And then the developers couldn't playtest it right because they knew exactly how much they could bend the rules, whereas people who played it really RP'ing the Avatar properly thought the game was way harder... but it was a pretty awesome game!
Shorter version: Yeah, *sure* some punk kid is gonna wake up an hour early to go hanging out with gang members at 8 am. Isn't that what all the cool bad-boy teenagers do? Wake up early?
You're right. Your daughter is completely unattractive to everyone and will probably die embittered and alone, having never known the intimate touch of another human being. ...what, that isn't a happier thought for you?
Uhh, right, okay. So when I purposefully put off purchasing a new computer for eighteen months, because I knew I could get better performance for the price in the near future, I was doing what exactly?
Oh, sure, I bought one eventually. But I kept the old one longer. And I'll buy fewer computers over my lifetime as a result. Multiply me by several million and what do you have? Decreased aggregate demand over the long term.
This is just a difference of opinion about the scope of government. You could just as easily make the same claim about the fire department, or the protection of the laws. Hey, you could even mandate that a person who wants to bring a lawsuit must pay all of the expenses -- not just legal fees, but the salaries of the judge, the upkeep of the court buildings, etc -- it would be simpler I suppose... but it's stealing money from your neighbors, who most likely won't have to sue anyone ever, in order to get justice for yourself. That's pretty wrong too.
I think we agree -- markets are a wonderful system to do a specific thing. They're a pretty good way of finding prices and allocating (some kinds of) resources, when they're properly managed. I just think it's a little broad to say that capitalism is by definition democratic, when really it sort of is and it sort of isn't, depending on the circumstance.
you are making everyone else pay for preexisting conditions.
No... you're making everyone all together pay for conditions. There's no such thing as "pre-existing" because everyone is always covered.
To reply to your points: 1. Insuring people -- reducing risk through collective action and providing economies of scale for things that are not profitable to do on an individual basis -- these are the fundamental functions of all government. Government can no more get out of this business than fish could get out of the swimming business.
2. Depends on your reading of the Constitution. It's apparently constitutional to mandate auto insurance...
3. Not really, no.
4. American health care is great for the rich. It's okay for the middle class, unless you get unlucky. It sucks for the poor. I agree that people who can afford to travel internationally to pay for incredibly expensive treatment out of pocket get wonderful care here, but I'm not sure what that's supposed to prove. (And note that Farah Fawcett, for instance, chose to seek treatment abroad, despite being a rich American. I don't know the precise details, but it's not absolute, is all I'm saying.) The real *crisis* is that the American health care spends far more money than the rest of the developed world for mostly equivalent results. That cannot continue. This bill doesn't really address that, and that's something else I'm dissatisfied with it for.
5. Agreed, and that's why I think this legislation sucks.
6. It isn't free, it's just paid for with taxes. They pay less than we do for, on average, better care.
I don't think that a pre-existing condition should grant a lien on anyone's property. I think that medical care should be paid for by the state for everyone, as one of its obligations is to provide for the welfare and well-being of its citizens, and that it is perfectly justified to tax in order to do so. I think that a private insurance model is a poor way to distribute health risks.
On what grounds can you sue them? They're causing damage to you, but doing just what they want with their own creek.
Besides, you're already assuming a legal system outside the marketplace that is capable of recognizing certain damages. The dollar votes are no longer relevant, because that system has to be regulated/overseen by real democratic votes.
It is certainly possible to call for boycotts and agitate against companies. I don't deny that. But again, that's somewhat outside the system of dollar votes -- it's about convincing the minority that does have a vote -- you have to be able to appeal to the consumers of the product. Suppose an executive armored limousine service has a habit of causing damages of some kind to a neighborhood of poor people; you could convince 80% of the population to boycott the service, but it was only selling to a separate 1% anyway. To get real redress -- for the damages in question even to have any legal meaning -- you have to have real democracy, where the non-consumers of the product get a vote, and where the majority counts more than the most wealthy.
