Whether they were drafted or not isn't really the point. Can you really say, in hindsight, that there were no "good-guys" on the battlefield in World War 2? That the western allies (as WrongMonkey rightly pointed out, as opposed to all of the allies), can't be considered the good-guys as opposed to the Wehrmacht, who regardless of their motivations as individuals, were working directly for the Third Reich?
Hey, how dare you challenge so many/.'ers dearly held notion that if you're serving in the military you're obviously a moron, while true genius is best expressed by posting on....well, Slashdot of course.
Informative would be that statement, with a source to back it up.
Or, would I be equally informative if I just replied "No, the top pilot is actually a kitten, and he flys the drone by batting at a special controller that's been dipped in catnip and dangled in front of him on a string"? My story is way better, and I don't have a source either.....
One lie, persistent on all battlefields in the history of humanity is: We're the good guys!
Silly concentration-camp prisoners during WW2, falling for that lie and thinking the Allied forces were the good guys. Man, what a bunch of rubes, when clearly, according to you, they were no different than the Wehrmacht. Or did you really mean some battlefields, or "the occasional battlefield"?
Okay, I concede that in the case of a made-up insurance company with only one customer, that's how it would work. Further, I'll concede that if I had wings and could navigate using sonar I might be a bat. Neither of these things are based in reality though. In the real world, insurance companies have thousands, or tens of thousands of subscribers, all of whom are paying far more for the insurance than they are using in care on a day-to-day basis. A small number are using far more than they're paying in, based on catastrophic circumstances (cancer, heart disease, brain surgery, whatever). That money is coming from the other subscribers. This is why insurance companies run at a profit, not at a loss. If the investors were the source of the payouts, there would be no profit, the stock would plummet and there would be no more investors. Seeing as how that isn't what's happening, I think we're safe to say that investors are *not* paying for claims.
While nothing is impossible, I'd be really surprised if they actually managed to successfully prosecute your mom for an attractive nuisance this way. Normally that would apply to something like a swimming pool without a fence, or an abandoned truck in the middle of a field. Teenagers stealing a running car would normally be a really hard sell, since 17 is an age where you should clearly know that taking a car without permission is illegal. I'm not doubting your story, but I suspect that the cop in that case may have brought that out as a way of not having to deal with the car-theft for some reason, and scaring your parents out of pressing charges against the kids themselves. Of course I could be wrong, but something here doesn't seem quite right....
On what are you basing this assumption? Government employees have incentives to screw you. They are just different incentives. Ever worked in the public sector during bad economic times? Ever seen managers rewarded for blanket cost cutting without regard to the facts just as they would be in the private sector? Ever seen a politically unpopular constituency screwed just to advance the career of some sleazeball politician? Ever seen a witch hunt where some poor mid level manager bastard takes all the fall for the incompetence of his better politically-connected bosses?
Nowhere did I say it was the *perfect* alternative. Yes, I've seen private sector managers rewarded for cost-cutting without regard for the facts, many, many, many times. And I've seen it in healthcare, and people then suffer or die from the results. As for the unpopular constituency being screwed, what do you think is going to happen? Is someone actually going to say "we're trying something different this year, if you're black or hispanic, you no longer get healthcare"? Are the Canadians really that much better than us that they can run a system like this while we, poor, corrupt, stupid Americans haven't a chance in hell of making it work? I have a higher opinion of this country than you do it seems.
Government always craves itself out a nice little exemption to the privacy laws. Go read the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Government regulated how, why and when third parties can look at your credit report -- but left itself a nice little exemption for law enforcement or national security. It doesn't need a warrant. All you need a government employee willing to make a "national security" claim and they can view your data at will.
This sounds more paranoid than anything else. And do you think that if this dangerous and evil government wanted your insurance information, they have absolutely no way of getting it now? Just like the phone companies, if the government did do an end run around warrants and demanded your records from whomever you're insured by, that company is probably going to hand it over. There's a point where worrying obsessively becomes a black hole, and you've got to go with what's reasonable, rather than what could happen in an absolute worst case scenario.
Ever notice how the do not call list exempted political pollsters and campaigns? Ever notice how the "not for identification" social security number grew into a tax id number and identifier? I'm sorry, but you are naive if you think that Government is better at protecting your privacy than private corporations.
