It’s the threat of litigation and big damages that would do the most to control abuse. You’re right, that money can’t at present cure cancer; but a) it can help mitigate it and get the best treatment; and b) the precendent set against the polluter will help persuade them and other polluters that it is in their best interest to behave better. No lobbying, no whining to the press, is going to help them with this. So this approach does directly help the victims, at least to some degree (and which the current system does not do at all), and is much more effective at ensuring that there are fewer other victims in the future.
Using class-action suits covers cases where individual victims have no one left to sue in their interest.
Roddy
If your pollution is short-range - water-based, for instance, rather than air emissions - and you kill everyone in that range, no class could be certified with standing. I’d rather have a system of laws that prevents them from pumping out the carcinogens in the first place rather than slapping them on the wrist for the cancer after the fact. An ounce of prevention, and all that.
Because the amount you get out is based on the amount you pay in. If surgery costs $10k and all your free plan will give you is $9999, then welcome to death.
The insurance agency insures you up to X amount, based on what plan you’re signed up under. If you’re on a free plan, then as stated, they might refuse to pay and you just don’t get your surgeries and you die. The actual cap amount would presumably be based on actuarial data and how often you have submitted a claim.
That’s true, but we do know that the US pays double the amount for health care as every other modern nation in the world, with no equivalent match in prolonged life or general health. It’s a proven fact that we can cut health care costs, private or public, by 50% across the nation, without any impact on national health.
As best I can tell, the reason for us paying double is because there isn’t a market for health to drive prices down. People don’t analyze insurance companies based on what they get out of it so far as their own health goes. Rather, companies look at insurance companies based on what sounds like it will attract the most employees to come work for them. With the majority of health coverage, in the US, being private, it drives up the price for health care overall (i.e. it rises the price for Medicare and Medicaid by an equal amount).
You could say, “Well let’s just make all health care public.” But the problem with that is that it would be a major shock to the economy. You’d be shutting down hundreds of companies and laying off a million people. Overall, private insurance isn’t any cheaper or more expensive than public intrinsically - Switzerland and Israel have private insurance as the main source of health coverage - but there, it’s the individual looking over companies and making choices. If you set things back to that standard - buying health care as an individual - then it might take decades for health care costs to reduce down to match the rest of the world. But that’s good, because it achieves the end goal without shocking the market.
There are three things wrong with what you said here:
There is a difference between laws preventing someone from causing wholesale death, and regulations designed to limit pollution by specifying specific pollution remedies. The former would still be there, and anyone doing so would be subject to criminal charges, jail terms and large government fines against their personal money. CEOs tend to hate that outcome.
Civil suits are not slaps on the wrist. Look at judgments against big tobacco and against companies who perpetrate oil spills. The point is to make it cheaper and less hassle for companies to go green than to risk more of those suits.
You seem to think that civil litigation is a game of whack-a-mole - company pollutes, company is sued and pays a judgment, another company pollutes, that company is sued and pays a judgment, etc., and companies just regard this as a cost of doing business. As if every company is completely unaware of previous judgments against others who have done the same or similar pollution. I think this ignores the way companies react to legal trends. Here’s an example: I and all my fellow employees have to sit through sexual harassment training every year, just on the off chance that one of us might perpetrate behavior that could result in a suit and a fairly small judgment. They just don’t want the hassle, so they will go out of their way to avoid it. Same with ADA compliance - most businesses pay a lot of attention to this because of the risk of litigation.
Here’s my other argument against government regulations: they are not efficient, because too much effort goes into the bureaucracy and the building of fiefdoms and personal power. If that were the only way, then I would say we live with it. But I don’t think that’s the case.
Roddy
The cases against big tobacco took something like a half a century after the problem was identified before they saw any success. Is that a desirable model?
Er, we don’t take kindly in these parts to folk who hide assumptions (in this case, the assumption that the income was “earned” rather than acquired by gaming the system) inside the conclusions.
Not the timing, no, but also this is not a pollution case but a medical one, and one that to some degree involved the voluntary action of the victim (at least in starting up, if not in failing to quit). My example was only to illustrate the potential magnititude of civil judgment amounts.
As I did in an earlier post, I also refer to the numbers of barriers to lawsuits in public policy areas that currently exist; if litigation were the primary method of enforcement instead of the last resort, this should be much easier.
Also, bear in mind that this is somewhat “blue sky” in that I am proposing a general method or approach that probably does not exist as such anywhere in the world.
Roddy
It doesn’t seem to bother anybody when you try to hide the opposite assumption in yours. So, er, it’s a little hard for me to give much of a rat’s patootie.
If automation works as an excuse as to why you shouldn’t increase worker pay, why is it an excuse to increase CEO pay? I mean, what’s the justification that increased producitivity should only see benefits at the very top?
How is this a proven fact? Come on. Let’s see the step-by-step plan to get there from here. Otherwise you’re just spouting nonsense, worse than the guys who just scream “socialism!”. Let’s see how we can get from a doctors’ visit in the US costing many times what it does in France. How do you get the American doctor/nurse/building etc. to just accept half or one-third of what they are getting now?
Yes, the current system is a freaking mess. How we get out of it is not obvious. All the paths have risks. Pretending that this is easy, because in Japan you only pay $13 to see the doctor is totally disingenuous. That Japanese doctor ain’t moving to Chicago to offer those prices.
Who should be getting the profit resulting from automation? The workers who remain, or the ones whose jobs were slashed, or somebody else? And how should that work? Automation is installed, profits increase–and then what? Some wise group determines how to divvy it up beyond the ownership of the company?
It’s not an excuse for anything. It increases profitability. Period. The owners can do with the profits what they wish, including giving it away to all the oppressed workers.
In the absence of that outcome, workers can decide if they want to work for the wages offered, same as the CEO.
Every other modern nation has accomplished it. That includes Japan, yes, but also the UK, France, Israel, Switzerland, Canada, Spain, Germany, etc. All of them.
No country has cut their health care costs in half and seen no reduction in care. It’s too late to go back to 1946 so we all have a similar starting point. The starting point for the US is 2011, where we spend 80% to 150% more per capita than other developed economies. We can’t pretend that the current system of health care delivery and finance does not exist. Most people get health insurance through their work. Its a sub-optimal system macroeconomically, but it’s where you start. Doctors make a lot more compared with the median earner than in most other countries. May not be fair, but that’s where you have to start. There is no easy way to make the oncologist earn $140k, and not $280k, but you cannot get the 50% reduction without it. We don’t have a magic way of saying, we want to be like Australia, so let it be. You have to go from where we are to where Australia is, step by step.
How are those steps supposed to cut costs by 50%? Let’s see the math.
Opportunities are not equal, and are becoming increasingly unequal (at the same time that income disparity is going up). It is becoming harder and harder for the poor to “make it” into the middle class. Indeed, while a few in the middle class are moving up, more are falling back into poverty.
You did not really answer my question. I asked where the increasing gap between rich and poor become a problem? I ask because it is increasing over time, and the only answer from some seems to be “so what, big deal”. Is it ever a big deal? To go to a foolish extreme, if one person holds 99.999% of all the wealth of a country, and the rest are surviving by eating his garbage, is this a good thing? Where, I ask, is the ideal point of income disparity? And are we in danger of moving past this ideal? We are not Burundi and Bangladesh NOW, you are correct. I ask, where is the tipping point of inequality (and unequal opportunity, which follows that), so that we essentially have BECOME these countries? I realize there is no bright line, but I believe that there is range beyond which it becomes dangerous.
Your answer merely said that individuals should work hard to better their lot in life (assuming opportunities are equal, which they are decidedly not ) I ask what is best for society as a whole.