OK. All I can say is there’s a chorus of “fuck the rich” from the Left that it seems impossible to believe I have just imagined. I will certainly accept your representation that you don’t harbor such sentiments personally.
But are you telling me I imagined it cmpletely? There’s no such tone, no such tenor, from anyone over on your side of the fence?
That’s been done in spite of the Left, not because of them.
I specifically referred to our monster health care problem two or three decades out if we continue along this path. This is a planning horizon of at least twenty years. This what you call “myopic”. Your understanding of this issue and the points the people here have repeatedly tried to make is as petty and superficial as the hollow justifications you offer up to avoid seriously examining your inflexible ideology.
You are now explicitly re-stating that you prefer the present system, which you claim only “appears less efficient”, when in fact the present system will, if left unchecked, lead to the fiscal insolvency of the United States federal government. But oh hey. It only “appears less efficient”. You are, in effect, proposing that there is something worse than a US debt crisis.
Ah, yes. It was facile of me to point out that our system costs nearly double every other advanced nation, while covering a smaller percentage of the population, and doing nothing to control costs two or three decades out from now. My problem seems to have been referring to the actual facts. Obviously, only women and retards use facts to prove their points.
I hate to point this out, since I’m going to have to refer to more of these nasty “fact” things, but there is actually on your house a device that measures how much power your electronic gizmos use when they’re sucking juice from the wall plugs. Employing the amazing power of mathematics, these facts can be put together in a comparative way. That is, we can actually measure first hand, directly, the power requirements of electronic cars. Even more amazing, we can actually put a dollar value on the price of powering those cars from the grid.
We have loads of facts about this. Truly, we live in a incomparably marvelous world, where facts, when they happen to exist, can be compared in such a rigorous, formal, and sophisticated way by the women and retards to whom we give this task.
Perhaps you’re much too much intelligent to see the problem presented here, but just the teensiest tiniest little flaw with your proposal so far, if you’ll pardon my bringing reality into this discussion, is that there is no evidence, not even the slightest scintilla, to support your own rampant speculation. You made an analogy to a fully documentable electric grid, with objective measurement devices on every building, but your own assertion has no fucking evidence whatsoever to back it up.
Get that through your skull right now. Don’t dodge it. Don’t side-step it. Don’t make up a new empty principle and pretend that everything you’ve said so far is actually totally consistent. You have no fucking evidence whatsoever. It does not exist. I actually have reviewed summaries of the current literature about the disincentives caused by government transfer programs. There is nothing out there that I have ever seen, not even the slightest hint, that backs up your conclusion. You are, right now, relying on nothing but hypothetical wonderland horseshit to argue against a mountain of evidence on the other side.
This is not to say that, for example, welfare programs do not provide disincentives to work. They do create a disincentive (although the net effect is smaller than you might expect). What I’m telling you is that there is no comparable literature on health care. Health care is a service for which the variance in the demand for costly service is extremely high. No one knows if they’re going to get hit by a car, or get cancer, until it happens, and so most people have no need to rely on expensive health care at all for most of their lives. There is no known society-shaking disincentive involved for a person who is given access to a service for which the demand is so unpredictable. To add to that, even if such disincentives were found (as they were indeed for welfare), that still wouldn’t establish a causal relationship between the disincentives and the long-term wealth and prosperity of our nation, as measured by any objective proxy variable like GDP growth.
And that’s not even the worst part of your miserably self-serving, baseless, and frankly idiotic appeal to the power grid. I can even go on to say there haven’t even been any conclusive studies linking government size in general and long-run GDP growth. These studies exist, correlations have been pointed to, but the underlying causal relationship is still very much up in the air. And even on top of that, there’s no consensus on what objective proxy variable we should use, whether GDP growth rates are actually appropriate, or whether a more flexible standard like a happiness index would work best to determine “what makes a nation great”.
Even if we settled on GDP, that would be just the first step in a long series of problems.
