Well, I have been deeply offended by your "claims and views" this entire thread.
Your comparison of paying taxes to The Holocaust or Segregation is disgusting.
I have no problem with paying taxes. I have a problem with your justification for taxes and your view of democracy.
USDA policies are the ones that have made food cheaply available to all Americans.
Wow, you are really utterly delusional.
I know how to debate, and you are not debating.
Of course I'm not debating with you; I have been pretty clear about that. What would be the point in debating with a greedy, selfish, ignorant little brownshirt like you? I have nothing but contempt for you, hence the little bubble next to your name. I just like to keep track of what the delusions-du-jour of people like you are; call it a survival instinct.
We have experts to grow food, experts to design roads, experts to manage business.
True. And those experts are predominantly employed by private organizations that people voluntarily give money to in exchange for their services, not by government. Hence, since you argue that experts helping the poor ought to be like experts doing anything else, experts helping the poor should be employed by private organizations that people voluntarily give money to in exchange for their services. Thanks for making that point so clearly for me.
I would rather have a clearly defined system that I pay into, and unfortunately for you, so would everyone else. That's Democracy, sorry to break it to you.
"Democracy" just means that government originates with the people somehow; there are many ways in which that can happen, some good, many bad. The will of the majority has resulted in killing the Jews, sterilizing the mentally ill, ethnically cleansing Native Americans, and segregating blacks. So, something being the will of the people doesn't make morally it right. That's why the US isn't supposed to be a majoritarian democracy but a constitutional republic; under that form of government, the will of the people is supposed to be limited by constitutional guarantees. And whenever we ignore such limits on government and democracy, minorities suffer greatly.
Your little fiefdom where you get to feel better then people and make them grovel for your help, only to withhold it because you spent too much on caviar one week, is not the America we live in.
I think we come back to the observation that (1) you clearly are not a charitable person, (2) you take the positions you take because of your own venal interests, and (3) your vision of "democracy" is of the socialist/progressive/fascist kind, in which a majority can deprive minorities of any rights they choose provided experts think it's "good for society as a whole". Again, thanks for making this so crystal clear.
Now that its legal to share your private internet access details in the US,
It's legal to share your private Internet access details in most countries; in fact, in most countries, it's required when the government asks for them.
I see. So you're claiming that you personally give "time, money, energy" voluntarily, but when it comes to other people, you want government to take money from them so that government can then hire public servants to deliver services in their place. Apparently, you think that you're a saint while most other people are greedy jerks. Nice opinion you have of your fellow Americans.
My view is that I give "time, money, energy" voluntarily, and I trust my fellow human beings to do the same thing, to the best of their ability.
Aren't you guys the ones who think that greed makes the world better
No, I'm one of those guys who thinks that charity, voluntary interactions, and community make the world better, and I'm one of those guys who trusts most of his fellow human beings to do the right thing voluntarily. I'm also someone who personally experienced how miserable and ineffective "help" delivered by the government actually is.
You have to think of this vault as a backup DNA, for when the GMO the greedy corps make turns into triffids and we are forced to take the napalm to it!
Well, I'm sure that if you're scientifically illiterate, that's what you'd believe.
I believe that freedom is a responsibility which comes with an obligation to extend this to others
Don't kid yourself: that's not what you believe. All this grandiose talk about how government should do this and that is simply a mask to cover your own greed, selfishness, and self-righteousness.
They didn't even need to run the simulations; higher temperatures than this have occurred pre-civilization, and that has been known for decades, so they should have been prepared for this.
I'm not going to sprint down the field tripping people and stepping on the heads of anyone who falls down, this seems to be your M.O.
My M.O. is to actually personally help people. Your M.O., on the other hand, is evidently merely to talk about how government should force other people to help yet other people; your M.O. is lazy, selfish, and ineffective.
My point is that success is impossible without the community, which provides the legal framework and customer base for any success.
Oh, I certainly believe that all of us need other people to succeed, that is, all of us need a community to live in. The essence of liberty is that people are both free to, and have a responsibility for, creating and maintaining these communities for themselves.
You, however, are saying something very different: you believe that there is a single community ("the community") that people are born into and bound to when they are born into the political unit of a nation state, and that that community can impose its will on its members for the supposed benefit of all. Your ideology is illiberal, harmful, and utterly deplorable.