The exemption is because of freedom of speech issues. If you block political calls, the issue becomes a question of whether the government is stifling potentially opposing viewpoints politically. It's annoying, but it's not sinister, and it has nothing to do with privacy, those callers get your number commercially, not from the government. The SSN is stupid because it's handy to have a number that identifies a person, but when it was created the government wasn't specifically barred from using it for purposes other than Social Security. You may also notice that it's widely used by the private sector. If it exists, and there's nothing stopping people from using it, it'll get used. Stupid on the part of the people who set it up, but that's about all.
Yes there is. Have you not been paying attention to the ongoing issues with medicare? Many of the medicare reimbursement rates don't even cover what it costs the doctor to offer the procedure. Primary care doctors now make less than half of what they did 20 years ago. Medicare is squeezing doctors and hospitals dry. The end result of this will be that the best and the brightest decide to go into other fields besides medicine and the overall quality of our health care system will go down.
Medicare is a different story. It's funded differently
Single-payer has the same problem as the current system. You are just replacing private sector bureaucrats for public sector ones.
I see the problem being the profit motive. A for-profit company has a great deal more incentive to screw you out of treatment to keep the money than a government employee does.
On a more philosophical level, I would also object to single-payer because it represents yet another expansion of government into our private lives. I don't want the government knowing what kinds of medical procedures and problems I have. I don't want my taxes being raised to support the bad lifestyle (obesity/promiscuity/abuse of recreational substances/etc) choices of another, nor do I want the government in the business of "correcting" those bad lifestyle choices.
Well, the first part is a concern I just don't share. I don't care if, lets call it "AmeriHealth" has that information, any more than I care that the insurance company does. Actually, I'd prefer it. I don't trust the insurance company to have that data, I have at least some hope that "AmeriHealth" could be forced to follow privacy regulations by virtue of it being a government agency, rather than a private group that can do what it wants in the shadows with no accountability to anyone but it's shareholders. As for your taxes being used to support "bad lifestyles", well, I don't want my taxes used to buy nuclear weapons, but they do. Sometimes your taxes will go towards things you don't like, and that's just a part of living in a large, diverse society. And with the government "correcting" bad choices, well, I'd hope that doesn't happen. I don't know how realistic that hope is, since they already impose sin-taxes on things that people don't like, but I'm not aware of, say, Canada forcing people to eat healthy or stop drinking, so I have no reason to believe it'd happen here.
In the latter that choice has been taken away from me and I'm at the mercy of a government run system which I can't even opt-out of.
I actually saw another post here somewhere that talked about the Australian system. That one sounded interesting to me, and allowed for you to either handle it yourself, or use the universal plan. Would that be more acceptable to you? If what I read was right, it'd sound just fine to me....
Consider what happened in the VA system a few years ago. Now ask yourself why any other government run health care system would be immune from the political and budgetary pressures that allowed and even encouraged such a pathetic outcome?
That was an absolute and true national disgrace. The people who served this country deserve far better than what they were getting, and reading about it was appalling. But, and there's always a but, that happened because the public at large didn't see it. It was intentionally hidden when possible. Now, first, I'd say, if that was widespread and the type of care everyone saw, the outrage would be at a level that couldn't be ignored. Second, single-payer is not "socialized medicine" in the English style where the government "owns" the hospitals and clinics, and doctors are government employees. Single payer only handles the role that the insurance companies currently handle. There's no reason why the hospital down the road from me, or my private doctor's practice would suddenly decay and become something out of a William Gibson novel just because the checks they cash say "AmeriHealth" on them instead of "Blue Cross" or "Cigna" or "Horizon". Even at that, the doctors would know up front what they were going to get paid, and not have to spend time and resources wrangling with the insurance companies over what the doctor charges vs. what the insurance company defines as customary rate.
There is a third option -- insurance. Not cost-sharing plans. Plain old insurance. Just like the GP described.
Really? So when a cancer patient goes for hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of treatment, or a someone requires a heart-transplant, running somewhere around half a million dollars or more, you think they've paid that much to their insurance plan beforehand, or even over the entire life of the policy? Nonsense. Insurance is cost sharing. You, hopefully, will lead a fairly healthy life, and will never require half a million dollars worth of care. The two possibilities I mentioned above are in addition to regular care, and more regular care than someone who's otherwise healthy will ever need. Where do you think the money for those procedures comes from when and insurance company is called on to pay up? Cost sharing. You've paid into people's heart transplants, cancer treatments, kidney and liver transplants, brain surgeries, and many other treatments, and chances are, you've never used any care that's come at all close to costing what those do.
