Socializing Healthcare Costs, et al.

[jgiffin]

This was from our NY considers legalizing pot thread. I typed it out but realized I was hijacking the original idea pretty badly and started it here, instead. Apologies if the quotes don't work well.

That only applies because we've socialized healthcare costs. That was the initial mistake. If we didn't require hospitals to provide emergency care to everyone without consideration of payment, those concerns would take care of themselves without reducing the liberty of the populace as a whole.

You have a right to fuck up yourself. You don't have a right to make me pay for it.

Right! It was preferable when poor people just died on the streets.



Those were the days!

+42 points to Griffindor for the classic TV reference (and pic), Yeti. I appreciate the point, too.

However, "poor people" are still dying in the streets (and elsewhere, you'll notice) today. So the argument isn't, "hmmm that didn't quite work the way we intended" it's "hey let's give everyone preventative healthcare, too!" It's simply unsustainable. We water down the medical care that contributing citizens can obtain by giving free care to the poor, free care to illegal immigrants, and - Dios Mio, Man - sex change operations to gender-confused prisoners!

Altruistic, and proud we are of all of that, but in the end it's immoral. We're undermining the same medical system that made such great advances possible. This won't lead to great care for all. It leads directly to great care for the insanely rich and the party members (look at cold war era soviet analogues) and bread lines for the rest of us. Sorry, I don't feel beholden to entitle everyone to shit they can't pay for when it means eventually only fewer of us will get the benefits.

Though shrouded in benevolent robes, government involvement in healthcare is just another freedom-sapping mechanism. Look at how federalism has devolved into modern day feudalism. The states (through their citizenry) pay money upwards to the federal government. The Feds, in turn, compile the money and decide how it should be allocated, embezzled, and wasted. Then, this is the kicker, before the Feds return the money to the States (from whence it came) they attach all kinds of putrid conditions.

"Want your DOT money to repair roads? Well, you gotta lower your DUI limit to 0.10, 0.08, 0.60 or whatever we say it should be. Also, you'll need to select vendors from our approved minority and female business list over here. There are three in your state for what you need and they generally perform well, once they eventually show up, for about twice the market rate."

"Want your Medicaid money? Ok, but first your program must comply with Obamacare's 12k pages of mandates. Oh, that's gonna cost you $6 Billion? Fine, we'll cover that for the first 5 years and split it for the next 10. Then you're on your own. Yeah, it pretty much means you'll be bankrupt - you want the money or not, bitch?"

"Want your Dept. of Education grants? Sure thing, buddy. Just show us you've enacted Common Core, bought iPads from our approved vendors, and kicked back money to the teachers' unions. Oh, also, make sure those kids selling drugs on the corner make it to class and pass their achievement tests - you don't want your performance index to go down."

Quite the excellent system we have here. I get sick when our media looks down on government in second and third world countries. At least their corruption is transparent and egalitarian. Ours is masked by the twin illusions of democracy and altruism.

[Rev. Gary (revgms)]

Do you really think you cover the cost of a military, Coast Guard, FAA, courts, prisons, police, fire, FBI, EPA, OSHA and and FEC to protect you?  There is no way you covered your portion of the costs it took to send me to a desert to dodge Scud missiles and camel spiders. Your logic negates my service, I didn't sign up to protect only those that could pay for it, I signed up to protect my fellow American, and more abstractly humanity in general.

Fact is, things have never been so good for humanity, this is the best we have ever had it. Is it perfect, nope, never will be, but to make the case that it sucks so bad is disingenuous.

Also this doesn't give us any of the tools we will need to deal with post scarcity, AI, and augmented humans. Imagine if AI ends up thinking like you, we'd all be eliminated. i hope we can learn to love and care for each other, before we have to teach a superior being to love us. Because we can not teach each other to love, how are we going to teach AI?

[BikerDude]

I just wish that the debate could be an honest one without the noise and misinformation.
I've lived in Canada and found zero difference from a user standpoint between the system there and the one here.
I had a line on my paycheck that withheld some money that was labeled "health insurance"; There I had a line withholding the same amount of money and it was labeled "health tax" or something like that.

Again the reality is that it works. In any industrialized or semi industrialized society paying into the same pool results in enough money to take care do the sick. It's a matter of percentages.
The "problem" with the entire health insurance proposition is that you set up a situation where you have companies that make more money by providing less service. That will never ever work. It is the opposite of any economic principle. Higher premiums and lower quality are absolutely inevitable as long as it does result in the people making the decisions getting richer. It's human nature.