A person who is sick or injured and can't get health care is harmed. A person who can't get a good job is harmed. I take harm to be a negative deviation in well-being from what should be expected; you appear to have a much lower baseline to calculate it from
No, I simply take "X harms Y" to mean what it commonly means: X causes injury to Y's body or property. If I make you sick, I harm you. If I fail to make you well, I'm not harming you because I didn't cause injury to you or your property. You're welcome to use your very own definition of "harm", but then your argument that we merely differ in degree and not substance doesn't work.
In fact, what we are talking about here is exactly the difference between negative and positive rights, the difference between a duty not to act and a compulsion to act. There may still be some corner cases, but in general, that difference is nowhere near as fuzzy as you think it is.
the only way the government can enforce anything is by inflicting harm on certain individuals. By your own arguments, this means the government will harm more people for fewer benefits. It's your slippery slope, and we just start at different places.
Reasoning about how many people benefit or get harmed as a result of government action is reasoning you engage in as a utilitarian, and reasoning that I reject as irrelevant and invalid.
As far as I am concerned, the only justification for government action is the protection of individual liberties / negative rights, and the only valid domain of government action is the individual, not the group. There is no slippery slope there. Furthermore, I consider that an upper limit on government action; that is, just because a government action protects individual liberties or negative rights doesn't mean I automatically consider it justified or defensible.
By the way, you appear to believe in government-enforced property rights
No, I merely believe in property rights, I said nothing about believing in "government enforced property rights". Whether government can and should legitimately enforce property rights depends on the kind of government, the kind of enforcement, and the kind of property rights we're talking about.
For example, I do not believe that the state should be able to bring criminal charges without an injured party asking for it and being able to demonstrate specific injury to their person or property. That is, incidentally, how legal systems used to work.
You are correct; I am a utilitarian,
You're not just that, you are a social utilitarian; that is, you don't just say that individuals should strive to optimize their own utility, you say that society should use government to optimize its total utility. Correct?
I just understand that community has just us much to do with success as hard work, luck too.
So, to you, "community" is about success? Your think community is about having big cars, big houses, a big bank account, and luck? Bizarre.
I want to make the world a little bit better before I check out.
You make the world better by rolling up your sleeves and doing something useful for your fellow human beings and connecting with them. You don't need money, status, or luck for that.
You don't make the world a better place by telling people they should vote for politicians to redistribute money to the biggest and most powerful voting blocs.
Interesting I was just talking to my wife about how with the rise of the ocean you could/would have to turn Manhattan into a new Venice
It won't. Modern engineering can easily deal with this.
Keep in mind that what you think of as "Manhattan" is constantly being rebuilt from the ground up anyway, so even if you (hypothetically) needed to raise every building by a few feet over the next 100 years, that wouldn't be a problem.
A 10-to-20 centimetre (four-to-eight inch) jump in the global ocean watermark by 2050—a conservative forecast—would double flood risk in high-latitude regions, they reported in the journal Scientific Reports.
Using "would" suggests incorrectly that there is any choice about it. Sea level rise of that magnitude is inevitable, no matter what policies we adopt, so we better learn to deal with it.
Coastal flooding, on the other hand, is something that's humans have dealt with for all of our existence and where we have good and effective countermeasures.
(Progressives in particular should love this, because dike building is government spending and should provide a wonderful Keynesian stimulus to third world nations!)
Really? How many thousands of dollars do you donate to charity a year? How many hours do you volunteer to help people?
You appear to be rigid about the means, regardless of the consequences.
Quite the opposite: I actually understand economic concepts like moral hazards and concentrated benefits/diffuse costs, whereas you seem to be oblivious to consequences.
At that point, what we've got is something like a continuum in which as a society we've got to decide what's acceptable behavior even though it might harm others, what's unacceptable because of possible harm to others, and of course there's a gray area in between
You are trying to pretend that for someone not to receive free healthcare or not get hired for a job because they are gay is causing them "harm". I suggest you try to define consistently what the term "harm" would mean if that were the case; I think you'll find it impossible.
No, the actual basis of your position is almost certainly the standard progressive position, namely that it is OK to cause harm to some people in order to benefit other people. That is, you think it is OK for government to take away property from rich people (harm) in order to help poor people (benefit) as long as the harm is less than the benefit. It's basic utilitarianism. We don't need to discuss the morality of that position because there is a much more basic problem with it: it doesn't work. Once you accept that government has the power to harm some people to benefit others, that power will be applied more and more indiscriminately over time, and fewer and fewer of the benefits accrue. And that's the real consequence of your ideology, and it's something you obviously don't consider.