Re:A false choice, of course...
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
A mandate is necessary because of the nature of insurance, which is a system for distributing risk. The rationale behind all insurance is that it is better to have a small fixed cost rather than the risk of a major one. With health care, this leads to a potential problem known as "adverse selection" in which the only people who purchase insurance are those who have greater-than-average risks; this increases the amount of risk relative to the number of people in the pool, and thus makes every individual obliged to pay more. That would be fine, if health care were like fire insurance, and we didn't as a society care about doing anything for people who take losses from it. But it's not. Like it or not, we do not live in a society that is happy for you to die in the street if you've been injured (though we're apparently content to put you in hock for life if you get cancer...) Since that health care will be provided, the public is facing the greatest adverse-selection problem of all -- being the backstop for risks that are uninsured by private insurers anywhere. This is over and above the shenanigans that private insurers go through to prevent paying claims, but that's a side issue. Anyway, without a mandate, if you simply prevent insurers from shaping their risk pool by denying pre-existing condition coverage, you force them to raise rates -- to the point that you'll wind up de-insuring a lot of people who can no longer afford it. To keep the costs low, the risks must be spread over a wider base which includes healthy people. A mandate is not necessary in absolute terms; it's only necessary once you force insurance companies not to shape their risk pools through denying higher-risk people from any access to insurance.
2) There are non-private-insurance-based ways to reform health care. The correct approach would be a single-payer system in which everyone is in the pool, and thus there is a strong democratic incentive to ensure that benefits are paid appropriately, and in which there is a powerful market presence to lower the price of drugs and to regulate procedures according to evidence-based appraisals of effectiveness, and generally set standards of care. This can also be considered a form of insurance ("social insurance" it's called) where the premiums have been replaced by a taxes, but it more closely resembles the social value that we seem to have adopted that everyone should have access to health care without being bankrupted in the process.
I am assured that there are a great many opportunities for reducing the cost of medical care itself. Drugs are expensive, as you mention, but the VA pays a lot less for them than Medicare does; the VA is allowed to bargain with pharma companies, while Medicare isn't. Procedures are expensive, but many of them are unnecessary, and are prescribed because doctors are paid for procedures rather than outcomes (so more medicine equals more profits). Similarly, many of them just don't do anything -- like routine prostate cancer screenings, which cost a lot but are pretty slim on actual health benefit -- and could be eliminated based on broad-based industry oversight through a medicare-for-everybody type program. Procedural costs could also be managed by reducing the disparity in incomes between primary-care doctors and specialists, reducing the incentive for over-specialization while at the same time reducing prices. Obviously medicine is expensive. But that doesn't mean you can't make it less so. And you know what's even more expensive than medicine? Creating a system that pays for X amount of medicine, and then adds Y percent profit on top.
And yet, "true capitalism" always winds up becoming that monopolistic capitalism, as one successful firm eats the others. Markets are good tools, for specific purposes, but they need to be managed; they don't just moderate themselves.
For the rest, like I said, "dollar votes" are a fine concept -- for people participating in the market for a specific good to choose among the firms providing that specific good, when there are no market externalities. It doesn't work nearly so well if you assume you aren't one of the competing firms or one of the customers.
On the other hand, suppose you have a nice piece of land with a creek running through it where you fish. Now suppose (I'm assuming you're a dude) a tampon company sets up a factory upstream, off your property, and dumps a ton of chemicals in the creek that kill all the fish. How can you boycott the product? You weren't buying it anyway. But you still get screwed. You've been harmed, but your dollar votes leave you no leverage whatsoever.
"Defensive medicine" has its place, but fears of medical malpractice suits are grossly overstated. Something like 10% of doctors account for 80% of malpractice claims; we really just need to get rid of the bad doctors.
Why is it OK for government theft and not insurance company theft?
Because the only way your prior statement made any sense is if you assumed insurance companies paying for pre-existing conditions was theft FROM the insurance companies (not BY them as your later post seems to say). It wouldn't *be* theft from the government; it would be part of what you paid for with your taxes.