[Rev. Gary (revgms)]

Single payer, why we treat the threat of dying from a terrorist differently than dying from heart disease is beyond me. If it is a terrorist threat everyone is eager to spend money and bomb somewhere, but next to none of us will die from terrorism, but most of us will die from heart disease.

[BikerDude]

Single payer, why we treat the threat of dying from a terrorist differently than dying from heart disease is beyond me. If it is a terrorist threat everyone is eager to spend money and bomb somewhere, but next to none of us will die from terrorism, but most of us will die from heart disease.

Because they have been told that the world will end.
That there taxes will quadruple and that Canada has no doctors or services and you just die alone in a shack in the snow.
This is my point. There is no REAL conversation. The bought off political whores and the bought off networks just repeat the same bullshit over and over until people just buy it.
You can always tell what they really really don't want you to know or think about.
The only ones that are worse are the ones that blow smoke up your ass about how it's not wrong it's actually evil.
You know the implausible nonsense about how "God wants us to be consumers". That it's actually unholy to have single payer health care or bla bla bla. Fill in the blanks. Clearly God has a platform very similar to the person speaking.
I'm not saying single payer health care is the way to go or whatever the issue is. But as soon as they start to bang the drum and cloud the entire debate with lies and bullshit clearly they are hiding something. They don't want to actually discuss it. So they make the entire thing come down to irrational nonsense. That's how you can pull the wool over people's eyes over and over and over.
Ha laughable!

[jgiffin]

Some very good points. I gots a couple thinkerings in response.

1. Rev, I pay my share now (50% total effective tax rates do that pretty quickly) but dispute all of these acronym-agencies are necessary and/or not bloated. Sure, we need a military - but a domestic one, not one with 900+ bases in 60+ countries with 250,000+ troops deployed worldwide. Yes, we need civil and criminal courts and law enforcement but - again - not on the scale we have. As for the regulatory agencies, we can do away with half entirely and reduce  staffing of the remainder by half again. These areas emphasize the extent to which government has become a pawn of industry, corporations, and do-gooder organizations. I'm against that shit and it's always worse the bigger the government gets.

2. I hope I'm not spouting noise or misinformation. As to comparative tax rates, I've always heard that Canada's is higher - maybe, maybe not. But the point isn't a relative one, it's a static one - unless the problem requires government action, is Constitutional, and it can be done efficiently, I shouldn't be taxed to support it. They've not made that showing on healthcare; in fact, so far it seems quite the contrary. If anyone has demonstrable proof "it works" part, I'd like to see it.

3.Unless I bury my head in the snow, I really can't avoid thinking the government will use healthcare to help its cronies and further fuck everyone else in the ass. It's what they do. And they get to use our own tax money to do it. Every week, we find out Obamacare will add more to the debt, be more expensive, provide fewer benefits, reduce employment levels, and that the pols knowingly lied to us in selling it. I'm not saying it's causing the world to end - but it ain't making the lives of hard working Americans any easier.

[Yeti]

This was from our NY considers legalizing pot thread. I typed it out but realized I was hijacking the original idea pretty badly and started it here, instead. Apologies if the quotes don't work well.

That only applies because we've socialized healthcare costs. That was the initial mistake. If we didn't require hospitals to provide emergency care to everyone without consideration of payment, those concerns would take care of themselves without reducing the liberty of the populace as a whole.

You have a right to fuck up yourself. You don't have a right to make me pay for it.

Right! It was preferable when poor people just died on the streets.

Those were the days!

[wall of text]

I don't know if this post is masturbatory on my part and I should just walk away, and I probably shouldn't have gotten involved in this thread in the first place, but you've been polite so far so I felt I should tell you that I'm going to have to drop out of these political discussions because I didn't come here to actively debate with a conservative or libertarian or whatever label you apply to your politics. It's not that I don't think I can back up my progressivism or that I'm looking for an echo chamber, it's just that I've gotten into these arguments online many times before and it got old and stale years ago, back when Dubya was still president and the lord was needlessly and pointlessly taking so many bright, flowering young men in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many hours were wasted and not a single mind was changed on either side. I realize I crapped on your thread with the Archie Bunker pic and I apologize for that.

Hopefully we can discuss other topics that aren't related to politics.

[meekon5]

This is actually a big debate in the UK at the moment, with more over sixties than there are teenagers causing problems. The system was designed to cater for fewer old people and lots of young people paying in.

