It allows poor people to get a university degree, which is really expensive in America Well, you could say the same of the first federal financial aid packages: they helped poor people get a university degree. But then, universities raised their prices, and now it's in a bit of a vicious cycle: universities get more federal aid, universities raise prices, universities build expensive projects generally of marginal use to attract more students (things like sports complexes and other facilities mostly incidental to actual education)...
As such, I'm a little skeptical of the scheme, but without knowing more of the implementation details I'm afraid I can't critique it in depth...
By what mechanism will global warming make rivers sooooo much warmer? I mean, I'm hearing about projections that say it will be about half a degree (C) warmer by 2030.....and, mapping this directly to the river as well, I just doubt that this sort of pathetic little increase in water temperature is enough to prevent the proper operation of their reactor (or its compliance with environmental regulations limiting how hot their cooling processes are allowed to make the river). Do you propose an alternative mechanism which will more substantially raise river temperatures?
While you're right, of course, about this being a story about government regulation, I don't see how that negates the contradiction I pointed out in my post. Without regulation, corporations would have even more leeway to stifle competition and transparency - examples of which abound, especially outside of western culture (example: the now richest guy in the world, the Mexican telecom magnate and his monopoly in Mexico). Hmm. Okay. I won't speak to that directly, but I'll offer a Milton Friedman quote that expresses a related sentiment:
"The two chief enemies of the free society or free enterprise are intellectuals on the one hand and businessmen on the other, for opposite reasons... every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that's a different question. He's always the special case. He ought to get special privileges from the government, a tariff, this, that, and the other thing..."
Its not everyone else who pays, its everyone. The difference is negligible. Pretend that every one in the Netherlands (~16 million and change) pays the exact same taxes. My latest healthcare expenditure (some surgery, let's say) costs, oh, $16,000. I pay $.001 for my healthcare, Everybody Else pays $15,999.999.
This is just the latest piece of evidence for the case that completely unbridled market capitalism is not without flaws. Whether there are flaws in "unbridled market capitalism" or not, blaming it in this case is inappropriate, for this isn't a story of completely unbridled market capitalism! The story, and indeed the telecom industry in general, is positively fraught with government intervention and regulation. And though "The FCC was (and probably still is) managed for the benefit of the companies and their lobbyists, not for you and me," that makes it even less free-market, not more.
I know an economics professor, incidentally, who noted that regulations on trade are generally put in place by the rich and powerful and act to keep the little people down. This is a textbook example.
What the hell, that's gotta be the worst-encoded video I've ever seen! aLaw/uLaw audio? Never heard of it. And the video data seems to be much shorter than the audio data. All in all 3.5 megs for 1 second of video, and a few seconds of onlookers babbling undifferentiatedly. I've heard of it.... in an academic context. Basically, it's a logarithmic mapping of standard uncompressed audio data sample levels. This makes your crappy 8-bit samples a little less crappy: you don't need as fine-grained of a difference between sample levels when the sample levels are very loud. Preception of volume levels is essentially logarithmic too, so this makes sense. It's not uncommonly used in.au files, I think.
Mind you, that's no excuse to be using it in modern video files for Internet consumption.
Hey. Assuming you're willing to talk Christianity, at least hypothetically, consider: the guy JC came down from Heaven and died on a cross so he could save us from our Sin. Now, this guy was supposedly God, so presumably he could have gone about forgiving this sort of stuff any way He so pleased, since he's the one calling us to account about the matter, defining what's Sin: it's his beef with the world, after all. So he could have just waved a hand, and said, "Alakazam! The World is Forgiven!!"
But no. The guy lets himself get nailed to a cross. He dies a horrible agonizing death that he didn't really strictly have to. I submit that there must have been a reason behind it and that, as such, it isn't the sort of thing that he would just sweep under the rug. Helloooo! He's sending a message here, people!
(The contents of this message are a subject for theologians, and not well-suited for a Slashdot post, even one as offtopic as this one is already. But on a related note, this is behind the reasons that the Orthodox and Catholic churches use a crucifix with Jesus hanging on it, not just a cross like many (most?) Protestant denominations.)
Also, I'm probably going to be modded down for all this.....
Re:Geeks do- everyone else doesn't.
on
The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Are you also of the opinion that auto industry executives hold the naive view that auto theft-deterrent systems are infallible?