A gram is a unit adopted by a bunch of numerically semi-literate blood-thirsty European barbarians during the Reign of Terror after they decapitated large numbers of math teachers, because they couldn't stand all that dividing by 2, 12, 24, etc. The same people also came up with 10-day work weeks and 10-hour days. Like all such revolutions in Europe, a little more than a decade later, France got themselves a totalitarian ruler who abolished the unpopular 10-day week and then proceeded to go rampaging and killing across Europe.
The disaster is how we treat hard working poor people. We give plenty of tax money to the wealthy and corporate interests.
Aren't "the working poor" so lucky that privileged guys like you speak up for them! It takes your level of courage, commitment, and superior intellect to make the daring statement that someone else ought to pay more to help them! You represent everything we have come to expect from the social engagement, activism, and charity of progressives and "liberals"! I just couldn't stand seeing the contrast between myself and people like you, which is why I left the Democratic party and the progressive movement! Keep up the "good work"!
In the real world, leaving a job where people bully you and humiliate you and pressure you into illegal acts might cause serious hardship.
You can pull beliefs like that out of your ass, but that doesn't make them true.
As always, you consider your ideology to be more important than the people involved.
Funny, that's just what I would accuse you of. I grew up in a very homophobic environment. When I immigrated to the US, US immigration law was still homophobic. I don't need you (or Hillary) to tell me what's good for me.
Almost all the developed world does have free healthcare. [...] It's free or at least low-cost to the individual using it, and using public funds makes it more efficient.
The developed world has several completely different models of healthcare. In some systems, medical providers are government run, in others they are private. In some systems, insurance companies are private, in others they are private but required to be non-profit, in yet others they are are public and tax funded. All combinations of these systems exist, and all of them sometimes work and they sometimes fail. If you compare the different systems, it's obviously not the details of the system that matter, what matters is whether a country has the political will to limit costs and services. Countries like the UK, France, and Germany have that, the US has not. The reason the US does not is because of its huge and powerful medical lobby; public funding makes that particular problem worse.
Ever noticed that people often need capital to start businesses? If an entrepeneur can get a low-interest government loan, said person is taking free crap from the government to be more productive.
Yes, and I strongly oppose government loans, loan guarantees, or other financial help to entrepreneurs: it is corrupt and unnecessary.
How many systems have you experience and why should I find your anecdotal data more compelling then the mountains of evidence that is out there.
You haven't produced any evidence at all. In fact, what you keep saying is this:
Our system is broken and taking it down to a basic single payer system would do wonders for our economy and our citizens. A basic level of medical insurance is something that we should all pay into with our tax dollars. [...] It works in the rest of the world, it will work here.
That is, you obviously live under the delusion that all other nations with working healthcare systems have tax-funded single payer systems. That is utter and complete nonsense, which you can easily check for yourself; you don't have to take my word for it. Other healthcare systems are all over the map, from regulated private systems with no tax funding at all to public systems in which all doctors are government employees.
The only thing all those systems have in common is the thing we lack: strict cost controls. A heart transplant in, say, Germany, costs less than 1/5 of what it costs in the US. Again, you don't have to take my word for it, you can simply look these things up.
That is, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to move to tax-payer funded single payer healthcare. If you want a healthcare system like Europe, all you need to do is implement cost controls.
Even wealthy people live paycheck to paycheck and would have trouble meeting bills as low as $5 or $10 thousand.
Well, and if they make such poor financial decisions, they have to live with the consequences, like, for example, only receiving limited, cheap medical care. What's so difficult about that?
While it make little sense to throw $250k at a 75 year old, it makes perfect sense to spend $100k on a five year old with poor parents.
So you are taking money from hardworking middle class families who are financially responsible and only have kids once they can afford them and transfer it to poor parents who have kids even though they can neither provide adequate medical care or education. That is not a viable long-term policy for society. It leads to just the situation we have right now: massively higher birth rates among poor women, with the long term consequences of increased inequalitiy, increased social problems, increased welfare dependency, and decreased social mobility.
We obviously can't withhold medical care from poor sick five year olds, but we can certainly treat such choices the same way we treat child support and hold parents financially responsible once their kids have become adults.
But you just want to keep forcing people who make prudent and careful decisions in their lives to pay for the consequences of bad choices that people make. That's a recipe for disaster.
It's folly for society to toss someone out because they're unlucky enough to need something like that and only a fool would decline it.
Really? Why is it "folly" for society to refuse to pay millions of dollars in medical procedures for people who are never going to contribute millions of dollars of value to society?