/ Plus we should let old people die (not kill them, just not spend billions fixing them)// I know I'm a terrible person for even thinking that, but it would solve the problem/// I'm sure not planning to spend a lot of time hanging out at death's door
If you're talking about people who are on life-support and have no conscious brain activity, I don't necessarily disagree with you. If you just mean people who are old, well, why do I have the feeling that when it's your turn to just die, you'll have a different take on things?
We aren't really disagreeing all that much here. What I'm talking about above is the system we have now, not what I like, or what I think is a good idea. Personally, I like the idea of a single payer system. What you mention about a high-deductible plan is interesting as well, I'd have to think it over more to decide whether I would approve of something like that. I'm willing to say that there's potentially more than one "right answer" on how to fix healthcare, but what we have now doesn't seem to be it.
Where I think we both seem to agree though, is that "insurance" is exactly the wrong model when it comes to most healthcare.
yeah yeah yeah, paying insurance premiums is slavery, paying taxes is slavery, paying into social security is slavery blah blah blah.
A slave is forced to work. You can quit your job, you can live in homeless shelters, you can sit by the side of the road and count cars all day. Nobody will *force* you to work. Nobody will whip you for dropping out of your formerly productive life. Your lifestyle will suck, but to suggest that paying taxes, or insurance premiums, or any other fee is the same as slavery means you haven't the vaguest concept of what it means to be a slave.
Slaves don't get to quit being slaves. You can go live in one of the paradise spots where nobody has to pay taxes, or insurance, or any of that stuff, I hear Somalia is nice. Slaves don't get the choice to pack up their belongings and leave if they want. You choose to live in a society like the ones in the U.S. or Europe. Boo-hoo, you have to pay something into the system to continue to live your chosen lifestyle in that chosen society.
I hate to break it to you, but healthcare insurance, really all insurance, is socialism if you look at it that way. A large group pays in, and costs are spread among them. If you have healthcare insurance, that's what you're paying for. Otherwise, you'd just set up a medical savings account, and pay all your costs out of pocket. For most people that doesn't seem to work in the extreme long term.
The worst thing about the "health-care debate" in the US is the absolute atrocious mangling of the truth that the has been employed by those seeking to increase their power base.
Why should people who are young and healthy have to subsidize those who aren't?
Do you intend to die as soon as you cease to be young and healthy? That condition is not going to last forever, and "I'll just stay in perfect health all my life" is a pretty stupid plan.
Health insurance is a for-profit industry. If the only people who subscribe to their services are making claims, where do you think the money to pay the claims comes from?
As for car insurance, the payouts for a healthcare insurer are inevitable, they aren't for a car insurance company. That's one of the reasons I hate the idea of "healthcare insurance". Most people don't make major claims against their car insurance company. Those that do are comparatively rare. In healthcare, as long as you have a plan, you can consistently be expected to make more claims against it as you grow older. Even if you live a healthy lifestyle, the likelyhood of needing care go up as you age, plain and simple.
If you really want nothing to do with that system, fine, but I suspect that as you get older, you'd be regretting having no healthcare option other than to pay for everything out of pocket.
Congrats, you've described the stereotypical pyramid scheme.
Which is pretty much what the health-insurance industry is.
I don't really see anything that you said that I don't agree with. I'm not a fan of the current incarnation of health-care legislation, I'm in favour of a single-payer system.
What I was describing above is how things are, not how I'd like things to be.
Let's say I have $1000. I can pay it for health insurance premiums, or I can go without health insurance and spend the money on whores instead. That's 'choice'.
Presumably though, when you're older and less indestructible, you'll want to enroll in health insurance though, right? The way insurance functions is that young healthy people are effectively subsidizing those less healthy, and then when those people eventually need that care, the new crop of young healthy insurance payers are effectively subsidizing their care. Keeping your money now to "spend on whores instead" short circuits that system, and puts you in the position of burdening everyone else by never having payed your share earlier. Unless of course you intend to never have insurance, and just die as soon as you get a little older and can't afford medical care. In that case, go for it.