The German system is one of the better versions where everyone buys insurance and the insurance company "buys" services from the health care provider. As always there is a safety net for those that can't afford.

[Rev. Gary (revgms)]

I think it is that safety net that is the issue here. Do humans deserve to be cared for, even if they are unable or unwilling to contribute to their own care. I say yes. I say the idea that a human beings value is not deduced through how much material wealth they can contribute. 

I don't buy the moral hazard argument that if we take care of people they will just sit back and do nothing. Sure some will, but most of us will do what needs doing, and most of us would take that security as a way of empowering us to do more, without the fear of failure breathing down our neck. If I did not have to risk my access to healthcare I could be more enterprising and take bigger risks in business and creativity.

That and a wondering sage can not exist if he has to get a job at Ralph's to get the healthcare he needs. With a universal healthcare system our society can be populated with Dudes, with out it, not so much.

It is also wrong to think we need everyone working, and it becomes more wrong to think that way by the day. Right now, 60-80% of us can do all the work we need done, the rest are just wasting time and resources. A byproduct of the obsolescence economy and the idea that if I gotta work so do they. In the years to come the amount of human labor needed to achieve the needs and wants of the whole human species could easily be provided by 10-20% of us, and quite literally the rest would be totally superfluous, and to force them to work would be a tragic waste of time and potential.

I've laid this all out in my other thread on economics.

Ultimately also, this is about the big dichotomy of our existence, ego vs non-ego. As a former big L libertarian and a current Buddhist, I can tell you that they are polar opposites. Buddhism is about the annihilation of the self, libertarianism is about the exultation of the self. Libertarianism is about ownership and possession, Buddhism is about non-attachment. Buddhism is about interconnection, the dissolution of divisions, libertarianism is about separation and borders. In libertarianism the only thing that matters is the self, in Buddhism the only thing that doesn't matter is the self.

Jus say'n

[MindAbiding]

Interesting thoughts, Dude. Added to this are beliefs about our responsibility to one another: The libertarian view that I hear most commonly voiced is a kind of "live and let live so long as it doesn't impinge upon my freedom." Contrast that with the Buddhist view that we are conjointly responsible for the happiness of one another.

Ultimately also, this is about the big dichotomy of our existence, ego vs non-ego. As a former big L libertarian and a current Buddhist, I can tell you that they are polar opposites. Buddhism is about the annihilation of the self, libertarianism is about the exultation of the self. Libertarianism is about ownership and possession, Buddhism is about non-attachment. Buddhism is about interconnection, the dissolution of divisions, libertarianism is about separation and borders. In libertarianism the only thing that matters is the self, in Buddhism the only thing that doesn't matter is the self.

Jus say'n

[BikerDude]

Some very good points. I gots a couple thinkerings in response.

1. Rev, I pay my share now (50% total effective tax rates do that pretty quickly) but dispute all of these acronym-agencies are necessary and/or not bloated. Sure, we need a military - but a domestic one, not one with 900+ bases in 60+ countries with 250,000+ troops deployed worldwide. Yes, we need civil and criminal courts and law enforcement but - again - not on the scale we have. As for the regulatory agencies, we can do away with half entirely and reduce  staffing of the remainder by half again. These areas emphasize the extent to which government has become a pawn of industry, corporations, and do-gooder organizations. I'm against that shit and it's always worse the bigger the government gets.

2. I hope I'm not spouting noise or misinformation. As to comparative tax rates, I've always heard that Canada's is higher - maybe, maybe not. But the point isn't a relative one, it's a static one - unless the problem requires government action, is Constitutional, and it can be done efficiently, I shouldn't be taxed to support it. They've not made that showing on healthcare; in fact, so far it seems quite the contrary. If anyone has demonstrable proof "it works" part, I'd like to see it.

3.Unless I bury my head in the snow, I really can't avoid thinking the government will use healthcare to help its cronies and further fuck everyone else in the ass. It's what they do. And they get to use our own tax money to do it. Every week, we find out Obamacare will add more to the debt, be more expensive, provide fewer benefits, reduce employment levels, and that the pols knowingly lied to us in selling it. I'm not saying it's causing the world to end - but it ain't making the lives of hard working Americans any easier.