I was a supporter of the alternative bills put forth by the Republicans
Link please. (I know they're out there, I would just like to read the specific one you were supporting. Feel free to summarize instead.)
As for the rest, you're talking out of both sides. You complain about how
Medicare "price controls" everything
-- but wait, do you want to control health care costs, or don't you? You complain that the majority of Medicare paperwork is done by doctors' staff -- right... so's the paperwork for private insurers. You've noticed that they take your card, and fill out forms, and take photocopies, and make all these records when you check in on your non-Medicare insurance? (I'm assuming you aren't on Medicare since you complain about it so much). They aren't doing that for the doctors' benefit... and those staff people? Their salaries come out of, you guessed it, patient-visit and procedure receipts. So where's the point?
If every American were taxed at 100% *from now on* that STILL wouldn't be enough to retire the Federal deficit OR pay for all the programs that the Gubmint has instituted.
...what are you talking about? The US gross public debt is currently around 80% of GDP (ref), which is certainly lower than the historic peak. It's also shot up recently, not due to public spending increases, but due to a major drop-off in tax revenue from Bush tax cuts and the general drop in GDP over the last few years (ref on GDP levels).
So, basically, wait for the economy to recover, repeal the tax cuts, and we'll be paying down debt again in no time, just like we were under Clinton.
Medicare costs are projected to reach around 11% of GDP -- in 2083; at which time Social Security costs will be around 5% of GDP (ref). That situation isn't good, but it's hardly the end of the world; Medicare costs need to be managed, but it seems that any attempt to do that will be demonized by the likes of McCain (and his proposed amendment preventing anyone from ever decreasing Medicare spending levels...)
These are not mystically insolvable problems. Every advanced country in the world deals with them. They aren't perfect either; they do cost money and it's difficult to manage that cost, but it isn't the disaster scenario you're painting.
Private insurance also imposes big-time administrative costs; perhaps 30% of premiums collected go to admin costs, and that doesn't start to talk about shareholder profits/dividends.
I have a very nice health plan, subsidized by my employer, for which I pay around $300/month in premiums. I pay $25 for each doctor's visit, and a similar copay on prescriptions, but I don't think I have a deductible, so anything major or any procedures would actually be covered, provided the company can't squirrel out of it. (Many people are not as lucky as me.) To compare that with your situation, you'd need to figure out what NHS funding does to your tax rate, so it's probably not as nice as it seems at first glance, but I think you're still winning on balance...
First, true capitalism is democracy (People vote with their money).
Except in a true democracy, you don't have some people with thousands of times more votes than others.
"Dollar votes" is a fine concept when applied only to the participants in particular markets that have no externalities. Otherwise capitalism is a pretty poor metaphor for democracy.
As for nfp insurance, it's probably not around because health care actually is pretty expensive, and a firm that didn't participate in the kind of rampant shenanigans of the insurance companies would be buried under adverse-selection-induced costs within days.
Umm, I'm confused by your math. If we've lowered the cost of Medicare by $500Bn in the first decade, the cost of Medicare *stays lowered by $500Bn* in the second decade, doesn't it?
Right -- that's why the government, and not private industry, should do it.
Provision of health care is an important function of a modern state. In the US, we just happened to choose the least efficient way of accomplishing that aim -- i.e. mediating it through a bunch of private insurers.
The rationale is laid out in the Preamble ("promote the general Welfare") and the power in Article I (Congress) Section 8 ("The Congress shall have Power... to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare").
Besides which, as this is a bill about health *insurance* (not health *care*), and as it does not really establish any public insurance plan, it's really a corporate regulation bill. That's squarely within Congress' power according to the Commerce Clause.