Some car insurance companies hold this viewpoint, officially. It lets them get away with paying fewer claims one way or another.
"But your car couldn't have been stolen, you must have been negligent and left the keys in." Or something to that effect.
You're right in that many of that the steps you mention (be union-friendly! stop immigration-fu!) would probably improve economic conditions for those in the Rust Belt, at least in the short run, but any such gains for people there will be countered by losses elsewhere in the economy - but that money doesn't come from nowhere.
Perhaps you think it noble to extract the money out of some rich industrialist bogeyman's well-stuffed portfolio (and neglect what it's taking from little old ladies' retirement portfolios) and it may improve things in the short run, but in the long run that just means that the industrialists make their investments elsewhere (think Asia). I suppose you could try and restrict trade to counter that, too, but you'd be effectively making the entire country pay extra to support this section of the economy which (it has been demonstrated) they don't particularly need, and is becoming obsolete. Aside from robbing Peter to pay Paul, none of this really helps encourage the region's economy do what it will need to (restructure) in order to move into the future.
That's already the case for graduate education at most universities, engineering credit hours cost more. Substantially more in many cases.
I'd be interested to see some statistics about this happening at the undergraduate level at a more coarse-grained, per-school basis, because it would surprise me if it wasn't already happening to a certain extent. Specifically, I mean: some colleges are little liberal arts colleges with a math program worth beans (and no engineering/etc programs), while others are much more technical/engineering-type schools with an English department that's worth beans. How does the tuition compare between the two? (Can one even compare it properly and adjust for quality of the education and other not-so-quantitative factors?)
For what it's worth, I seem to recall, a year or two ago, this page having a note at the beginning about how it's not really all that serious of a page, more of a few quick jabs back at Britannica. I'm really very disappointed that it's being posted here with such trumped-up language in the summary.
Why? Because you can't make a profit in a competitive market. It's as simple as that. True competition drives profit margins down to subsistence levels. You've probably learned about this in an economics class. In a perfectly competitive market, it is true that you cannot make any economic profit.
But economic profit isn't the same as accounting profit. Economic profit is, roughly, (accounting profit - opportunity cost). The opportunity cost is basically "how much money could I be making doing something else?"
So, when you get down to it, in a perfectly competitive market, you could do just about as well in any one business as you could in any other, making a normal profit. This makes sense, no? If you could get out of the business you're presently in and make a ton more money, you'd do it, wouldn't you? So people go into the businesses where there's a fortune to be made, and leave the unprofitable businesses, until everything is more or less the same. Whether or not that's "subsistence" is another matter. That's bringing in a whole different economic model (Malthusian macro, if I recall correctly) which says that whenever new resources become available, populations will grow, until you've reached the same level of wealth per capita again. But that used to work because the main resource was stuff related to Food, and when you got more Food, you'd get more people, until there was about the same amount of food per person, and you're at the same level with more people. But that's largely not the case anymore, outside of the third world! Our population size and growth levels are no longer bounded by the food supply. In fact, to some extent, the richer people get, the less likely they are to have kids! And our primary resources are not foodstuffs, or even half so much energy and fossil fuels, as they are Knowledge, Education, and Innovation- all of which comes from people.
The story of American obesity is the story of American corn subsidies, which is therefore the story of high-fructose corn syrup and omnipresent, cheaper-than-water soda; Hey! Blaming corn subsidies by themself isn't entirely fair. We also need to consider the Hawaiian sugar lobby; thanks to tariffs and what-not, the US pays something like triple the world market price for regular old sugar.
and fast-food restaurants, 'family-style' Applebee's-like chains that exist solely to help burn off the excess corn stock by selling almost nothing but corn and its byproducts. No, they exist to make money: corn's just a cheap foodstuff that they can turn into money.
The country's having some serious agflation issues related to ethanol subsidies, now, though, and the price of corn is shooting through the roof, bringing many other foodstuffs with it. A third of our corn is now turned into fuel; this may begin change things, though I can't say if it's for the better.
While a robot is good, a swarm of nanorobots or molecular machines would be much better and with greater efficiency, taking care of our crops at the molecular level. Why do you think they could do it with greater efficiencies? Large scale robots can take advantage of certain economies of scale that microscopic ones don't have, it's not difficult to add communication capabilities, sensors (video, GPS, laser range-finders), and such. You can't fit that on a nanobot. You can't power that from a nanobot, short of mystic energy fields, and you're going to have a very very hard time coordinating your nanobots under any circumstances.