What? Can you name any actual *current* conservatives that are saying these things?
Marriage. The conservative will say, "whatever people wanna do, let 'em do it and face the consequences." Some of them will add, "I hope those homos some day figure out that no matter how much they buttfuck, they're not going to create a baby. Too bad, their loss when they grow old and don't have a family to support them." Other conservatives will say, "What consequences? Spending your life with someone you love? Ha!"
Funny, it seems to me that the conservative viewpoint is that marriage is under attack, and that same sex marriage would destroy the institution. Every major (albiet stupid) argument against same-sex marriage I've heard has come from the conservatives. It's either social conservatism (preserving the status quo), or based on religious values, but either way, it's coming from the conservatives. Liberals are far more likely to be in favor of same-sex marriage, but unfortunately liberal politicians are generally too weak-knee'd to follow through on it.
And so on. Drug war? Liberals are generally against it, with, once again, liberal politicians too weak-knee'd to do anything about it for fear of being called "soft on crime" by.....wait for it....conservatives.
Abortion: again, most staunchly opposed by conservatives. And why is that? The hardest core against abortion is the religious right, which is purely a conservative institution. You don't have a "hardcore religious left" trying to call the shots in politics, religion is much more marginal for the liberals than the conservatives.
Now, I noticed you specified "Pre-Reagan", but really, at this point who cares what the conservatives were like 30 years ago. What matters is what they are now. And really, are you nostalgic for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford? If not, we're really talking about almost 50 years ago to Eisenhower.... I don't know if you were going for one of those "these guys now aren't REAL conservatives" positions, but they're here now, and they're the conservatives.
Or maybe there's just no particularly good reason for them to regrow, meaning, an organism with a badly damaged brain is in dire shape, and unlikely to live long enough to reproduce. Now, that answer sucks from a "But I don't wanna die!" perspective, but evolution doesn't care about that. Now, humans, being a pretty cheeky bunch, have no problem looking at this as a challenge to be overcome, and due to the fact that we can provide an individual with time and the proper environment to recover from this kind of injury. We can just come along, say "Gee, may have made sense 10,000 years ago when we were swinging from trees, but now why don't we fix this and let Bill recover instead". Brain injuries like that are rare enough and (without care) fatal enough that we may just have never evolved a repair mechanism, because it didn't grant much of an advantage in survival.
Or maybe it'll make our brains grow uncontrollably until our eyes pop out and our skulls crack open. Could go either way I suppose....
Just to be clear, I didn't specify *formal* education. You can be educated, and never set foot in a classroom. If you want to be an expert on history for example, it's *possible* to do so on your own, but the level of expertise depends on your own intelligence, aptitude, and how far you want to go with it. The level and formality of training to have an "informed opinion" depends entirely on the person, the subject matter, and the level of detail being discussed. If you're on a daytime talkshow, having a pulse is probably all you really need for nearly any subject. If you're discussing physics with Stephen Hawking and Michio Kaku, you probably want more than a high-school diploma and a copy of Carl Sagan's Cosmos DVDs.
All I'm saying is, anti-intellectual has a very specific meaning, and that is someone who doesn't value intellectual discourse, activities or pursuits. The left has plenty of faults, but anti-intellectualism isn't one that they generally fall into, that seems to be far more likely on the right than the left.
You're missing the point. Anti-intellectual doesn't mean wrong or stupid. It is a position that shows hostility or disdain for intellectuals, which AFAIC isn't a position generally attributed to the left in general, or to Gore and Moore in particular.
The Republican party has shown a leaning toward anti-intellectualism. That's the subtext of comments about "Liberal Elitists". It's not hard to find examples of the Republicans trying to say that being educated is a negative, but being a "regular Joe-Sixpack" is somehow virtuous.
Anthropogenic Global warming believers don't want anyone to drive SUVs without feeling bad about it, so they cherrypick data that supports their already determined philosophical standpoint.
I don't really get this though. I can see why you'd want an SUV even if it's bad for the environment. They're comfortable, they hold a lot of stuff, they're cool looking, they're great off-road compared to a Prius. What I don't get is, why would AGW supporters care if you're driving a HMMWV if they don't feel that the theory is valid? It sounds like you're saying their position is: "I hate SUVs. I must find a way to make people stop driving them. I must fudge my data to make it look like SUVs are bad". My question is, why do you think they care about people driving SUVs in the first place?