It’s one thing to note that a fully socialized economic system works against human nature to undermine the fairness and equality that such a system is supposed to bring about. This is clear. There’s no controversy about it in professional circles. But it is something else entirely to draw a line in an exact place and go “Here! This is where national greatness falls apart! Every step past this point is a betrayal of our national principles!” The problem here is sample size and bias in the variables. It’s easy for you to make a stupidly wild claim on the internet that we understand the nature and causes of the wealth of nations to such precision that we can even hazard the roughest of guesses of the genuine cost of a shift in the public’s perceptions to a more “socialist” mindset. But to have even the slightest bit of real-world foundation of fact for such an extraordinary claim? That’s just not going to happen any time soon. There are relatively few developed countries, and those countries have myriad problems that don’t precisely relate to each other, not to mention different peoples having different estimates in the value of public goods, for which there is no market price and so no effective measurement value, let alone a reliable trans-national comparison.
Which is to say that the magical “cost” you’re referring to here of legally adopting another entitlement is at present a fantasy. A chimera. A delusion. Even if it exists–which we have no evidence for–it is likely so small as to be negligible, its tiny nub of relevance lost in the noise of the very real and very large costs that we can precisely measure, e.g. our current health care inefficiencies. I could thoroughly inspect the contents of my last bowel movement and find just as much evidence supporting your assertion as you have provided in this thread, or could possibly provide in the near future, even if you were an expert in this field. Whereas, on the other side of this debate, we have a very real health care debt crisis brewing. Not a hypothetical fantasy one. A real, demonstrable crisis that’s resulting directly from the fact that we pay nearly twice per capita as much as any other advanced country does to insure a smaller percentage of our population.
This evidence you entirely neglect to account for is actually, you know, essential. But for some reason, you act as if making an argument logically sound is somehow equivalent to making it valid and applicable to the real world. For some reason, you seem to believe that your conclusion is within the realm of “reasonable” belief as long as it’s argued logically from your premise, even if your premise is horseshit with no substantive basis at all. It must wonderful to live your life believing that building a logical argument for something automatically entitles you to believe that your beliefs are “reasonable”, not matter how idiotic the premises are. If we just need come up with theories without supporting them, then I can throw out an equally plausible and equally evidenceless scenario that argues the exact opposite conclusion. It’s damn easy to do:
Larger companies have larger risk pools, which allows them to purchase insurance more cheaply for their employees. The importance of having insurance as a backstop is an essential perquisite that qualified employees demand, especially given the health dangers in the United States for those who are uninsured. This puts a strain on small business expansion, which has historically been a primary source of job growth. Without the ability to give their employees reasonably priced health care plans, these small businesses are caught in a labor disadvantage that contributes directly to stalled employment growth rate, and so a stalled economy. And thus, universal health care would be one important factor in “what would make our country great”.
I don’t have support for every step of this cause and effect. I only have pieces of it without the whole. Those pieces, totally insufficient as they are, are nevertheless real evidence, and so this (as yet unsubstantiated) theory of mine not only acts entirely counter to your own, but it also does so with the benefit of having a few of the pieces filled in. And there are, in fact, people who have argued exactly what I just argued, real people looking at the evidence who are concerned about US competitiveness because of burden of the present system on small business employment. I just don’t typically trot out this argument. Why? Because I can’t fucking prove it. And I would expect any other responsible, intellectually honest, morally upright, non-insane debater to also not rely on fantastical hypotheticals of disaster, especially when there is a very real disaster staring us down in the next few decades.
So I am inclined now to leave the realm of empty speculation and enter again the world of fact. In doing so, I can keep pointing out the fact–as so many others in this thread already have–that our health care costs are enormously out of line with the rest of the developed world. Moreover, I can state again that we are on an unsustainable course. The status quo is not an option. We can’t maintain the current system. That’s what “unsustainable” means.
But you haven’t even acknowledged that much. You haven’t even acknowledged the existence of the monster. Instead of paying attention to the real numbers, the real coming crisis, you rely solely on the illusory hypothetical cost, sticking your head in the sand to continue claiming that the potential costs cooked up by your fervent imagination, based on no evidence whatsoever (I cannot say that enough times), are even higher than the well-established precariousness of our budget situation if we continue on our present health care trajectory. But what do we get from you? Stephen Colbert, arguing from his gut:
Oh. Right. “Gumption.”
All we needs to do, ya know, is take a look-see at the gumption meters on the back of every human and tabulate the results. Lookee there! Lookit that fallin gumption! It’s the death o the Republic ya see right thar!