And, assuming they could be manufactured, powered, and controlled... it's all well and good to say "take care of our crops", but what tasks exactly are they supposed to do towards that end? Gnaw through the cellulose of selected weeds? Find random insects passing by and bite them on the ankle? Adjust the plants' chemistry to promote certain growth patterns? It sounds to me like this could be better done with large robots, bio-engineering, or good old-fashioned icky Pesticides.
It's funny that you make the argument for a socialized health care system, the universal system to support the every-man, with the Exceptional case. It's a touching story. But the US already has government-funded health care for the poor and for children; it's called Medicaid. I have no idea whether it would have covered your friend's surgery. If it doesn't, that's a flaw, sure, and maybe it should get more money. You can do that without a single-payer system, though.
The last paragraph of your post, anyway, makes a bunch of nonsense comparisons. Some of the things you cite are plain-and-simple public goods: non-rival, non-excludable. The Army, for instance: my being in the country doesn't mean we're any less safe from war (it's nonrival) and, if you were taking up a collection to pay for it and I didn't, you couldn't exactly say "oh, everyone in this country can be safe from war, except for that guy over there." (nonexcludable). Currency is one of those few interesting cases where there's a greater benefit from having fewer options available, and a free market solution would be less than efficient. Those free-market things some people love to talk about only really work so wondrously well if transaction costs are low, and there aren't barriers to entry: roads don't really qualify (a, tollbooths - even with modern speed-pass-whatever, and b, natural geographic monopolies on 'em).
Health care is fundamentally different. It's often very much rival (if I see the doctor, someone else has to wait) and very much excludable. They still have a lot of barriers to entry, mind you (medical schools and licensing and all that), and transaction costs can be very high indeed (you can't exactly be hospital-shopping for better prices when someone's having a heart attack, for instance). So it's not a free market to begin with, and one can certainly make the case for the government doing something (something more) to address the very-much-existant issues. But converting it to a monopsony is largely orthogonal to such efforts.
You are, of course, welcome to disagree with what The Evidence says, to present a case for it, or to not present a case and just say I'm wrong, and disagree with what actually constitutes The Facts and what constitutes propaganda. We obviously have a disconnect there. While discussing this, we can hold intelligent and meaningful discussion and debates.
But I'd appreciate it if you didn't ascribe me motives I don't have.
I believe that humanity will be better served in the intermediate and long term by maintaining a non-socialized health care system in this country, because I believe (rightly or wrongly is a valid topic for debate) that a socialized one will end up in a state where it drags things down more than it lifts them up.
I also don't believe that anyone else fundamentally has a right to my money (via tax dollars) to attain such health care; and not half so much offended by the idea of taxes and losing my own personal money as the sense of raw entitlement that I'm running into. (It leaves me with a very bad reaction, and far more vehement opposition to things than I would otherwise normally have). I am not trying to keep anybody down and wage class warfare. I've come from a very poor background myself; I won't go into specifics and try to brag about it, or about how much I give to charity (nor is it that impressive at the moment, I've only been working a month -- you can strike another count against my Wealthy Rich Snob status though).
If I am going to ascribe motives to you, I think you want to paint me with some sort of broad brush of The Evil Rich Greedy Selfish Snobbish Wealthy Enemy, so you can feel good about yourself and all how you can stand firm against these terrible people. But you're wrong, and this isn't a healthy sort of attitude for anyone to maintain, though it is all too typical. To use a political analogy, you're being just like a pro-lifer saying that a pro-choicer is out to murder and maim babies to satisfy their wicked, sinful bloodlust (which is obviously the case, since the pro-choicer is the spawn of Satan). Tip: Most people arguing a political point like this actually think they're promoting good. (You obviously think so yourself.) If you can somehow accept this fact, you might be able to accord your opponent that modicum of respect I was mentioning earlier. I mean, imagine that, seeing your opponent as a human being, instead of hellspawn! (I'm afraid that point of view is not really that grand for motivating the voters to Get Out And Do something though. Spreading hate is much more effective.)