I hope mass-production never becomes available to normal people.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see it available for people with a legitimate medical need. I would just hate to see just anyone get things.
I'm probably going to get modded flamebait for this one, but here goes...
I work hard to make everything in my house. I practice carpentry and woodworking every day. I choose how I spend my time very carefully, and I don't give in when I'd rather do something else, like work on my physique. I have earned the right to live the way I do.
Far, far too many people in this country just want something for nothing. They want the instant fix without any hard work, and this isn't limited to having nice furniture. The idea that someone could pop down to a store and suddenly have their home look like a their furniture was made by a master craftsman makes me angry. It's like those damn "do it yourself kits" you see everywhere. When the day finally comes that a "do it yourself kit" can actually be assembled into really nice furniture, I'll be furious.
Maybe I'm being too critical, but my opinion boils down to this: If you work hard at something, you deserve to reap the benefits. If you do not work hard at something, you deserve nothing.
It was a friendly jab at the fact that the US is a bit behind in mobile phone technology, but you seem to be taking it awfully hard.
And I was just doing the same. Oddly, instead of either just laughing and moving on, or making your own comeback, you decided to take it seriously. Interesting. I was just taking a friendly jab at the fact that major Scandinavian innovation ended with the Viking longboat, unless you count their breakthroughs in the field of inexpensive, but tasteful, modular home furnishings.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether they were drafted or not isn't really the point. Can you really say, in hindsight, that there were no "good-guys" on the battlefield in World War 2? That the western allies (as WrongMonkey rightly pointed out, as opposed to all of the allies), can't be considered the good-guys as opposed to the Wehrmacht, who regardless of their motivations as individuals, were working directly for the Third Reich?
Hey, how dare you challenge so many /.'ers dearly held notion that if you're serving in the military you're obviously a moron, while true genius is best expressed by posting on....well, Slashdot of course.
Shame on you sir. Shame.
Informative would be that statement, with a source to back it up.
Or, would I be equally informative if I just replied "No, the top pilot is actually a kitten, and he flys the drone by batting at a special controller that's been dipped in catnip and dangled in front of him on a string"? My story is way better, and I don't have a source either.....
Silly concentration-camp prisoners during WW2, falling for that lie and thinking the Allied forces were the good guys. Man, what a bunch of rubes, when clearly, according to you, they were no different than the Wehrmacht.
Or did you really mean some battlefields, or "the occasional battlefield"?
Okay, I concede that in the case of a made-up insurance company with only one customer, that's how it would work. Further, I'll concede that if I had wings and could navigate using sonar I might be a bat. Neither of these things are based in reality though. In the real world, insurance companies have thousands, or tens of thousands of subscribers, all of whom are paying far more for the insurance than they are using in care on a day-to-day basis. A small number are using far more than they're paying in, based on catastrophic circumstances (cancer, heart disease, brain surgery, whatever). That money is coming from the other subscribers. This is why insurance companies run at a profit, not at a loss. If the investors were the source of the payouts, there would be no profit, the stock would plummet and there would be no more investors. Seeing as how that isn't what's happening, I think we're safe to say that investors are *not* paying for claims.
While nothing is impossible, I'd be really surprised if they actually managed to successfully prosecute your mom for an attractive nuisance this way. Normally that would apply to something like a swimming pool without a fence, or an abandoned truck in the middle of a field. Teenagers stealing a running car would normally be a really hard sell, since 17 is an age where you should clearly know that taking a car without permission is illegal.
I'm not doubting your story, but I suspect that the cop in that case may have brought that out as a way of not having to deal with the car-theft for some reason, and scaring your parents out of pressing charges against the kids themselves.
Of course I could be wrong, but something here doesn't seem quite right....
Nowhere did I say it was the *perfect* alternative. Yes, I've seen private sector managers rewarded for cost-cutting without regard for the facts, many, many, many times. And I've seen it in healthcare, and people then suffer or die from the results. As for the unpopular constituency being screwed, what do you think is going to happen? Is someone actually going to say "we're trying something different this year, if you're black or hispanic, you no longer get healthcare"? Are the Canadians really that much better than us that they can run a system like this while we, poor, corrupt, stupid Americans haven't a chance in hell of making it work? I have a higher opinion of this country than you do it seems.
