraft carriers, or 200,000 ton oil tankers. Most likely it was a crude piece of wood that floated. Later, we would learn to hollow things out, or put pieces of wood together. It took us many years to get from those days to now.
There does not need to be a contest of manned exploration versus unmanned science. At most we are quibbling about an additional 5 to 10 billion dollars per year. Out of a federal budget of several trillion dollars, this is chump change. I would shocked to find that as we have achieved some sort of victory in Iraq, we cannot use some of the nearly 700 billion dollars a year in military spending for this purpose.
No. Even cheap treatments are way too expensive in the US. Because of insurance-based money-grabbing medicine
No, because, blue cross blue shields return on equity is only 12.5%.
http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/522.html
At best, assuming you eliminated all profits from insurance, you would only be getting a 12.5% cut. Now, since health insurance costs are rising by 10% a year, give or take, that would roughly imply that all things being equal, you would eat up your profits.
I would ask, in any country that has socialized medicine, are there caps on malpractice. In the UK, you certainly don't have much rights to sue, and in France, many of those rights were swept away in 2002.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone has to make compromises in life. For me, I had a big compromise when I said "I do." I'm a staunch Republican. My wife is a staunch Democrat. We glower at each other in line at the DMV, which has motor-votor registration. And sometimes we try and rip up each other's voter cards. One year we found out that we were donating equal amounts of money to George Bush and Al Gore, then, after swearing that we'd never do it again, expressed great surprise that we were donating to George Bush and John Kerry...
Anyway, I have to say that this is the finest thing I have ever done. I have enjoyed so much being married to a liberal wife, and having that hard difference of opinion. I am not only happy but I am grateful to the stars above that I've had the opportunity to meet all her liberal friends, and she my conservative ones. It's a great life, to discover your liberal wife is a better shot with an assault rifle than you are! I've gotten hammered with all of her nutty liberal friends and I have to say that I am better for it. When you leave politics out the window, we're all pretty much the same, and yes, that includes gay couples too.
Now, the great compromise we have, of course, politically, is over single payer health care. Our deal is thus: My wife will always buy American products, but I will have to come around and support single payer health insurance. SO here goes.
It is utterly foolish for Democrats to support the kind of health care reform they are proposing. Single payer is completely the way to go.
1) People prefer simplicity. No longer will people believe that health insurance companies will somehow give a better service than government. After the last twenty years, they cannot give a better service than anybody. With single payer, I don't have to do a damned thing, but see a doctor when I want. That's pretty powerful.
2) It makes American companies more competitive. One of the chief reasons that GM went belly up is because their interiors of their cars were not as good as their foreign counterparts. Why the difference? Well, GM had to pick up a $1000 difference per car and that translates to health care costs. IF we had single payer, corporations would not have to pay for health insurance. There would be no need for corporate plan administrators, and so forth.
3) More privacy. There's no need for your corporate boss to know about your health care.
4) Better risk management. We've watched insurers merge one after the other, to get better economies of scale and also to have a better risk pool. Size matters in insurance and the chief complaint against any federal plan is that health insurance won't be competitive. Geez, that's some argument. Its one thing to say that government sucks and isn't as good, but its quite another to say that private people have some right to not compete against the government when the delivery of a service is at issue. If UPS can win against the Post Office, then Aetna needs to quit whining about an expanded Medicare.
5) Rationing should be democratic. We all know that ultimately we, me, you and I, are driving health care into the ground. We're Americans and when one of our loved ones is dying, we don't say, gee, that's too bad. WE grab the doctor by the throat and say "save him!" Our desire to save everyone we know, regardless of the cost, is what makes us a great people. Even if we cannot, we are better for having tried, because, as we try, we learn, and some day, we will. In the meantime though, there are sometimes that we must say no, and it is more fare that such times should be held to a vote among all of us, rich and poor, citizens all, than, some stuffy boardroom with insurance doctors picking random things that stuff the balance sheet.
6) Government is not evil. You cannot say that you think Government is evil when you support our military. Our Army is socialized weaponry, and they kick ass. We got 4300 empty helmets on rifles in Iraq, of people working for the US Government. Show me the p
Srawman? People already die _now_ because they can't have access even to _cheap_ treatments. Never mind expensive ones.
Oh really? If they were cheap, they could buy them, and there would be no need for public insurance now, would there?