You're right. No one is forcing them to go into medicine. And if the only reason to go into medicine was for charity, then you'd see a whole lot fewer doctors, you can guarantee it.
At the minimum, they'd all need someone else to pay for med school.
Try not being a DNC puppet. Thinking for yourself isn't nearly as hard as you'd imagine. (I'm many things. A GOP puppet, however, is not one of them. A modicum of respect and avoidance of ad hominem attacks from your future posts would be greatly appreciated, thank you oh-so-kindly, sir!)
So pharmaceutical companies charge well in excess of manufacturing and research costs. This covers the marketing. Why, then, are they wasting all this money on marketing? I know! So they can make more money. Why? Because that's the point. they're out to make money. Private investors are not going to pay billions for research if they don't think they're going to get a return on their investment. That's why people are investing their money: not for the good of humanity or a noble cause like that, but for profit. There is incidental good to humanity, mind you, in the form of new knowledge which will make it into the public domain in 20ish years. But if you take away all the marketing, you take away a good chunk of the profits, and then suddenly biotech isn't so hot anymore, and people will put their money elsewhere. There's no incidental good of humanity served.
Yes, the Government and various philanthropists and such can fund research and develop drugs without all this money-making hooplah. But if you take it away, there are drugs which are not going to be researched and which will simply will not exist. Your choice is this: live in a world where you pay lots of money for fancy drugs (and cover the marketing and the investors) which save your life (or just make it better) but put you in debt, or live in a world where you don't even have the option of going into debt to save your life because nobody researched that particular drug. You don't get a cheap Get-Out-Of-Illness-Free card. Sure, a nationalized system might make things better in the short run by yanking a bunch of already-researched drugs into a more affordable state, but that's not a sustainable solution.
People feel they are entitled to NOT DIE. Fancy that! People must have a fundamental disconnect with Reality. If there's one thing you can be certain about in life, it's death.
If no one's come to them yet, they actively reach out. To one side. The one with the money. The one with the blood money. If you weren't there already, this is the last nail in the coffin of the notion of Google as anything more than any old corporation with its requisite ration of evil. Now, if you do believe that our friends in the health care industry are pure evil, and that they're spending blood money, then yes, Google is, indeed, being evil. And I suppose if you obediently believe every line that Moore has to tell you about the matter is the whole and honest extent of the truth, then there is no possibility that anything could counter it. As such, anything that the companies say to contradict that must, in fact, be evil propaganda utterly devoid of any informative content, with the ultimate design to boost their image (and their profits) - at the expense of all that is well and good in the world, if necessary.
And if that's your world view, you're probably adequately opinionated that no one can hope to convince you that it is otherwise. I'd like to hope that most people can entertain the notion of a middle road which characterizes both Moore and the health care industry as neither impeccable nor pure evil, ascribing to both the property of providing some information which is both true and valid.
Do you realize that healthcare is the largest cause of debt in the United States? That's fucked up. Health care is expensive. Doctors, nurses, pharma companies who want a return on the billions they poured into drug research. It's really a fantastic luxury of the modern world. A century ago, how much of it even existed?
There are millions of people living in poverty without clean water, dying of AIDS or malaria, crippled or diseased. Meanwhile, in the United States, bright young people are expending their youth, working their rear end off for years while going deep into debt for medical school... investors are throwing billions of dollars of perfectly good money at drug research (in the hope of a return).... and people have such a sense of entitlement to all this work, and they're outraged that they can't have it on the cheap. Fancy that.
Yeah, there's adequate room to complain about the system taking advantage of people unfairly. Health care isn't exactly a perfectly competitive industry, so the hospitals do get to play price-fixing games and such. But it will never be cheap, just subsidized. Which basically means that someone else (in fact, every single taxpayer in the country) is paying thousands of dollars so you don't have to. I wish I could get that sort of a deal for everything I did...
Not all of the cost. Most people would think that there's significant nontrivial negative value in just being big, fat, and likely to die younger. And, unless your employer is particularly wonderful with its insurance, most people will see a monetary cost sooner or later.
Still, changing to the "single-payer" system would make things even worse in that regard. There's also a significant incentive for the single-payer government solution to cut its own costs by, oh, passing legislation on what people are allowed to eat (and I'm sure there are some people out there who already would like to outlaw Big Macs). Now, I'm not a big fan of such things, but the notion of that kind of legislation scares me... as does the notion of health care as a bureaucracy. (You thought insurance companies were bad? Wait until they're more like the DMV.)