This sounds more paranoid than anything else. And do you think that if this dangerous and evil government wanted your insurance information, they have absolutely no way of getting it now? Just like the phone companies, if the government did do an end run around warrants and demanded your records from whomever you're insured by, that company is probably going to hand it over. There's a point where worrying obsessively becomes a black hole, and you've got to go with what's reasonable, rather than what could happen in an absolute worst case scenario.
The exemption is because of freedom of speech issues. If you block political calls, the issue becomes a question of whether the government is stifling potentially opposing viewpoints politically. It's annoying, but it's not sinister, and it has nothing to do with privacy, those callers get your number commercially, not from the government. The SSN is stupid because it's handy to have a number that identifies a person, but when it was created the government wasn't specifically barred from using it for purposes other than Social Security. You may also notice that it's widely used by the private sector. If it exists, and there's nothing stopping people from using it, it'll get used. Stupid on the part of the people who set it up, but that's about all.
Medicare is a different story. It's funded differently
I see the problem being the profit motive. A for-profit company has a great deal more incentive to screw you out of treatment to keep the money than a government employee does.
Well, the first part is a concern I just don't share. I don't care if, lets call it "AmeriHealth" has that information, any more than I care that the insurance company does. Actually, I'd prefer it. I don't trust the insurance company to have that data, I have at least some hope that "AmeriHealth" could be forced to follow privacy regulations by virtue of it being a government agency, rather than a private group that can do what it wants in the shadows with no accountability to anyone but it's shareholders. As for your taxes being used to support "bad lifestyles", well, I don't want my taxes used to buy nuclear weapons, but they do. Sometimes your taxes will go towards things you don't like, and that's just a part of living in a large, diverse society. And with the government "correcting" bad choices, well, I'd hope that doesn't happen. I don't know how realistic that hope is, since they already impose sin-taxes on things that people don't like, but I'm not aware of, say, Canada forcing people to eat healthy or stop drinking, so I have no reason to believe it'd happen here.
I actually saw another post here somewhere that talked about the Australian system. That one sounded interesting to me, and allowed for you to either handle it yourself, or use the universal plan. Would that be more acceptable to you? If what I read was right, it'd sound just fine to me....
That was an absolute and true national disgrace. The people who served this country deserve far better than what they were getting, and reading about it was appalling. But, and there's always a but, that happened because the public at large didn't see it. It was intentionally hidden when possible. Now, first, I'd say, if that was widespread and the type of care everyone saw, the outrage would be at a level that couldn't be ignored. Second, single-payer is not "socialized medicine" in the English style where the government "owns" the hospitals and clinics, and doctors are government employees. Single payer only handles the role that the insurance companies currently handle. There's no reason why the hospital down the road from me, or my private doctor's practice would suddenly decay and become something out of a William Gibson novel just because the checks they cash say "AmeriHealth" on them instead of "Blue Cross" or "Cigna" or "Horizon". Even at that, the doctors would know up front what they were going to get paid, and not have to spend time and resources wrangling with the insurance companies over what the doctor charges vs. what the insurance company defines as customary rate.
depending on what you catch from them, you may not have to worry about the getting old part either.
Really? So when a cancer patient goes for hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of treatment, or a someone requires a heart-transplant, running somewhere around half a million dollars or more, you think they've paid that much to their insurance plan beforehand, or even over the entire life of the policy? Nonsense. Insurance is cost sharing. You, hopefully, will lead a fairly healthy life, and will never require half a million dollars worth of care. The two possibilities I mentioned above are in addition to regular care, and more regular care than someone who's otherwise healthy will ever need. Where do you think the money for those procedures comes from when and insurance company is called on to pay up?
Cost sharing. You've paid into people's heart transplants, cancer treatments, kidney and liver transplants, brain surgeries, and many other treatments, and chances are, you've never used any care that's come at all close to costing what those do.
If you're talking about people who are on life-support and have no conscious brain activity, I don't necessarily disagree with you. If you just mean people who are old, well, why do I have the feeling that when it's your turn to just die, you'll have a different take on things?