Well, I’ll tell you what. You convinced me. Gumption. Wow. Gumption. I should’ve realized only a total pussy would use factual parameters like comparative health care costs per capita, long-term budget projections, and real GDP comparisons, all the while unforgivably ignoring the gumption factor. Where did you go to law school? We ought to send all of our economists there from now on, so that we, too, can partake in the highly sophisticated “gumption” analysis of government disincentives. We were all blind before, but now, oh yes, now we can see.
Fuck-a-doodle-do.
No, this isn’t argument about efficiency. Honest arguments about efficiency are based on evidence. You have no evidence. You have no argument from efficiency, but only self-righteous onanistic speculation.
This is an argument about society slouching toward collapse because the evil liberals pushed their evil socialist agenda one too many evil times. This is you clinging to your fantasy theory that the whole country will fall into a swamp because there’s one more entitlement that’s contrary to your ideology.
I’ve seen libertarianish/conservativish compromise proposals that are perhaps, maybe, possibly feasible solutions to our current problem. I’m not convinced by them at present, but at least some of those people manage to acknowledge that we have to do something about insuring our uninsured. The GOP in congress is entirely uninterested in their ideas, which is unfortunate, but at least some of these people are willing to acknowledge that something like single payer would be better than what we have now, even if it’s not their ideal solution to the problem. They’re practical, in other words. They can see the writing on the wall, and they’re scrambling to come up with something more appealing to them. And if we had a genuine opposition party, instead of the demons that currently infest the GOP leadership ranks, then maybe we could have a real debate on these issues. I would be thrilled to see an honest congressional discussion between single-payer advocates and those who advocate subsidized HSAs for the poor, with the unspent insurance money rolled over into social security retirement accounts. Now, that would be a real policy discussion.
But claiming that what we have right now is somehow “more efficient” based on idle theorizing that has as much real world basis as My Little Pony? That’s just raw denial, plain and simple.
Yes. Which I have already conceded in this very thread.
Hellestal, out of curiosity, have you read Meltzer & Richard 1978? I think it’s called A rational theory of the size of government.
Did you ever read Cecil’s column on the death of a housefly?
Please provide a cite that demonstrates that if we fail to adopt UHC, we will bankrupt the government.
Yes, that’s true. My analogy was not meant to suggest that electric power was not measurable. But congratulations on extracting the wrong detail. Perhaps you would also like to point out that health care can’t be delivered in three phase or four phase, just to really put the skids to my argument?
What was my analogy meant to suggest? It’s hard to believe you missed it, since I explicitly stated it, but perhaps you were busy attending a Maoist rally or something and got distracted.
My analogy was merely to point out that when you focus on too small a scope, it’s easy to miss true costs of a solution. I notice you completely ignored the other analogy I offered to the same end, that of the death penalty for double parking. I imagine you couldn’t think of a way to pretend to miss that point and be convincing about it, huh?
I agree that my supposition is not amenable to much in the way of objective measurement. But that’s not to say it has no evidence. You yourself agree that welfare produces disincentives to work. We may argue that, by analogy, so will this proposal, for the same reasons welfare does. This may be weak, in that it lacks any measurement, but it’s not non-existent. It is more than a scintilla.
Wow, that’s fascinating.
Say, when did we stop talking about all health care and begin this conversation about expensive health care? I had no idea your proposal was limited to some kind of relief for catastrophic costs. I thought you were talking about the same proposals that are generally in front of the House and Senate, that do in fact deal with ALL care. Perhaps you could point me towards the post in which you refined your proposal?
Ha! Ha!
You liberals slay me. Really, you do.
Yes, a happiness index. That’s the ticket.
Look, that entire discussions presupposes the truth of a concession I have not made: that individuals should be forced to sacrifice for the good of the whole. This idea, that if the overall happiness of the populace is increased, we may impose on some of the highly productive members of society, leech off their talent, so that everyone gets something.
I am convinced that what makes a nation great is the greatest respect for individual achievement and freedom, not this collective “we’re all in it together, so you must sacrifice for the greater good” mandate. I agree this is not proveable; it’s a postulate. It’s certainly not DISPROVABLE. It’s not testable. It’s unfalsifiable.
You may well reject it as a postulate. But you can hardly claim that I don’t hold it, and you can hardly claim that what I have said is not at least a plausible inference from it.
Bricker, I haven’t been overly involved in many of your threads, so for my own sake please help me clarify a point:
Am I correct in thinking that your preferred policy for health care is, ‘only people who pay for health care should have health care’?
No.