Your also discounting the fact that many people don't make their own decisions.
Well, yes, and that's a problem. Individuals should make those decisions for themselves, and the way you make those decisions is by purchasing medical insurance that meets your needs and objectives.
End of life care on the USA is not more expensive then elsewhere. [pennmedicine.org] So there goes one of your talking points.
I think that's the extent of this argument. (Of course, I'm right and your wrong)
Well, the difference is that I actually have first hand experience with several of these systems, whereas you (like most Americans asking for single-payer) just speak from ignorance. And while you are a fool who is never going to change his mind, fools vote, so it's important to figure out what your misconceptions actually are.
Well, that kind of "blame" is a step up from the traditional Chinese statements about the US:
“If the U.S. monopoly capitalist groups persist in pushing their policies of aggression and war, the day is bound to come when they will be hanged by the people of the whole world. The same fate awaits the accomplices of the United States.”
“Under the white population of the United States of America only the reactionary classes oppress the black population. Under no circumstance can they represent the workers, farmers and revolutionary intellectuals and other enlighted people who form the majority of the white population.”
(Wait, were those quotes from Chairman Mao or from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders?)
People should die more gracefully, with less end of life costs.
And Medicare is responsible for not letting people die gracefully and for creating massive and unnecessary end-of-life expenses.
It doesn't matter whether someone "doesn't want expensive medical procedures". Nobody "wants" expensive medical procedures. They are necessary
It isn't "necessary" to get treated for every form of cancer, heart disease, stroke, disability, etc., it is a choice. You apparently want to choose "multi-million dollar treatments". Other people prefer to die with grace and dignity.
Our system is broken and taking it down to a basic single payer system would do wonders for our economy and our citizens. A basic level of medical insurance is something that we should all pay into with our tax dollars.
And here you go again, making utterly unsubstantiated claims.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I have been deeply offended by your "claims and views" this entire thread.
I have no problem with paying taxes. I have a problem with your justification for taxes and your view of democracy.
Wow, you are really utterly delusional.
Of course I'm not debating with you; I have been pretty clear about that. What would be the point in debating with a greedy, selfish, ignorant little brownshirt like you? I have nothing but contempt for you, hence the little bubble next to your name. I just like to keep track of what the delusions-du-jour of people like you are; call it a survival instinct.
True. And those experts are predominantly employed by private organizations that people voluntarily give money to in exchange for their services, not by government. Hence, since you argue that experts helping the poor ought to be like experts doing anything else, experts helping the poor should be employed by private organizations that people voluntarily give money to in exchange for their services. Thanks for making that point so clearly for me.
"Democracy" just means that government originates with the people somehow; there are many ways in which that can happen, some good, many bad. The will of the majority has resulted in killing the Jews, sterilizing the mentally ill, ethnically cleansing Native Americans, and segregating blacks. So, something being the will of the people doesn't make morally it right. That's why the US isn't supposed to be a majoritarian democracy but a constitutional republic; under that form of government, the will of the people is supposed to be limited by constitutional guarantees. And whenever we ignore such limits on government and democracy, minorities suffer greatly.
I think we come back to the observation that (1) you clearly are not a charitable person, (2) you take the positions you take because of your own venal interests, and (3) your vision of "democracy" is of the socialist/progressive/fascist kind, in which a majority can deprive minorities of any rights they choose provided experts think it's "good for society as a whole". Again, thanks for making this so crystal clear.
It's legal to share your private Internet access details in most countries; in fact, in most countries, it's required when the government asks for them.
I see. So you're claiming that you personally give "time, money, energy" voluntarily, but when it comes to other people, you want government to take money from them so that government can then hire public servants to deliver services in their place. Apparently, you think that you're a saint while most other people are greedy jerks. Nice opinion you have of your fellow Americans.
My view is that I give "time, money, energy" voluntarily, and I trust my fellow human beings to do the same thing, to the best of their ability.
No, I'm one of those guys who thinks that charity, voluntary interactions, and community make the world better, and I'm one of those guys who trusts most of his fellow human beings to do the right thing voluntarily. I'm also someone who personally experienced how miserable and ineffective "help" delivered by the government actually is.
Well, I'm sure that if you're scientifically illiterate, that's what you'd believe.
Don't kid yourself: that's not what you believe. All this grandiose talk about how government should do this and that is simply a mask to cover your own greed, selfishness, and self-righteousness.
They didn't even need to run the simulations; higher temperatures than this have occurred pre-civilization, and that has been known for decades, so they should have been prepared for this.