It's not even about a government that increased wages -- the government doesn't set wages. The problem was that the economy got really hot, wages increased, and the government set its spending based on tax revenue from the higher wage levels. Normally a country would see its currency fluctuate to mitigate this on the way up and moderate it on the way down, but thanks to the Euro, Greece has no control whatsoever over its own monetary policy, and so it can't do the normal things to increase jobs and help support its private-sector implosion.
Meanwhile the only problems with Greece's debt levels are that some creditors will use this as a chance to claim Greece can't pay its debts and use it as an excuse to jack interest rates through the roof -- which is what is technically known as a "self-fulfilling prophecy."
Re:A false choice, of course...
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 3, Informative
(forcing people to buy health care, taking away private property to give to another private party are just two examples)
I'm not a fan of the bill -- the lack of a public option creates, as you say, a major problem by forcing people to give money to insurance companies that have little incentive not to gouge their captive market. A mandate *is* necessary, though, for insurance-based health reform to work. (That's why single-payer was the way to go...)
As for the other, that's inevitably always going to happen. Unless the government carries out its necessary functions entirely itself (which wouldn't be a bad thing, but would probably be considered "socialist" or something), there will always be government contractors and the like. But redistributing income is a core part of every government, ever. Taxing the serfs to keep your warriors in meat and mead fits that description just as well as does Social Security, the Space Program, and the local fire department.
When it continues to spend us into either runaway iflation or economic ruin, I'd say that's bad for America.
We are nowhere near runaway inflation. In fact, there is a substantial risk of a very bad deflationary spiral at present. (see e.g. graph here). Deflation is bad; it means wages decrease, consumer spending drops, and job losses keep mounting. I mean, deflation is wonderful if most of your assets are dollars. If you own anything of value though, like say a gold stockpile, or a house, or if you like jobs, deflation is very very bad. And there is approximately zero chance of Zimbabwe-style inflation in any imaginable non-post-apocalyptic America over the next fifty years.
Slashdot Mirror
Such as "providing for the common Welfare"?
And then the developers couldn't playtest it right because they knew exactly how much they could bend the rules, whereas people who played it really RP'ing the Avatar properly thought the game was way harder... but it was a pretty awesome game!
Shorter version:
Yeah, *sure* some punk kid is gonna wake up an hour early to go hanging out with gang members at 8 am. Isn't that what all the cool bad-boy teenagers do? Wake up early?
You're right.
...what, that isn't a happier thought for you?
Your daughter is completely unattractive to everyone and will probably die embittered and alone, having never known the intimate touch of another human being.
Uhh, right, okay. So when I purposefully put off purchasing a new computer for eighteen months, because I knew I could get better performance for the price in the near future, I was doing what exactly?
Oh, sure, I bought one eventually. But I kept the old one longer. And I'll buy fewer computers over my lifetime as a result. Multiply me by several million and what do you have? Decreased aggregate demand over the long term.
This is just a difference of opinion about the scope of government. You could just as easily make the same claim about the fire department, or the protection of the laws. Hey, you could even mandate that a person who wants to bring a lawsuit must pay all of the expenses -- not just legal fees, but the salaries of the judge, the upkeep of the court buildings, etc -- it would be simpler I suppose... but it's stealing money from your neighbors, who most likely won't have to sue anyone ever, in order to get justice for yourself. That's pretty wrong too.
I think we agree -- markets are a wonderful system to do a specific thing. They're a pretty good way of finding prices and allocating (some kinds of) resources, when they're properly managed. I just think it's a little broad to say that capitalism is by definition democratic, when really it sort of is and it sort of isn't, depending on the circumstance.
you are making everyone else pay for preexisting conditions.
No... you're making everyone all together pay for conditions. There's no such thing as "pre-existing" because everyone is always covered.
To reply to your points:
1. Insuring people -- reducing risk through collective action and providing economies of scale for things that are not profitable to do on an individual basis -- these are the fundamental functions of all government. Government can no more get out of this business than fish could get out of the swimming business.