We aren't really disagreeing all that much here. What I'm talking about above is the system we have now, not what I like, or what I think is a good idea.
Personally, I like the idea of a single payer system. What you mention about a high-deductible plan is interesting as well, I'd have to think it over more to decide whether I would approve of something like that. I'm willing to say that there's potentially more than one "right answer" on how to fix healthcare, but what we have now doesn't seem to be it.
Where I think we both seem to agree though, is that "insurance" is exactly the wrong model when it comes to most healthcare.
yeah yeah yeah, paying insurance premiums is slavery, paying taxes is slavery, paying into social security is slavery blah blah blah.
A slave is forced to work. You can quit your job, you can live in homeless shelters, you can sit by the side of the road and count cars all day. Nobody will *force* you to work. Nobody will whip you for dropping out of your formerly productive life. Your lifestyle will suck, but to suggest that paying taxes, or insurance premiums, or any other fee is the same as slavery means you haven't the vaguest concept of what it means to be a slave.
Slaves don't get to quit being slaves. You can go live in one of the paradise spots where nobody has to pay taxes, or insurance, or any of that stuff, I hear Somalia is nice. Slaves don't get the choice to pack up their belongings and leave if they want. You choose to live in a society like the ones in the U.S. or Europe. Boo-hoo, you have to pay something into the system to continue to live your chosen lifestyle in that chosen society.
I hate to break it to you, but healthcare insurance, really all insurance, is socialism if you look at it that way. A large group pays in, and costs are spread among them. If you have healthcare insurance, that's what you're paying for. Otherwise, you'd just set up a medical savings account, and pay all your costs out of pocket. For most people that doesn't seem to work in the extreme long term.
I agree entirely. Please stop doing that.
Do you intend to die as soon as you cease to be young and healthy? That condition is not going to last forever, and "I'll just stay in perfect health all my life" is a pretty stupid plan.
Health insurance is a for-profit industry. If the only people who subscribe to their services are making claims, where do you think the money to pay the claims comes from?
As for car insurance, the payouts for a healthcare insurer are inevitable, they aren't for a car insurance company. That's one of the reasons I hate the idea of "healthcare insurance". Most people don't make major claims against their car insurance company. Those that do are comparatively rare. In healthcare, as long as you have a plan, you can consistently be expected to make more claims against it as you grow older. Even if you live a healthy lifestyle, the likelyhood of needing care go up as you age, plain and simple.
If you really want nothing to do with that system, fine, but I suspect that as you get older, you'd be regretting having no healthcare option other than to pay for everything out of pocket.
Which is pretty much what the health-insurance industry is.
I don't really see anything that you said that I don't agree with. I'm not a fan of the current incarnation of health-care legislation, I'm in favour of a single-payer system.
What I was describing above is how things are, not how I'd like things to be.
Presumably though, when you're older and less indestructible, you'll want to enroll in health insurance though, right? The way insurance functions is that young healthy people are effectively subsidizing those less healthy, and then when those people eventually need that care, the new crop of young healthy insurance payers are effectively subsidizing their care. Keeping your money now to "spend on whores instead" short circuits that system, and puts you in the position of burdening everyone else by never having payed your share earlier.
Unless of course you intend to never have insurance, and just die as soon as you get a little older and can't afford medical care. In that case, go for it.
What? Can you name any actual *current* conservatives that are saying these things?
Funny, it seems to me that the conservative viewpoint is that marriage is under attack, and that same sex marriage would destroy the institution. Every major (albiet stupid) argument against same-sex marriage I've heard has come from the conservatives. It's either social conservatism (preserving the status quo), or based on religious values, but either way, it's coming from the conservatives. Liberals are far more likely to be in favor of same-sex marriage, but unfortunately liberal politicians are generally too weak-knee'd to follow through on it.
And so on. Drug war? Liberals are generally against it, with, once again, liberal politicians too weak-knee'd to do anything about it for fear of being called "soft on crime" by.....wait for it....conservatives.
Abortion: again, most staunchly opposed by conservatives. And why is that? The hardest core against abortion is the religious right, which is purely a conservative institution. You don't have a "hardcore religious left" trying to call the shots in politics, religion is much more marginal for the liberals than the conservatives.