My point is that if you don’t pay for health care, you’re not entitled to demand it from the government.
OK - so, rephrasing to make sure I follow you, your stance is, ‘the government should not provide health care for people who can’t afford health care’. Do I understand you correctly?
So, the government should have some kind of, I don’t know, panel that decides when to pull the plug? 
Again, no. But closer.
If you don’t pay for health care, you’re not entitled to demand it from the government.
The government may, as an expression of wise policy, choose to pay for or subsidize health care in some cases. It should not be considered a right, an entitlement.
Example: the government chooses to give you a tax break for interest paid on a home mortgage.
You don’t have a right to tax-deductible mortgage interest.
As opposed to:
If you cannot afford a criminal lawyer and you’re charged with a crime, you have a right for the government to pay for one for you.
Hmm, OK - just one more: Regardless of whether it is a right or a privalege, do you think the government provide health care to those that do not pay for it?
There are absolutely circumstances under which it would be wise for the government to provide health care to those that do not pay for it.
OK - your opinion is that the the government should not pay for health care for those that do not pay for it, except only in specific instances that would be considered limited exceptions.
Do I have it right?
No. Why do you keep trying to rephrase my statement?
There are plenty of wide-ranging exceptions that certainly cross the boundary of “limited circumstances.” Government employees, both civilian and military, should have their health care paid for by the government, for example.
I am saying that if you don’t pay for it, you cannot demand it. It’s not a right. It’s not an entitlement.
With that restriction agreed-upon, I’m perfectly willing to discuss any number of instances in which it might be wise for the government to do it anyway, with the understanding that, like the mortgage interest deduction, it’s not a right, just a wise policy.
Because I’m trying to figure out what your stance is, and your answers always seem to be sidestepping my question. Maybe I’m not asking the right question, or in the right way.
I’m not questioning whether you think health care is a right or a privilege. You’ve been clear in that you think it is not a right. I get that.
You’ve said that there are instances where the government ‘would be wise’ to pay for health care. Can I ask why (i.e., in what sense) would the ‘government be wise’ to pay for health care in those circumstances?
Of course that’s true.
We can as a society, decide how best to deal with the huge problem that health care has become can’t we? In fact I’d say we have an obligation to address it.
I’d also say we can as a society decide that UHC is the wisest choice for a modern democracy, lets say like almost every other modern country has.
In order to do that we have to be willing to look at the facts rather than have the facts distorted and misrepresented by those {on both sides} who have a political agenda in mind rather than the real problem and the welfare of the society as a whole.
Sure.
The obvious category to me is when the health care benefits someone whose own bad choices have not left him unable to supply it himself. It makes sense to me to cover anyone who fits into that category with basic health care.
The other category would be things like vaccinations, which I would extend even to people whose bad choices have left them unable to pay, out of pure self-interest in preventing the spread of communicable diseases.
And I’d certainly be open to hearing who else ought to go on that list.
Of course. And in the course of that discussion, we can offer up voices to help shape what our ultimate decision should be.
Which I’m doing.
Yes, although I flinch when I hear phrases like “…welfare of the society as a whole…” because in my experience such phrases are often the precursor for phrases like, “Our country is so well-of that it’s our duty to provide health care to everyone, whether they cam afford it or not.”
Since it’s not our duty, I balk at lines like that.
But to the extent “…welfare of the society as a whole…” simply means adopting the wisest course for this particular issue at this particular time, and not carving out a new right that future generations will view as a God-given mandate, sure, I agree.
Oh, I have no particular sympathy for them, taxing them heavily is a matter of minor concern. You have apparently misread disdain for fierce hatred. And I find the efforts of your own ilk to paint them in bright colors as entrepenuers and risk-takers, job providers, and so forth with amused contempt.
And it must be noted that sometimes a man may feed the greed monkey to satiation, and the nasty little brute falls asleep. Such a man may blink, look about, and go “WTF have I been doing?” A man like Bill Gates, for instance, who is now doing some very good work, I applaud his work against malaria with unstinting praise, even as I’m disappointed he has not contributed significantly in the struggle against cognitive dissonance. Or it may be simply that he got married. Women can have a marvelously calming effect on the deranged ego, they are never as impressed with us as we are with ourselves.
My attitude towards the rich can best be summed up by directing your attention to the work of Mr Vonnegut, specifically God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.