2. Depends on your reading of the Constitution. It's apparently constitutional to mandate auto insurance...
3. Not really, no.
4. American health care is great for the rich. It's okay for the middle class, unless you get unlucky. It sucks for the poor. I agree that people who can afford to travel internationally to pay for incredibly expensive treatment out of pocket get wonderful care here, but I'm not sure what that's supposed to prove. (And note that Farah Fawcett, for instance, chose to seek treatment abroad, despite being a rich American. I don't know the precise details, but it's not absolute, is all I'm saying.)
The real *crisis* is that the American health care spends far more money than the rest of the developed world for mostly equivalent results. That cannot continue. This bill doesn't really address that, and that's something else I'm dissatisfied with it for.
5. Agreed, and that's why I think this legislation sucks.
6. It isn't free, it's just paid for with taxes. They pay less than we do for, on average, better care.
I am perfectly aware of the way insurance works.
I don't think that a pre-existing condition should grant a lien on anyone's property. I think that medical care should be paid for by the state for everyone, as one of its obligations is to provide for the welfare and well-being of its citizens, and that it is perfectly justified to tax in order to do so. I think that a private insurance model is a poor way to distribute health risks.
On what grounds can you sue them? They're causing damage to you, but doing just what they want with their own creek.
Besides, you're already assuming a legal system outside the marketplace that is capable of recognizing certain damages. The dollar votes are no longer relevant, because that system has to be regulated/overseen by real democratic votes.
It is certainly possible to call for boycotts and agitate against companies. I don't deny that. But again, that's somewhat outside the system of dollar votes -- it's about convincing the minority that does have a vote -- you have to be able to appeal to the consumers of the product. Suppose an executive armored limousine service has a habit of causing damages of some kind to a neighborhood of poor people; you could convince 80% of the population to boycott the service, but it was only selling to a separate 1% anyway. To get real redress -- for the damages in question even to have any legal meaning -- you have to have real democracy, where the non-consumers of the product get a vote, and where the majority counts more than the most wealthy.
A mandate is necessary because of the nature of insurance, which is a system for distributing risk. The rationale behind all insurance is that it is better to have a small fixed cost rather than the risk of a major one. With health care, this leads to a potential problem known as "adverse selection" in which the only people who purchase insurance are those who have greater-than-average risks; this increases the amount of risk relative to the number of people in the pool, and thus makes every individual obliged to pay more.
That would be fine, if health care were like fire insurance, and we didn't as a society care about doing anything for people who take losses from it. But it's not. Like it or not, we do not live in a society that is happy for you to die in the street if you've been injured (though we're apparently content to put you in hock for life if you get cancer...) Since that health care will be provided, the public is facing the greatest adverse-selection problem of all -- being the backstop for risks that are uninsured by private insurers anywhere.
This is over and above the shenanigans that private insurers go through to prevent paying claims, but that's a side issue.
Anyway, without a mandate, if you simply prevent insurers from shaping their risk pool by denying pre-existing condition coverage, you force them to raise rates -- to the point that you'll wind up de-insuring a lot of people who can no longer afford it. To keep the costs low, the risks must be spread over a wider base which includes healthy people.
A mandate is not necessary in absolute terms; it's only necessary once you force insurance companies not to shape their risk pools through denying higher-risk people from any access to insurance.
2) There are non-private-insurance-based ways to reform health care. The correct approach would be a single-payer system in which everyone is in the pool, and thus there is a strong democratic incentive to ensure that benefits are paid appropriately, and in which there is a powerful market presence to lower the price of drugs and to regulate procedures according to evidence-based appraisals of effectiveness, and generally set standards of care. This can also be considered a form of insurance ("social insurance" it's called) where the premiums have been replaced by a taxes, but it more closely resembles the social value that we seem to have adopted that everyone should have access to health care without being bankrupted in the process.