Now, I noticed you specified "Pre-Reagan", but really, at this point who cares what the conservatives were like 30 years ago. What matters is what they are now. And really, are you nostalgic for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford? If not, we're really talking about almost 50 years ago to Eisenhower....
I don't know if you were going for one of those "these guys now aren't REAL conservatives" positions, but they're here now, and they're the conservatives.
Or maybe there's just no particularly good reason for them to regrow, meaning, an organism with a badly damaged brain is in dire shape, and unlikely to live long enough to reproduce. Now, that answer sucks from a "But I don't wanna die!" perspective, but evolution doesn't care about that.
Now, humans, being a pretty cheeky bunch, have no problem looking at this as a challenge to be overcome, and due to the fact that we can provide an individual with time and the proper environment to recover from this kind of injury. We can just come along, say "Gee, may have made sense 10,000 years ago when we were swinging from trees, but now why don't we fix this and let Bill recover instead".
Brain injuries like that are rare enough and (without care) fatal enough that we may just have never evolved a repair mechanism, because it didn't grant much of an advantage in survival.
Or maybe it'll make our brains grow uncontrollably until our eyes pop out and our skulls crack open. Could go either way I suppose....
Then clearly they're all in on the conspiracy. Duh.
Just to be clear, I didn't specify *formal* education. You can be educated, and never set foot in a classroom. If you want to be an expert on history for example, it's *possible* to do so on your own, but the level of expertise depends on your own intelligence, aptitude, and how far you want to go with it. The level and formality of training to have an "informed opinion" depends entirely on the person, the subject matter, and the level of detail being discussed. If you're on a daytime talkshow, having a pulse is probably all you really need for nearly any subject. If you're discussing physics with Stephen Hawking and Michio Kaku, you probably want more than a high-school diploma and a copy of Carl Sagan's Cosmos DVDs.
All I'm saying is, anti-intellectual has a very specific meaning, and that is someone who doesn't value intellectual discourse, activities or pursuits. The left has plenty of faults, but anti-intellectualism isn't one that they generally fall into, that seems to be far more likely on the right than the left.
Did you actually read the comment I was replying to?
You're missing the point. Anti-intellectual doesn't mean wrong or stupid. It is a position that shows hostility or disdain for intellectuals, which AFAIC isn't a position generally attributed to the left in general, or to Gore and Moore in particular.
The Republican party has shown a leaning toward anti-intellectualism. That's the subtext of comments about "Liberal Elitists". It's not hard to find examples of the Republicans trying to say that being educated is a negative, but being a "regular Joe-Sixpack" is somehow virtuous.
I don't really get this though. I can see why you'd want an SUV even if it's bad for the environment. They're comfortable, they hold a lot of stuff, they're cool looking, they're great off-road compared to a Prius. What I don't get is, why would AGW supporters care if you're driving a HMMWV if they don't feel that the theory is valid?
It sounds like you're saying their position is: "I hate SUVs. I must find a way to make people stop driving them. I must fudge my data to make it look like SUVs are bad". My question is, why do you think they care about people driving SUVs in the first place?
I hope mass-production never becomes available to normal people.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see it available for people with a legitimate medical need. I would just hate to see just anyone get things.
I'm probably going to get modded flamebait for this one, but here goes...
I work hard to make everything in my house. I practice carpentry and woodworking every day. I choose how I spend my time very carefully, and I don't give in when I'd rather do something else, like work on my physique. I have earned the right to live the way I do.
Far, far too many people in this country just want something for nothing. They want the instant fix without any hard work, and this isn't limited to having nice furniture. The idea that someone could pop down to a store and suddenly have their home look like a their furniture was made by a master craftsman makes me angry. It's like those damn "do it yourself kits" you see everywhere. When the day finally comes that a "do it yourself kit" can actually be assembled into really nice furniture, I'll be furious.
Maybe I'm being too critical, but my opinion boils down to this: If you work hard at something, you deserve to reap the benefits. If you do not work hard at something, you deserve nothing.
And I was just doing the same. Oddly, instead of either just laughing and moving on, or making your own comeback, you decided to take it seriously. Interesting.
I was just taking a friendly jab at the fact that major Scandinavian innovation ended with the Viking longboat, unless you count their breakthroughs in the field of inexpensive, but tasteful, modular home furnishings.