Ultimately, health care is an expensive service since it must be performed by fairly intelligent people with a lot of very hard training and expensive education, and drugs are expensive because researching them takes lot of money paying intelligent people with expensive educations, and which may or may not be successful. The outrage some people seem to express at wealthy people being able to pay other wealthy people for quality healthcare seems a silly to me. Maybe if the doctors were all humble and devout servants of the greater good of humanity, they would be just as willing to treat the poor, and not make a lot of money, and things would be more equitable in the world, yeah. But they're not charities, they're people, and their efforts are their own, to dispose of as they will.
Indeed.
From the title, one could expect something like "Google is censoring search results about Sicko!". But really, Google is saying "hey, healthcare guys, you've got stuff on your website - here's how to get us to index it better and find it" (insert standard non-spammy search engine optimization strategies here) "and you can even advertise with us while you're at it!"
Now, I guess if your friends in the Healthcare industry are pure evil, then Google is being evil, but I don't see how you can construe that as "protection". Apparently the submitter, however, would like to protect "Sicko" from the health care industry's web sites. Meh. Lame.
Or you could just record it all. The timing might never be exactly the same twice, but if you can just record everything you sent, and then send it again, that's a big improvement.
I'm sure the article talks about this in spades. If only we were to read it.
Slashdot Mirror
As such, I'm a little skeptical of the scheme, but without knowing more of the implementation details I'm afraid I can't critique it in depth...
By what mechanism will global warming make rivers sooooo much warmer? I mean, I'm hearing about projections that say it will be about half a degree (C) warmer by 2030.....and, mapping this directly to the river as well, I just doubt that this sort of pathetic little increase in water temperature is enough to prevent the proper operation of their reactor (or its compliance with environmental regulations limiting how hot their cooling processes are allowed to make the river). Do you propose an alternative mechanism which will more substantially raise river temperatures?
"The two chief enemies of the free society or free enterprise are intellectuals on the one hand and businessmen on the other, for opposite reasons
Just because someone else (or, really, everyone else) pays for it doesn't mean it's free.
I know an economics professor, incidentally, who noted that regulations on trade are generally put in place by the rich and powerful and act to keep the little people down. This is a textbook example.
Mind you, that's no excuse to be using it in modern video files for Internet consumption.
But no. The guy lets himself get nailed to a cross. He dies a horrible agonizing death that he didn't really strictly have to. I submit that there must have been a reason behind it and that, as such, it isn't the sort of thing that he would just sweep under the rug. Helloooo! He's sending a message here, people!
(The contents of this message are a subject for theologians, and not well-suited for a Slashdot post, even one as offtopic as this one is already. But on a related note, this is behind the reasons that the Orthodox and Catholic churches use a crucifix with Jesus hanging on it, not just a cross like many (most?) Protestant denominations.)
Also, I'm probably going to be modded down for all this.....
Are you also of the opinion that auto industry executives hold the naive view that auto theft-deterrent systems are infallible?
Some car insurance companies hold this viewpoint, officially. It lets them get away with paying fewer claims one way or another. "But your car couldn't have been stolen, you must have been negligent and left the keys in." Or something to that effect.You're right in that many of that the steps you mention (be union-friendly! stop immigration-fu!) would probably improve economic conditions for those in the Rust Belt, at least in the short run, but any such gains for people there will be countered by losses elsewhere in the economy - but that money doesn't come from nowhere. Perhaps you think it noble to extract the money out of some rich industrialist bogeyman's well-stuffed portfolio (and neglect what it's taking from little old ladies' retirement portfolios) and it may improve things in the short run, but in the long run that just means that the industrialists make their investments elsewhere (think Asia). I suppose you could try and restrict trade to counter that, too, but you'd be effectively making the entire country pay extra to support this section of the economy which (it has been demonstrated) they don't particularly need, and is becoming obsolete. Aside from robbing Peter to pay Paul, none of this really helps encourage the region's economy do what it will need to (restructure) in order to move into the future.
For what it's worth, I seem to recall, a year or two ago, this page having a note at the beginning about how it's not really all that serious of a page, more of a few quick jabs back at Britannica. I'm really very disappointed that it's being posted here with such trumped-up language in the summary.
