You need to provide some numbers to support your assertion that people live for long periods of time on public assistance. Public assistance is scant and doled out by individual states based on severe economic circumstances. Don’t you remember welfare reform? People work hard, some two jobs, and still can’t afford health care premiums or can’t afford the copays and deductibles.
And no one wants to take your money, believe it or not, the people who want reform are on your side.
There really isn’t anything I can say to this that I haven’t already said. There is this, tho I’m sure someone will say the site is biased (I don’t have any idea).
OK suppose you are born to the sort of parents you disapprove of, what are you going to do now?
Don’t be silly. Right now I am 51 and have no worries about that. At a time when I was dependent on my parents, I had no recourses.
If, perchance, you mean what would I do about children born to the irresponsible, I do nothing. I haven’t noticed that the billions of dollars we are now throwing at them has made a better world for them, and I do believe that if we quit paying people to have kids, many of them would stop doing it. Or at the very least wait until they can actually afford them. Then maybe there would be fewer children growing up in squalor than we have now.
Yeah, those darn selfish children!
Investment funds (of which pension funds are one) invest in businesses directly or indirectly. Businesses are run by workers. Future workers are those who are now children. Private pension funds are also funded by the payments of those below working age, and those payments in the future will be made by people who are now children.
It’s very simple. The money doesn’t come from nowhere.
If the birth rate declines, then there won’t be enough people to fund that process. You are advocating that even fewer people have even fewer children, without apparently considering the implications for your own future finances ten, twenty, thirty and forty years down the line. If those future adults are uneducated and unhealthy, which they’re more likely to be without good, free education and healthcare, then those pension funds are going to be in even more trouble. You’re not paying to raise other people’s kids, you’re paying to ensure a viable future working populace who’ll support you.
Shit happens. If someone doesn’t have money for necessities and can’t get it through normal means (ie. they’re unemployed and can’t find a job), do you really think they’re going to just starve?
Compared to the current system it is. Do you really think it’s right that people can go bankrupt because of something as necessary and ultimately unavoidable as healthcare? Personally I see it as both inhumane and a waste of time and money. 'Cause guess what happens when they can’t pay? You pay more! I say we just pay upfront and skip the part where they go bankrupt.
That’s the point. It’s fine to say that people shouldn’t have kids if they can’t afford to raise them (and I agree with you–they shouldn’t), but unless you can actually stop them from having kids, you’re going to have innocent people living in poverty for no fault of their own, and without the ability to do anything about it. I know, I know, it’s a ‘think of the children’ answer, and it’s not perfect, but they neither asked for nor deserve their lot in life.
So you are, in fact, saying that we should just let the kids die in starvation and sickness because you think they shouldn’t have been born and if we allow their miserable deaths it might prevent more from being born in the future, curlcoat?
That previous generation went through the depression and discovered that business and government mistakes can malignantly impact innocent people. The Bush generation decided to prove it. I too am from that generation . You obviously have seen many hard working careful people who’s lives have recently gone to hell. They should be growing their own crops and slaughtering their own animals , I guess.
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/mythbusting-canadian-health-care-part-i Time for this again. lets see what we should have. We have millions uncovered. Our system is an adversary system. The medical companies want to deny coverage to save money. They want to withhold services to save money. It is not hard to see how that would evolve into an abuse of the people who think they are paying for coverage.
The article was written a month before Bill Clinton signed welfare reform. The numbers referenced in the article are fifteen years old and irrelevant. The welfare of 1994 no longer exist.
But I agree there is nothing more to say that hasn’t already been said.
Now I’m going to need you to provide some evidence for this claim. How would universal health insurance lower how much doctor’s make?
I can see administrative costs going down with a single payer system.
How would malpractice insurance costs go down?
I’m genuinely interested as to how the government footing the bill is going to magically cut all our doctor’s compensation in half and reduce the number of malpractice suits per year.
