You had this before, Travellin’ Doctors would go from place to place either with their own entertainment entourage, or at the next carnival, and dispense good curing.
I don’t know. Aside from being bad for me and my family, the current iteration offends some of my principles (individual liberty, limited government, free markets, etc.). If it were good for my family but still offended my principles, my degree of support or opposition would probably hinge on how much it improved my family’s specific circumstances.
I suspect that answer will invite some snarky remarks about ‘just haggling over the price’, but I fully admit that my politics result from a messy interaction of principles and self-interest.
Without commenting on the specifics of this plan, by your own admission there exist other ways to achieve these end goals that don’t involve retaining the ACA.
Umm, that was implied. Everyone here in this debate I thought knew this. Everyone knows the ACA is a conservative solution to this problem. People are required to pay their own way - that’s what the individual mandate is. The only reason there’s tax credits is that it’s so stupidly expensive than a significant number of people physically can’t, it is not possible, so that’s what they arrived at.
Everyone with any knowledge of the system knows that the ACA is a 3-legged stool, you cannot change any major provision without setting it up for eventual collapse. There must be an individual mandate, there must be tax credits, there must be no pre-existing conditions, it must cover most scientifically accepted effective treatments, and you can’t really pick and choose on these things.
You can make it better, but since the ACA is about the most conservative plan that can possibly be still functional by the laws of mathematics (without flipping it around like I said and doing something extreme), none of the conservative plans are going to result in something better. They all result in a worse mess than we have.
And perhaps I contend that a country with more emphasis on self-reliance will produce such greater overall good that I am willing to risk my own loss of life to foster that outcome, in the same way that people die for their country’s ideals in other ways.
Can you disprove that decision’s value, using universal postulates?
That’s noble of you, to be willing to sacrifice yourself for noble principles. Very noble indeed.
But, wait, is it you that is being sacrificed to these noble principles? Is it you that is denied life saving healthcare? Are you the one in the position to suffer from the ACA being repealed? I think not.
To sacrifice yourself for a principle is quite the noble act, but making someone else sacrifice himself for your principle is even more noble, amiright?
See the “being stupid” argument above. If you act irrationally in contravention to your own direct best interests that your behavior shows you follow (unless you are mentally ill), you’re just stupid or wrong. If you didn’t care about being alive a whole much, you’d probably already be dead and we would not be having this conversation. (I assume you’re a middle aged or older adult and have survived a great many things)
And if you’re in a situation where the downsides of ACA repeal cannot apply to you (you are on medicare, have a large sum of money saved, etc), well, your vote wouldn’t be enough to matter regardless. Even if all of ‘you’ in that situation collectively voted the same way.
Am I to take it that this is laying out the steps of your proof? It’s pretty poor. I think you miss the fundamental nature of tradeoffs.
As an example, consider speed limits. In most places, the speed limit on highways is between 55 mph and 70 mph. Certainly excessive speed contributes to car accidents, and if the speed limit were reduced incidents of accidents would also be reduced. If we set the speed limit to 10 mph in all places that currently exceed that limit, I think the incidents of fatal road accidents would be greatly reduced. In your construction, this would prove that reducing the speed limit to 10 mph is the way to go.
Do you understand why we do not have a 10 mph speed limit?
We do evaluate speed limits, and determine whether or not they are safe. We have 20 mph speed limits in school zones, we have 25 in residential zones. If you can show me a school zone with a 70 mph limit, I’ll be very surprised.
We also make car manufacturers increase the safety of the cars, even though that adds to the cost of the cars.
That speed limits and car manufactures are not responsible for completely eliminating all traffic accidents and deaths does not mean that speed limits and regulations on manufacturing cars is not responsible for reducing the number of traffic deaths very considerably.
To use your car analogy, arguing against the ACA is like arguing against speed limits and seatbelt laws entirely. There are principles at stake, sure, but there are lives at stake on the other side of the argument.
To be sure, in this thread I’m not arguing against the ACA. Yes I think it is a perversion of the role of government, but that’s not my point here. My point is, that SamuelA 's argument is bad. Terrible actually. It mischaracterizes opposition and misconstrues how to evaluate tradeoffs in decision making. What he takes as certainty is anything but. It’s a very poor argument.
There are in fact, sound arguments in favor of the ACA. Just not from SamuelA in this thread.
Shrug. I tried. I think my arguments are sound and your reasoning is the fault, so we won’t get anywhere. Certainly, around the community I hang out (besides here), the basic concept is solid. I will comment that the reason the speed limit isn’t 10 mph is that the cumulative lifespan lost from traveling that slow exceeds the cumulative lifespan lost from car wrecks. That is, if people collectively lose 5 times as much of their lives as they do today waiting in cars, all those wasted hours total to a bigger number than the extra hours the people who die in crashes would have enjoyed. (since car crashes only kill about 1% of people)
Of course, everyone where I hang out (reluctantly) accepts the reasonableness of cryonics.