But economic profit isn't the same as accounting profit. Economic profit is, roughly, (accounting profit - opportunity cost). The opportunity cost is basically "how much money could I be making doing something else?"
So, when you get down to it, in a perfectly competitive market, you could do just about as well in any one business as you could in any other, making a normal profit. This makes sense, no? If you could get out of the business you're presently in and make a ton more money, you'd do it, wouldn't you? So people go into the businesses where there's a fortune to be made, and leave the unprofitable businesses, until everything is more or less the same. Whether or not that's "subsistence" is another matter. That's bringing in a whole different economic model (Malthusian macro, if I recall correctly) which says that whenever new resources become available, populations will grow, until you've reached the same level of wealth per capita again. But that used to work because the main resource was stuff related to Food, and when you got more Food, you'd get more people, until there was about the same amount of food per person, and you're at the same level with more people. But that's largely not the case anymore, outside of the third world! Our population size and growth levels are no longer bounded by the food supply. In fact, to some extent, the richer people get, the less likely they are to have kids! And our primary resources are not foodstuffs, or even half so much energy and fossil fuels, as they are Knowledge, Education, and Innovation- all of which comes from people.
The country's having some serious agflation issues related to ethanol subsidies, now, though, and the price of corn is shooting through the roof, bringing many other foodstuffs with it. A third of our corn is now turned into fuel; this may begin change things, though I can't say if it's for the better.
And, assuming they could be manufactured, powered, and controlled... it's all well and good to say "take care of our crops", but what tasks exactly are they supposed to do towards that end? Gnaw through the cellulose of selected weeds? Find random insects passing by and bite them on the ankle? Adjust the plants' chemistry to promote certain growth patterns? It sounds to me like this could be better done with large robots, bio-engineering, or good old-fashioned icky Pesticides.
The last paragraph of your post, anyway, makes a bunch of nonsense comparisons. Some of the things you cite are plain-and-simple public goods: non-rival, non-excludable. The Army, for instance: my being in the country doesn't mean we're any less safe from war (it's nonrival) and, if you were taking up a collection to pay for it and I didn't, you couldn't exactly say "oh, everyone in this country can be safe from war, except for that guy over there." (nonexcludable). Currency is one of those few interesting cases where there's a greater benefit from having fewer options available, and a free market solution would be less than efficient. Those free-market things some people love to talk about only really work so wondrously well if transaction costs are low, and there aren't barriers to entry: roads don't really qualify (a, tollbooths - even with modern speed-pass-whatever, and b, natural geographic monopolies on 'em). Health care is fundamentally different. It's often very much rival (if I see the doctor, someone else has to wait) and very much excludable. They still have a lot of barriers to entry, mind you (medical schools and licensing and all that), and transaction costs can be very high indeed (you can't exactly be hospital-shopping for better prices when someone's having a heart attack, for instance). So it's not a free market to begin with, and one can certainly make the case for the government doing something (something more) to address the very-much-existant issues. But converting it to a monopsony is largely orthogonal to such efforts.
But I'd appreciate it if you didn't ascribe me motives I don't have. I believe that humanity will be better served in the intermediate and long term by maintaining a non-socialized health care system in this country, because I believe (rightly or wrongly is a valid topic for debate) that a socialized one will end up in a state where it drags things down more than it lifts them up.
I also don't believe that anyone else fundamentally has a right to my money (via tax dollars) to attain such health care; and not half so much offended by the idea of taxes and losing my own personal money as the sense of raw entitlement that I'm running into. (It leaves me with a very bad reaction, and far more vehement opposition to things than I would otherwise normally have). I am not trying to keep anybody down and wage class warfare. I've come from a very poor background myself; I won't go into specifics and try to brag about it, or about how much I give to charity (nor is it that impressive at the moment, I've only been working a month -- you can strike another count against my Wealthy Rich Snob status though).
If I am going to ascribe motives to you, I think you want to paint me with some sort of broad brush of The Evil Rich Greedy Selfish Snobbish Wealthy Enemy, so you can feel good about yourself and all how you can stand firm against these terrible people. But you're wrong, and this isn't a healthy sort of attitude for anyone to maintain, though it is all too typical.