Are we going to put a cap on physician compensation? Limit the legal rights of individuals to file suits? That may work–but that isn’t change because of a single payer system those are entirely different changes.
So what you’re suggesting we do is make it so more people can become doctor’s and nurses? How do you do that? Don’t you think it’s possible there is simply a huge portion of the population that simply aren’t smart enough to be doctors? Or not driven enough? Going through medical school and the years of relatively low-compensation residency and such is extremely difficult. The hours are grueling, the information overload is extreme. There’s a reason only the most driven undergraduates go on to medical school. There’s also a reason most medical schools don’t let people in who had an undergraduate GPA under 3.5; sure part of it is there are a limited number of spots in a program, but part of it is if you don’t have the right combination of drive and smarts you’re not going to be a good doctor. The fix to our health care system isn’t to pump out a lot of lesser-quality doctors.
Nurses are obviously a bit different as I think the barriers to enter nursing are lower. But here’s the thing, nursing is a fucking hard and thankless job. The compensation is right now “average” make it “below average” and I don’t see more people jumping on the band wagon.
This graph shows that there were 2.8 Physicians per 1,000 population in the United States in the year 2000. The number in Canada was 2.1. The number in the United Kingdom was 1.8.
Yet we pay ours more; not sure increasing the number is going to have a meaningful effect–unless you increase it so dramatically that basically anyone who managed to bumble their way through undergrad can get into medical school; and then make medical school easy enough that Joe Sixpac can get through it.
Which is what it always boils down to - think of da chiiiiiillllldren!!! It doesn’t maaaaaater if their parents are completely irresponsible and are selling their food stamps to buy drugs, you must keep throwing money at them! And never NEVER suggest that anyone shouldn’t have children, they are so wooooonderful and will make the world perfect, no matter how poorly they are raised.
So, if the population slows down some, particularly in the sector where it is less likely the children will grow up to do any legit work, my pensions will disappear? How likely is that?
No, you gotta earn it.
Oh come on. For one thing, I’d just like the population to quit growing, nevermind decline. But even if it did, do you really think that a slow decline is going to make* that* much difference? For another, the people that I want to quit having children are the irresponsible ones - you know, the ones that might not be likely to raise children to be adults that will “fund the process”?
Yeah, there’s a huge difference between wanting to help an innocent suffering child and some kind of insane child-worship mentality, and it’s not even just that generally we see people incapable of empathy as dysfunctional. It’s more expensive to deal with the fallout from letting kids get sick than it is to provide them with adequate preventative care, so even if the bottom line is all you care about (which you’re proud of for some reason), it still doesn’t make sense not to invest in protecting your own assets.
No, they are going to expect the government to take care of them.
It depends on what they have been doing with their money. You act like every uninsured person in this county has no money at all and all they ask is the opportunity to go to the doctor, just once before they die. But that isn’t what is going on. If they have no money they are already on Medicaid. If they have money, what are they spending it on other than insurance? How many of these poor people going bankrupt because of a health problem decided they had to have “the American dream” right now, on credit? What has been going on with their money before they got cancer - or even worse, their kid got cancer? Why do they have any kids when they can’t afford to insure them?
How about we quit supporting the idea that it’s ok to do whatever you want, the government will bail you out? How much money will that save?
No. I don’t jump to emotional conclusions based on nothing at all…
Okay. So, what do we do with the sick and starving kids which exist even though you don’t want them to? You’ve been asked this over and over and your only reply is that they shouldn’t exist, and then I thought you said we should do “nothing” as a way of using suffering children to change people’s behavior. If that’s not accurate, what do you think should be done when the kids you don’t think should be born get sick and hungry?
Actually, no I haven’t. If it were just me, that could be counted as luck, but I personally know nobody at all who has “gone to hell” after living a hard working careful life. Some of our friends have been laid off and didn’t “go to hell” until they found a new job. One friend’s mother and father are both having serious health problems - no going to hell there.
Why would you think the government would be any different? Tax money isn’t infinite.