I’m still trying to figure out how my charitable donations to a homeless shelter in my home town are going to help a senior citizen living 2,000 miles from me get medical care.
Or, for that matter, why they should count for anything when I become a senior citizen who needs medical care.
Mitt, is that you?
I don’t see anything here to show that the system you are proposing is more efficient than the current one. Under your system, smaller charities that don’t get many “donations” (you keep calling it a gift when it’s really still just a tax from the government, which I thought libertarians hated) will have to make a choice between using the money to help the few people they can or to advertise in the hope that they can get more “donations” in future and perhaps help more people. That doesn’t seem very efficient to me.
Yeah, the government messes up. That’s because it’s run by people. Any other system would still be run by people and therefore still subject to errors, excesses, abuse, fraud, etc., plus it would have the additional burden of having to advertise that you so blithely assign to it.
When you become a senior citizen the government and the younger generations may have instituted some brutally effective ways of keeping costs down, namely euthanasia and medical rationing. You should have thought about that before passing such an expensive system on to them. They can only give of what they have. Try having a little faith in people. That senior 2000 miles away has people living nearby who are ready and able to help. You stick to your calling be it the homeless, the enviroment, old people, whatever.
No. Military benefits are part of the compensation package of people who have served be it explicit or implicit. We do get into a grey area with some of the implicit compensation to veterans as it begins to fall on the charity side of things. Currently private companies and individuals provide all sorts of benefits to servicemen everything from free cover at the dance halls to free meals purchased by individuals I think these things more fall under gratitude than charity.
A society which practices euthanasia on its senior citizens because of expense is not a society which is going to willingly hand over 10% its income to charity. That senior living 2000 miles away has a better shot relying on the current safety net.
That’s not really “society” though, that’s a government basically instructed by the voters to keep costs down, and we’ll look away if you have to kill people to do it. Government can represent the generosity of society, but it can also represent the outsourcing of generosity by a selfish society. “Here, I’ll give you X amount and I don’t want to see no suffering around here!” Some suffering is ameliorated, but some is just kept out of sight where it won’t bother people.
Your right they will not willingly hand the money over and an immoral society with a representative government will have an immoral government as well. But there remains a time lag between the immorality of the people and the change in government policies. btw euthanasia, and medical rationing are already on the table and will be brought about through incrementalism and justified as mercy. This is the growing nature of government care. Best of luck! Do not become weak lest you be devoured.
This does explain the massive wave of senior citizen murder throughout Europe and Canada, though.
Not a massive wave, but:
Commenting on the new sedation-and-dehydration regimes[clarification needed], in 2008 Jacqueline Laing, a legal academic at London Metropolitan University, warned that “*n the context of changing positive law, however, it is important to understand the considerable financial, scientific and medical interests there are in controlling death. These interests need not be illicit in themselves. The interests of hospital and state efficiency, freedom from unnecessary compensation claims, scientific research and increased supplies of organs for transplant are not in themselves wrongful. When understood in the context of law that invites bureaucratised homicide and serious mutilation of the non-consenting or ill-informed vulnerable, these interests introduce new extrinsic concerns.”[16][17]
A 2008 article in the American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care criticised the Liverpool Pathway for its traditional approach and not taking an explicit position on the artificial hydration for critically ill patients.[18] A 2009 editorial in the Journal of Clinical Nursing welcomed the impetus towards providing improved care at the end of life and the more widespread use of integrated care pathways, but warned that much more research is needed to assess which of the several approaches that are in use is most effective.[19]
In 2009 The Daily Telegraph wrote that the pathway has been blamed by some doctors for hastening the death of some mortally ill patients, and possibly masking signs that the patient is improving.[20] This story was criticised by the Association for Palliative Medicine and the anti-euthanasia charity Care Not Killing as inaccurate.[2][21] In contrast, The Times welcomed the pathway as an attempt to address patients’ wishes and warned about “alarmist” press coverage of the scheme.[22][23]