You should actually think my argument through. If you did, you would find that I'm handing you a slam dunk shot for single payer. After all, if health care has gotten so expensive that we must choose to who lives and who dies by virtue of cost, isn't that really the responsibility of the government, and the government alone, and not the private sector?
I'm trying to help you out here, in a goofy sort of way. I am beholden to a treaty this conservative person made to an arch-liberal wife. In order for her to swear to buy American products wherever possible, in particular, American cars, I have to ultimately support Single Payer. It's just tough working up to it.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
If the answer is yes, why should universal health care be different?
It is different, because ultimately, if an invader attacks me, a fire gets me, then, we should be united to fix that.
You could make the argument that roads are not only economically inefficient, but they are an inefficiency multiplier. Just have a look at your federal government spending thousands of dollars per mile to pave a road to the middle of nowhere, so that we can spend even more ridiculous amounts of money to deliver a letter to the middle of nowhere, have electricity in the middle of nowhere.... at some point, if you really wanted to make the USA cost efficient, and this is the great secret Republicans do not want to face up to, is that you need to put everyone in medium sized cities.
Most of my friends from work go to their doctor whenever they have a cold...
My wife does that. She suffered from a severe anxiety problem, most likely from marrying yours truly, but, she would have such a sense of doom and dread that she would often wind up in the emergency room.. she would wait for hours...
on the other hand, I walked in with atrial fibrillation. The nurse took my pulse and I was admitted immediately. No standing in line.
Bottom line is, if you are waiting in line in an emergency room, there is likely nothing wrong with you.
Massachusetts alone may not be large enough of an area for that.
The fallacy is that they are trying to solve a problem of exponentially increasing costs with a linear solution. Health care reform cannot possibly work unless you start throwing out expensive treatments and letting some people die. It's just a simple economic reality.
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.
You are so right!
It wasn't that the guy was gay that made me suggest not paying taxes for his healthcare, it was that he was a Democrat with a disease that happens to be terminal.
But here's the flipside. What if we sponsored a plan to provide taxpayer funded abortion clinics but only opened them in areas that were heavily Democratic. The idea would be that you would try and get Democrats to abort themselves out of existence, but you could always sell it as providing a service for the needy or something like that. How could any Democrat argue that this would be a sort of a genocide, when they say that abortion is not killing at all?
Why am I not surprised to see a Republican openly proclaming that they'd vote for someone to be killed for not liking Republicans
Uh, its a joke.
Although, you do bring up an interesting point...
Why should you be required to support the life of someone who openly hates your culture and is trying to get rid of it? Should a Jewish person be required to pay taxes and provide health care for someone who is a member of a Neo-Nazi organization? Should a black man be required to pay health insurance for someone who is a member of the Klan? Should a member of PETA be required to pay health insurance for a hunter of baby seals? You open up quite a can of worms, indeed, when you make health care a public issue.
Yes. If insurance was about nothing more than hedging bets on property, and we were primarily concerned with the health of the insurance industry, then this would be the move to take. However, since health insurance deals with human lives, and the people most likely to have the poorest coverage are those least likely to be able to absorb the costs of health care that is uncovered,
But here's the thing, if health care is so important, why can't people pay for it themselves? Do you not see the problem that we actually have? We have health care that is beyond the ability of anyone to afford it, and so foolishly people look at insurers as if they can magically make it affordable. They can't, and replacing them with government won't make it affordable either.
What's going to happen, really, in this health care reform, and why insurers are on board, is that the Administration is going to lower what it pays to doctors and will treat less diseases with less skill than was done before simply because it is too much. Private insurers will thus be able to point their fingers at government, and, if they want to offer premium insurance that covers more, they will be able to, dropping those that cannot afford it, knowing that the Feds have a plan for everyone else.
The point of insurance is to keep people healthy. If society can't provide that with the current system, it has to decrease the (now exorbitant) prices until people, taken as a whole, can pay for it. Insurance is merely an intermediate in this process -- if it can't operate with a profit, make it a nonprofit
The point of insurance is to provide a way for people to manage the financial risk of catastrophic health care costs. It is up to you to keep you healthy.
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. With health care costs climbing by 10% a year, it stands to reason that even if you completely wiped out private insurance, in a scant few years, those profits would be replaced by tax increases or additional borrowing as costs continued to climb.
The only sensible way to approach health care is to understand that we have created cures and treatments that we cannot afford, and the only way to have health care for everyone is to not have those treatments. That way, everyone could afford to actually pay for their own health care.