Oh, for fuck’s sake. Billions? How many “billions” live in the US?
As The Tao’s Revenge noted above, this is really an argument over implementation details, not the merits of UHC itself. Also, as I noted, Germany alone has 80 million people. Japan has 130 million. But somehow 300 million is an insurmountable number? Even though they are poor countries, India and China, who indeed do have “billions” to look after, somehow manage to pull it off.
Only for the first 36 years of my life (see post 28), during which for many years I had no health coverage at all. Some of those years, I wasn’t even a drug-dealing, welfare-cheating thief.
You apparently didn’t understand my response. You said, "Handing them yet another government freebie will not give them any incentive to actually earn anything. " I responded with, “And the ‘incentive to actually earn anything’ would be a desire for any material goods or services exclusive of medical care, I presume.”
To be more clear, I was stating that, by providing UHC, there still exists an incentive to buy anything that’s not medical care. In other words, if a poor person has UHC coverage, if they want anything else that money can buy, i.e. food, shelter, clothing, education, child care, luxuries of any kind, they would still have to work for that. I made no mention at all of providing free food, housing, etc. That’s YOUR strawman, not mine.
I don’t believe that for a second. The USA is the wealthiest country in the world and the only industrialized, advanced nation that doesn’t have UHC.
Horseshit. You specifically said, “One [socialized medicine] most likely doesn’t have anything to do with the other [higher average life expectancies].” Conversely, I made no such claim that UHC was the only factor. I was asserting, in roundabout fashion, that if UHC was so detrimental to a society, then surely there would be some evidence of this in lower life expectancies. I think most would find this to be a reasonable assertion, and the evidence is on my side, not yours.
Another one word rebuttal. Quite the riposte.
I’ll try one more time. Bismarck was a highly pragmatic and ruthless statesman whose primary goal was to increase his nation’s power and geopolitical standing. He was in favor of UHC not because he “cared” about the working class, but because he saw it as one element to augment his nation’s strength. I’m pretty sure that he used even harsher terms than yours when referring to the lowest classes of society.
This doesn’t have to be a left/right issue. It’s an issue of pragmatism.