I am assured that there are a great many opportunities for reducing the cost of medical care itself. Drugs are expensive, as you mention, but the VA pays a lot less for them than Medicare does; the VA is allowed to bargain with pharma companies, while Medicare isn't. Procedures are expensive, but many of them are unnecessary, and are prescribed because doctors are paid for procedures rather than outcomes (so more medicine equals more profits). Similarly, many of them just don't do anything -- like routine prostate cancer screenings, which cost a lot but are pretty slim on actual health benefit -- and could be eliminated based on broad-based industry oversight through a medicare-for-everybody type program. Procedural costs could also be managed by reducing the disparity in incomes between primary-care doctors and specialists, reducing the incentive for over-specialization while at the same time reducing prices.
Obviously medicine is expensive. But that doesn't mean you can't make it less so. And you know what's even more expensive than medicine? Creating a system that pays for X amount of medicine, and then adds Y percent profit on top.
...wow. That's completely insane, how cheap this is. (And this is on top of your NHS care, right?)
And yet, "true capitalism" always winds up becoming that monopolistic capitalism, as one successful firm eats the others. Markets are good tools, for specific purposes, but they need to be managed; they don't just moderate themselves.
For the rest, like I said, "dollar votes" are a fine concept -- for people participating in the market for a specific good to choose among the firms providing that specific good, when there are no market externalities. It doesn't work nearly so well if you assume you aren't one of the competing firms or one of the customers.
On the other hand, suppose you have a nice piece of land with a creek running through it where you fish. Now suppose (I'm assuming you're a dude) a tampon company sets up a factory upstream, off your property, and dumps a ton of chemicals in the creek that kill all the fish. How can you boycott the product? You weren't buying it anyway. But you still get screwed. You've been harmed, but your dollar votes leave you no leverage whatsoever.
"Defensive medicine" has its place, but fears of medical malpractice suits are grossly overstated. Something like 10% of doctors account for 80% of malpractice claims; we really just need to get rid of the bad doctors.
Why is it OK for government theft and not insurance company theft?
Because the only way your prior statement made any sense is if you assumed insurance companies paying for pre-existing conditions was theft FROM the insurance companies (not BY them as your later post seems to say). It wouldn't *be* theft from the government; it would be part of what you paid for with your taxes.
it's single-payer health insurance (which died on the table months ago quite quickly) but with a different name.
This is completely 100% incorrect. (I would be much happier with this bill if it were true.) This bill doesn't even have a public insurance option.
I was a supporter of the alternative bills put forth by the Republicans
Link please. (I know they're out there, I would just like to read the specific one you were supporting. Feel free to summarize instead.)
As for the rest, you're talking out of both sides. You complain about how
Medicare "price controls" everything
-- but wait, do you want to control health care costs, or don't you?
You complain that the majority of Medicare paperwork is done by doctors' staff -- right... so's the paperwork for private insurers. You've noticed that they take your card, and fill out forms, and take photocopies, and make all these records when you check in on your non-Medicare insurance? (I'm assuming you aren't on Medicare since you complain about it so much). They aren't doing that for the doctors' benefit... and those staff people? Their salaries come out of, you guessed it, patient-visit and procedure receipts.
So where's the point?
If every American were taxed at 100% *from now on* that STILL wouldn't be enough to retire the Federal deficit OR pay for all the programs that the Gubmint has instituted.
...what are you talking about? The US gross public debt is currently around 80% of GDP (ref), which is certainly lower than the historic peak. It's also shot up recently, not due to public spending increases, but due to a major drop-off in tax revenue from Bush tax cuts and the general drop in GDP over the last few years (ref on GDP levels).
So, basically, wait for the economy to recover, repeal the tax cuts, and we'll be paying down debt again in no time, just like we were under Clinton.
Medicare costs are projected to reach around 11% of GDP -- in 2083; at which time Social Security costs will be around 5% of GDP (ref). That situation isn't good, but it's hardly the end of the world; Medicare costs need to be managed, but it seems that any attempt to do that will be demonized by the likes of McCain (and his proposed amendment preventing anyone from ever decreasing Medicare spending levels...)