Media storm
The LCP has continued to be controversial. It has been claimed that elderly patients were admitted to hospital for emergency treatment and put on the LCP without documented proof that the patient wanted it, or could not recover from their health problem; 48 year old Norfolk man Andrew Flanagan was revived by his family and went home for a further five weeks after doctors put him on the LCP.[24] The Royal College of Physicians found that up to half of families were not informed of clinicians’ decision to put a relative on the pathway.[25]
Writing in the Daily Mail, Patrick Pullicino has claimed that doctors’ use of the LCP protocol has turned it into the equivalent of euthanasia of the elderly.[26] In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, six doctors belonging to the Medical Ethics Alliance[25] called on LCP to provide evidence that the pathway is “safe and effective, or even required”, arguing that, in the elderly, natural death is more often painless, provision of fluids is the main way of easing thirst, and “no one should be deprived of consciousness except for the gravest reason.”[5]
Under figures gained from a 2012 freedom of information request by The Daily Telegraph, 85 per cent of NHS trusts were revealed to have adopted the Liverpool Care Pathway. Just over half of the total of NHS trusts have received or are due to receive financial rewards for doing so. At many hospitals more than 50 per cent of all patients who died had been placed on the pathway and in one case the proportion of foreseeable deaths on the pathway was almost nine out of 10.[1]
The wikipedia article mentions a “media storm”, but they don’t report the half of it. Every once in awhile you can come across an article about a patient who was fully conscious and demanding water and tried to call their family or the police, only to have a nurse try to take the phone away from them. And there are people put on the pathway whose families took them home and they got better.
“Dance halls?”
[del]Where[/del] When the hell are you posting form?
Please look back and see my post about how I only care about efficiency as it relates to effectiveness per dollar. I have a link to a chart in that, that shows the rising poverty rates. You are right we are all people and we all mess up. But there remains an extra temptation when you give a few people a lot of power. I prefer to keep this power spread amongst the people and avoid the pitfalls of having too many eggs in too few baskets. AND don’t try and put me in a box I have been called a socialist and a libertarian in this debate. The truth is this idea has elements of both the left and the right and remains unknown and unclaimed by either faction.
You alway crack me up.
Nice to know I can return the favor. 
Yes of course. The primary functions of a government is leadership, law, and order/security.
Not before the Amish man had his horses taken and this help thrust down his throat which had been against the edict of his church since the late 1800’s. This is a form of religious persecution done in the name of helping people. Since a ‘special’ measure had to be enacted for them… Why if the Amish don’t have to pay social security tax then why should the rest of us? Why should they get special privileges and not us? There is no special measure for the rest of us even tho we despise this program and all the other ones. Come now there is nothing fair about how the government does things. Their big foot print squashes many little people. This is why we need to be able to make charitable and social choices for ourselves because we are little and more attuned to the little things.
I don’t see very much “effectiveness per dollar” coming out of this if a good portion of the money is going to have to be spent on advertising the cause, which may or may not work.
A social safety net falls under order/security. If we’re to have one, which you seem to agree with given that your plan involves a de facto tax, the government is better suited to create a net that applies equally to all citizens, a “basement” of sorts which private, voluntary charity can then build upon.
That’s not persecution, either. The Amish weren’t singled out for mistreatment because they were Amish, they were treated the same as everyone else under the law, until Congress decided they wouldn’t be any longer.
If you want an opt-out of Social Security, such as one of the various privatization schemes that has been proposed, that’s a separate discussion. I’m certainly not fundamentally against the idea. But what you’re proposing is much more far-reaching and radical than that: you’re talking about removing the safety net for everyone, not just those who choose to opt-out.
You can, at present, make charitable and social (whatever that means) choices for yourself. Americans freely give almost $300 billion a year to charity.
If you were really interested in free choice, you wouldn’t be advocating a mandatory tax, now would you?