My M.O. is to actually personally help people. Your M.O., on the other hand, is evidently merely to talk about how government should force other people to help yet other people; your M.O. is lazy, selfish, and ineffective.
Oh, I certainly believe that all of us need other people to succeed, that is, all of us need a community to live in. The essence of liberty is that people are both free to, and have a responsibility for, creating and maintaining these communities for themselves.
You, however, are saying something very different: you believe that there is a single community ("the community") that people are born into and bound to when they are born into the political unit of a nation state, and that that community can impose its will on its members for the supposed benefit of all. Your ideology is illiberal, harmful, and utterly deplorable.
No, I simply take "X harms Y" to mean what it commonly means: X causes injury to Y's body or property. If I make you sick, I harm you. If I fail to make you well, I'm not harming you because I didn't cause injury to you or your property. You're welcome to use your very own definition of "harm", but then your argument that we merely differ in degree and not substance doesn't work.
In fact, what we are talking about here is exactly the difference between negative and positive rights, the difference between a duty not to act and a compulsion to act. There may still be some corner cases, but in general, that difference is nowhere near as fuzzy as you think it is.
Reasoning about how many people benefit or get harmed as a result of government action is reasoning you engage in as a utilitarian, and reasoning that I reject as irrelevant and invalid.
As far as I am concerned, the only justification for government action is the protection of individual liberties / negative rights, and the only valid domain of government action is the individual, not the group. There is no slippery slope there. Furthermore, I consider that an upper limit on government action; that is, just because a government action protects individual liberties or negative rights doesn't mean I automatically consider it justified or defensible.
No, I merely believe in property rights, I said nothing about believing in "government enforced property rights". Whether government can and should legitimately enforce property rights depends on the kind of government, the kind of enforcement, and the kind of property rights we're talking about.
For example, I do not believe that the state should be able to bring criminal charges without an injured party asking for it and being able to demonstrate specific injury to their person or property. That is, incidentally, how legal systems used to work.
You're not just that, you are a social utilitarian; that is, you don't just say that individuals should strive to optimize their own utility, you say that society should use government to optimize its total utility. Correct?
So, to you, "community" is about success? Your think community is about having big cars, big houses, a big bank account, and luck? Bizarre.
You make the world better by rolling up your sleeves and doing something useful for your fellow human beings and connecting with them. You don't need money, status, or luck for that.
You don't make the world a better place by telling people they should vote for politicians to redistribute money to the biggest and most powerful voting blocs.
It won't. Modern engineering can easily deal with this.
Keep in mind that what you think of as "Manhattan" is constantly being rebuilt from the ground up anyway, so even if you (hypothetically) needed to raise every building by a few feet over the next 100 years, that wouldn't be a problem.
Using "would" suggests incorrectly that there is any choice about it. Sea level rise of that magnitude is inevitable, no matter what policies we adopt, so we better learn to deal with it.
Coastal flooding, on the other hand, is something that's humans have dealt with for all of our existence and where we have good and effective countermeasures.
(Progressives in particular should love this, because dike building is government spending and should provide a wonderful Keynesian stimulus to third world nations!)
I didn't "get" mine, I worked hard for what I have, probably a lot harder than you. And I share, probably a lot more than you.
You, on the other hand, seem to pretend that your deep-seated anger and envy amount to generosity and charity.
Really? How many thousands of dollars do you donate to charity a year? How many hours do you volunteer to help people?
Quite the opposite: I actually understand economic concepts like moral hazards and concentrated benefits/diffuse costs, whereas you seem to be oblivious to consequences.
You are trying to pretend that for someone not to receive free healthcare or not get hired for a job because they are gay is causing them "harm". I suggest you try to define consistently what the term "harm" would mean if that were the case; I think you'll find it impossible.
No, the actual basis of your position is almost certainly the standard progressive position, namely that it is OK to cause harm to some people in order to benefit other people. That is, you think it is OK for government to take away property from rich people (harm) in order to help poor people (benefit) as long as the harm is less than the benefit. It's basic utilitarianism. We don't need to discuss the morality of that position because there is a much more basic problem with it: it doesn't work. Once you accept that government has the power to harm some people to benefit others, that power will be applied more and more indiscriminately over time, and fewer and fewer of the benefits accrue. And that's the real consequence of your ideology, and it's something you obviously don't consider.