These are not mystically insolvable problems. Every advanced country in the world deals with them. They aren't perfect either; they do cost money and it's difficult to manage that cost, but it isn't the disaster scenario you're painting.
Private insurance also imposes big-time administrative costs; perhaps 30% of premiums collected go to admin costs, and that doesn't start to talk about shareholder profits/dividends.
I have a very nice health plan, subsidized by my employer, for which I pay around $300/month in premiums. I pay $25 for each doctor's visit, and a similar copay on prescriptions, but I don't think I have a deductible, so anything major or any procedures would actually be covered, provided the company can't squirrel out of it. (Many people are not as lucky as me.) To compare that with your situation, you'd need to figure out what NHS funding does to your tax rate, so it's probably not as nice as it seems at first glance, but I think you're still winning on balance...
First, true capitalism is democracy (People vote with their money).
Except in a true democracy, you don't have some people with thousands of times more votes than others.
"Dollar votes" is a fine concept when applied only to the participants in particular markets that have no externalities. Otherwise capitalism is a pretty poor metaphor for democracy.
As for nfp insurance, it's probably not around because health care actually is pretty expensive, and a firm that didn't participate in the kind of rampant shenanigans of the insurance companies would be buried under adverse-selection-induced costs within days.
Umm, I'm confused by your math. If we've lowered the cost of Medicare by $500Bn in the first decade, the cost of Medicare *stays lowered by $500Bn* in the second decade, doesn't it?
Right -- that's why the government, and not private industry, should do it.
Provision of health care is an important function of a modern state. In the US, we just happened to choose the least efficient way of accomplishing that aim -- i.e. mediating it through a bunch of private insurers.
Ron Paul? You're on Slashdot now??
The rationale is laid out in the Preamble ("promote the general Welfare") and the power in Article I (Congress) Section 8 ("The Congress shall have Power... to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare").
Besides which, as this is a bill about health *insurance* (not health *care*), and as it does not really establish any public insurance plan, it's really a corporate regulation bill. That's squarely within Congress' power according to the Commerce Clause.
It's not even about a government that increased wages -- the government doesn't set wages. The problem was that the economy got really hot, wages increased, and the government set its spending based on tax revenue from the higher wage levels. Normally a country would see its currency fluctuate to mitigate this on the way up and moderate it on the way down, but thanks to the Euro, Greece has no control whatsoever over its own monetary policy, and so it can't do the normal things to increase jobs and help support its private-sector implosion.
Meanwhile the only problems with Greece's debt levels are that some creditors will use this as a chance to claim Greece can't pay its debts and use it as an excuse to jack interest rates through the roof -- which is what is technically known as a "self-fulfilling prophecy."
(forcing people to buy health care, taking away private property to give to another private party are just two examples)
I'm not a fan of the bill -- the lack of a public option creates, as you say, a major problem by forcing people to give money to insurance companies that have little incentive not to gouge their captive market. A mandate *is* necessary, though, for insurance-based health reform to work. (That's why single-payer was the way to go...)
As for the other, that's inevitably always going to happen. Unless the government carries out its necessary functions entirely itself (which wouldn't be a bad thing, but would probably be considered "socialist" or something), there will always be government contractors and the like. But redistributing income is a core part of every government, ever. Taxing the serfs to keep your warriors in meat and mead fits that description just as well as does Social Security, the Space Program, and the local fire department.
When it continues to spend us into either runaway iflation or economic ruin, I'd say that's bad for America.
We are nowhere near runaway inflation. In fact, there is a substantial risk of a very bad deflationary spiral at present. (see e.g. graph here). Deflation is bad; it means wages decrease, consumer spending drops, and job losses keep mounting. I mean, deflation is wonderful if most of your assets are dollars. If you own anything of value though, like say a gold stockpile, or a house, or if you like jobs, deflation is very very bad. And there is approximately zero chance of Zimbabwe-style inflation in any imaginable non-post-apocalyptic America over the next fifty years.