To use a political analogy, you're being just like a pro-lifer saying that a pro-choicer is out to murder and maim babies to satisfy their wicked, sinful bloodlust (which is obviously the case, since the pro-choicer is the spawn of Satan). Tip: Most people arguing a political point like this actually think they're promoting good. (You obviously think so yourself.) If you can somehow accept this fact, you might be able to accord your opponent that modicum of respect I was mentioning earlier. I mean, imagine that, seeing your opponent as a human being, instead of hellspawn! (I'm afraid that point of view is not really that grand for motivating the voters to Get Out And Do something though. Spreading hate is much more effective.)
At the minimum, they'd all need someone else to pay for med school.
So pharmaceutical companies charge well in excess of manufacturing and research costs. This covers the marketing. Why, then, are they wasting all this money on marketing? I know! So they can make more money. Why? Because that's the point. they're out to make money. Private investors are not going to pay billions for research if they don't think they're going to get a return on their investment. That's why people are investing their money: not for the good of humanity or a noble cause like that, but for profit. There is incidental good to humanity, mind you, in the form of new knowledge which will make it into the public domain in 20ish years. But if you take away all the marketing, you take away a good chunk of the profits, and then suddenly biotech isn't so hot anymore, and people will put their money elsewhere. There's no incidental good of humanity served.
Yes, the Government and various philanthropists and such can fund research and develop drugs without all this money-making hooplah. But if you take it away, there are drugs which are not going to be researched and which will simply will not exist. Your choice is this: live in a world where you pay lots of money for fancy drugs (and cover the marketing and the investors) which save your life (or just make it better) but put you in debt, or live in a world where you don't even have the option of going into debt to save your life because nobody researched that particular drug. You don't get a cheap Get-Out-Of-Illness-Free card. Sure, a nationalized system might make things better in the short run by yanking a bunch of already-researched drugs into a more affordable state, but that's not a sustainable solution.
People feel they are entitled to NOT DIE. Fancy that! People must have a fundamental disconnect with Reality. If there's one thing you can be certain about in life, it's death.And if that's your world view, you're probably adequately opinionated that no one can hope to convince you that it is otherwise. I'd like to hope that most people can entertain the notion of a middle road which characterizes both Moore and the health care industry as neither impeccable nor pure evil, ascribing to both the property of providing some information which is both true and valid.
There are millions of people living in poverty without clean water, dying of AIDS or malaria, crippled or diseased. Meanwhile, in the United States, bright young people are expending their youth, working their rear end off for years while going deep into debt for medical school... investors are throwing billions of dollars of perfectly good money at drug research (in the hope of a return).... and people have such a sense of entitlement to all this work, and they're outraged that they can't have it on the cheap. Fancy that.
Yeah, there's adequate room to complain about the system taking advantage of people unfairly. Health care isn't exactly a perfectly competitive industry, so the hospitals do get to play price-fixing games and such. But it will never be cheap, just subsidized. Which basically means that someone else (in fact, every single taxpayer in the country) is paying thousands of dollars so you don't have to. I wish I could get that sort of a deal for everything I did...
Still, changing to the "single-payer" system would make things even worse in that regard. There's also a significant incentive for the single-payer government solution to cut its own costs by, oh, passing legislation on what people are allowed to eat (and I'm sure there are some people out there who already would like to outlaw Big Macs). Now, I'm not a big fan of such things, but the notion of that kind of legislation scares me... as does the notion of health care as a bureaucracy. (You thought insurance companies were bad? Wait until they're more like the DMV.)
Ultimately, health care is an expensive service since it must be performed by fairly intelligent people with a lot of very hard training and expensive education, and drugs are expensive because researching them takes lot of money paying intelligent people with expensive educations, and which may or may not be successful. The outrage some people seem to express at wealthy people being able to pay other wealthy people for quality healthcare seems a silly to me. Maybe if the doctors were all humble and devout servants of the greater good of humanity, they would be just as willing to treat the poor, and not make a lot of money, and things would be more equitable in the world, yeah. But they're not charities, they're people, and their efforts are their own, to dispose of as they will.
Now, I guess if your friends in the Healthcare industry are pure evil, then Google is being evil, but I don't see how you can construe that as "protection". Apparently the submitter, however, would like to protect "Sicko" from the health care industry's web sites. Meh. Lame.
I'm sure the article talks about this in spades. If only we were to read it.