Cryonics is a poorly performed, crude method to preserve human brains shortly after death. It has a low probability of success. But, according to mainstream science, the probability is not zero, unless mainstream science is completely wrong about physical reality. So, if your lifetime earnings were 2 million dollars, and cryonics costs $100k, and the probability of being dead permanently without cryonics is 100% (mainstream science says it is), the math works out in favor of cryonics unless you assume it is so improbable to work that you can round to zero. This is because any society that can revive a frozen, damaged brain can keep that brain alive in some form for thousands of years, and thousands of years of life in some form is worth a huge amount.
We wait with bated breath. Have you a couple of those excellent arguments close at hand? As you no doubt know, we lefties are a well-intended lot, but rather dull when it comes to crisp, hard-nosed rhetorical splendor. We could use your help, if you’ve nothing better to do.
But you aren’t risking your life. You have a high paying job with benefits. You’re going to be ok no matter what Congress does. For the tens of millions who don’t share your good fortune, they are the ones whose lives are being risked. Republicans are perfectly willing to throw them under the bus in order to give huge tax breaks to their donors, which is what Donaldcare 3.0 is all about. If Republicans cared about health care, they would have crafted a plan in the past 7 years. They didn’t. Let’s face it- they can’t govern, they can only oppose.
That’s an interesting health care plan. Got terminal cancer? Freeze yourself. Got heart disease? Freeze yourself. Acne? Freeze yourself.
One main objection to the cryonics argument is that you are assuming that a society thousands of years in the future would have any need for you. There may be a few corpsicles revived for historical reasons, but the vast majority will either sit in vaults forever, or have accidents and become less than viable, or have “accidents” and become less than viable.
Just as our society seems to put very little value on preserving the lives of the people who are here right now, I don’t see why a future society would place any more value on the lives of people who have already lived their lives in the past.
Sure, last ditch effort, and if you can afford it, why not? But it is not a very good actual plan for people who want real solutions to real problems.
Well, in the real American world (and specially before ACA) individual freedoms were restrained, as mentioned before it has been a wonder of deception that the republicans and [del]stink[/del] think thanks convinced many of the opposite.
I posted this before ACA was deployed:
We have less freedom (in 2009) in the US now.
Many Americans do not have freedom from the fear… of going bankrupt for health reasons.
Latest reports show that even families that thought that they had coverage found that bankruptcy was their only option after the insurers dropped them.
Many Americans do not have the freedom to seek a different job or to work on their own.
Job Lock is specially real to families that have one their members suffer a condition that will be considered preexisting if a job switch takes place. (Even with COBRA the reality is that many can not afford the COBRA payments and then they can not expect the same coverage if another job appears) And Workers that wish to start a business on their own find that heath care costs put a barrier to it.
Many Americans (and foreign companies) have less freedom to start a company in the USA thanks to the health care cost.
The high cost of health care is already a reason why the USA is not competitive with other nations.
Again, all that was pre ACA and besides being a reply to HurricaneDitka it also deals a lot with the crummy points from Bricker; he and others are really clueless about how, besides they really defending the “right” for Americans to have less freedom or life, Republicans in power specially do not notice the waste in money and opportunity their position has. Not to mention the implied notion that Republicans in power would indeed rather had me see dead and many others just to make reality their point of view.
Surprisingly, I’m in agreement. Especially as one of the main legislative goals is the repeal of the ACA.
Having a party that cannot even agree on what they all campaigned on for 7 years is disturbing, and I would find it embarrassing if it were the party that I supported, but in this case, it turns out to be a good thing.
Is it your position that the ACA resolved these issues? That there are no longer “many Americans” with “fear… of going bankrupt for health reasons” or that “many Americans” now, thanks to the ACA, have “freedom to seek a different job or to work on their own” that did not pre-ACA?
You seem to skip the posts from k9bfriender showing how he and his new workers can start a business when before ACA almost no employee would had looked to get a job under him if the then extremely costly insurance was the only thing available. He is not the only to notice:
Of course as the CBO and others pointed out, that what Ryan said was and remains poppycock. As others pointed, not all the cases of Job Lock are gone, as even I pointed before even when it is getting better there is more work to be done.
Those working part time, while looking for a better job environment, also include guys like me. I’m currently working to get a science teaching certificate and during the dark days of the recession I stayed afloat with part time work at local schools mostly in IT and substitute teaching. That was the time when the ACA did save my life BTW.
So, once again, you really need to stop defending Republicans that in reality do see slavery* as freedom.
Or to be more precise, as I also said during the discussions about the ACA, you are defending a system that only a feudal lord would be proud to have.