A gram is a unit adopted by a bunch of numerically semi-literate blood-thirsty European barbarians during the Reign of Terror after they decapitated large numbers of math teachers, because they couldn't stand all that dividing by 2, 12, 24, etc. The same people also came up with 10-day work weeks and 10-hour days. Like all such revolutions in Europe, a little more than a decade later, France got themselves a totalitarian ruler who abolished the unpopular 10-day week and then proceeded to go rampaging and killing across Europe.
Aren't "the working poor" so lucky that privileged guys like you speak up for them! It takes your level of courage, commitment, and superior intellect to make the daring statement that someone else ought to pay more to help them! You represent everything we have come to expect from the social engagement, activism, and charity of progressives and "liberals"! I just couldn't stand seeing the contrast between myself and people like you, which is why I left the Democratic party and the progressive movement! Keep up the "good work"!
You can pull beliefs like that out of your ass, but that doesn't make them true.
Funny, that's just what I would accuse you of. I grew up in a very homophobic environment. When I immigrated to the US, US immigration law was still homophobic. I don't need you (or Hillary) to tell me what's good for me.
Nice try, but that analogy fails. In fact, it supports my point. I suggest you think it through.
The developed world has several completely different models of healthcare. In some systems, medical providers are government run, in others they are private. In some systems, insurance companies are private, in others they are private but required to be non-profit, in yet others they are are public and tax funded. All combinations of these systems exist, and all of them sometimes work and they sometimes fail. If you compare the different systems, it's obviously not the details of the system that matter, what matters is whether a country has the political will to limit costs and services. Countries like the UK, France, and Germany have that, the US has not. The reason the US does not is because of its huge and powerful medical lobby; public funding makes that particular problem worse.
Yes, and I strongly oppose government loans, loan guarantees, or other financial help to entrepreneurs: it is corrupt and unnecessary.
You haven't produced any evidence at all. In fact, what you keep saying is this:
That is, you obviously live under the delusion that all other nations with working healthcare systems have tax-funded single payer systems. That is utter and complete nonsense, which you can easily check for yourself; you don't have to take my word for it. Other healthcare systems are all over the map, from regulated private systems with no tax funding at all to public systems in which all doctors are government employees.
The only thing all those systems have in common is the thing we lack: strict cost controls. A heart transplant in, say, Germany, costs less than 1/5 of what it costs in the US. Again, you don't have to take my word for it, you can simply look these things up.
That is, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to move to tax-payer funded single payer healthcare. If you want a healthcare system like Europe, all you need to do is implement cost controls.
Well, and if they make such poor financial decisions, they have to live with the consequences, like, for example, only receiving limited, cheap medical care. What's so difficult about that?
So you are taking money from hardworking middle class families who are financially responsible and only have kids once they can afford them and transfer it to poor parents who have kids even though they can neither provide adequate medical care or education. That is not a viable long-term policy for society. It leads to just the situation we have right now: massively higher birth rates among poor women, with the long term consequences of increased inequalitiy, increased social problems, increased welfare dependency, and decreased social mobility.
We obviously can't withhold medical care from poor sick five year olds, but we can certainly treat such choices the same way we treat child support and hold parents financially responsible once their kids have become adults.
But you just want to keep forcing people who make prudent and careful decisions in their lives to pay for the consequences of bad choices that people make. That's a recipe for disaster.
Ah, yes, the measure of your ego: the number of upvotes on Slashdot. Pretty sad, isn't it?
Really? Why is it "folly" for society to refuse to pay millions of dollars in medical procedures for people who are never going to contribute millions of dollars of value to society?
Well, yes, and that's a problem. Individuals should make those decisions for themselves, and the way you make those decisions is by purchasing medical insurance that meets your needs and objectives.
That's not what the study says. It's also not true: https://blogs-images.forbes.co...
Well, the difference is that I actually have first hand experience with several of these systems, whereas you (like most Americans asking for single-payer) just speak from ignorance. And while you are a fool who is never going to change his mind, fools vote, so it's important to figure out what your misconceptions actually are.
Well, that kind of "blame" is a step up from the traditional Chinese statements about the US:
(Wait, were those quotes from Chairman Mao or from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders?)
And Medicare is responsible for not letting people die gracefully and for creating massive and unnecessary end-of-life expenses.
It isn't "necessary" to get treated for every form of cancer, heart disease, stroke, disability, etc., it is a choice. You apparently want to choose "multi-million dollar treatments". Other people prefer to die with grace and dignity.
And here you go again, making utterly unsubstantiated claims.
It's not "innovation" until Apple steals it from you and patents it.