The tax rate comes down to a label.
They have a health tax. We have health insurance cost.
We pay for things like trash removal up there it's "free" or more correctly paid for through taxes 'ie' civic.
It basically comes down to cost of living. Seat of your pants user experience.
Having lived both places I'd say it's a tie when looked at that way.
At the time I lived there I had no preference for either system of health care. They were equal.
But now the proliferation of health networks and participating vs non participating physicians has made our health insurance a royal pain in the ass. There is none of that in Canada. It's all under the same umbrella. You see whatever Doc you want and it's covered. I'm sure there are pluses and minus' but the point is that most of what people think about it has been spoon fed to them. The tax "myth" being an example. Most people don't really get it that the increase in tax just replaces the amount they pay each paycheck for health insurance. So they say "your taxes go through the roof!" . Scarey scarey. It's just tactics.

Obama care is a gift to the insurance companies.
It is not a good thing.

The fact is that as measured by the UN and other groups the US spends a higher percentage of GDP on health care than nearly every other industrialized countries and has far worse outcomes.
Single payer health insurance works in the UK, Canada, France most of Europe etc etc.
All spend a lower percentage of GDP on health care and have a better outcome.

The debate should not be about Ideology. It should be about efficiency. Clearly this is one of those issues where it is about ideology and sensible discussion generally gets obfuscated by lies and bullshit. Ideology as always just muddys  the waters.

[jgiffin]

Hopefully we can discuss other topics that aren't related to politics.

Absolutely, man. I appreciate your points and agree that, in the entire history of the interwebs, approximately zero minds have been changed by lit-up pixels.

I really did like the All in the Family pic, though.

[jgiffin]

I don't buy the moral hazard argument that if we take care of people they will just sit back and do nothing. Sure some will, but most of us will do what needs doing, and most of us would take that security as a way of empowering us to do more, without the fear of failure breathing down our neck...

It is also wrong to think we need everyone working, and it becomes more wrong to think that way by the day. Right now, 60-80% of us can do all the work we need done, the rest are just wasting time and resources. A byproduct of the obsolescence economy and the idea that if I gotta work so do they. In the years to come the amount of human labor needed to achieve the needs and wants of the whole human species could easily be provided by 10-20% of us, and quite literally the rest would be totally superfluous, and to force them to work would be a tragic waste of time and potential.

Wow, I couldn't disagree with this statement more if it was 8 feet tall, weighed 600 pounds, sprouted red flames, and chased my mom through a petroleum refinery at 2am in the morning. That said, it's well-reasoned and honest. I just see the endgame turning more dystopia than utopia.

Still, I wish that portion of our political elite who thought this way would admit it. Maybe they're starting to by characterizing work as just another "choice". A debate where both sides lie to each other about their true visions is kinda not so productive.

[Rev. Gary (revgms)]

Well, I would say that progressives are rather clear on this, we want single payer, minimum incomes, free education, more science and infrastructure, basically we want Star Trek. That's the end game isn't it? To live free, and travel to the stars.

Thing is, you are not supposed to agree, that would collapse the dichotomy, and it is the dichotomy that makes life dynamic. Like the strong and weak forces, it is the tension that gives reality form. Where I think people get confused is thinking progressives are the Yin of this relationship, not so, we are the Yang, the aggressive and expansive side, our function is to push, pull and coerce civilization into the future. Conservatism is the Yin, their function is to put on the brakes, slow us down, so we don't step on our dick getting to the future. At least that's how it is supposed to work when we play our parts honestly and with reason.

People who can have this debate with each other, jgiffen and the rest of us ITT, are not enemies, we are partners, partners in building the future of civilization.

One more thing, minds do change, mine did. up to 7-8 years ago I was arguing from the Libertarian side, and it was through these arguments that my mind was changed. So the discussion can bare fruit.

[jgiffin]

One more thing, minds do change, mine did. up to 7-8 years ago I was arguing from the Libertarian side, and it was through these arguments that my mind was changed. So the discussion can bare fruit.

Whoa, dude, are you, like, me from the future? If so, tell me this rash is gonna eventually clear up...

Liberalism can certainly make everything sound appealing and all kumbaya in theory. It's only when I see that actual humans are put in charge of enacting such high-minded aspirations that I go all Debby-Downer. Call me cynical but when I look into the crazy-bobblehead eyes of Nancy Pelosi or Kathleen Sebilius, I just don't get all warm and tingly. I start reaching for my mace and my wallet. (Full Disclosure - I distrust all politicians equally, so Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz would scare the shit outta me, too).

Still, I dig your style, man. More power to ya. Keep the folks on your side of the line honest.