Document exposes what the RNC really thinks of its donors, admits to using "fear."

Great Debates
81

You should at least acknowledge that you are in a tiny minority then. Society itself should not help anyone who cannot afford healthcare? There are not many who would agree that Medicare for the elderly should be abolished. Few would agree that charity-run hospitals (a part of society, after all) should be closed down.

Most people would probably agree that there IS a role for society in helping those in need to avoid a painful, unnecessary death. The alternative would seem to be an exceedingly nasty world where it’s every man for himself, society does not help anyone, and there would be a good business in running a cart up and down the street, charging to remove dead bodies.

Perhaps you meant that government should not provide health care to those who cannot afford it. But since I know you are exceptionally careful with the words you choose, I have rejected this premise.

82

If it’s every man for himself, then why have cops? Why should society pay to protect your life and property? Hire your own security guards.

Why have a fire department? If your house is on fire, why should society pay for you to put it out. Pay for your own fire engine.

Why have a sanitation department or a water department? Haul your own garbage. dispose of your own sewage. Purify your own drinking water.

83

For once I’d like to see debaters admit that the word “socialist”–as used in American policy debates–is a loaded term. You may be able to defend it on technical grounds, but it’s also clear that people often use it strictly for its incendiary value.

I guess I’m not surprised that the very first response to the question of embarassing Republican tactics is yet another variant of “Obama is a socialist”–a tactic that quickly reduced this thread to a semantic argument–but it should be called out for the Ann Coulter-style bomb throwing it is.

84

Yes, let’s look at that sentence again:

“To me, the most significant thing is that the RNC is basically admitting that its base is a bunch of reactionary morons who are easily manipulated by fear, and by words like “Socialism” I wonder if they’ll be smart enough to even know that they’ve been insulted, though.” (emphasis added)

So, according to the OP, “the most significant thing” is that (1) the RNC is admitting (2) that its base is a bunch of reactionary morons, (3) that its base is easily manipulated by fear, and (4) that its base is easily manipulated by words like “socialism.”

Out of all of that, you seize upon one subpart of one section of what concerns the OP – not the use of fear, not the unabashed manipulation, not the remarkably uncharitable perception of the party’s own base, not the fact that the RNC apparently has no problem admitting all of this in a semi-public forum, not any of the interesting questions this raises about the disconnect between the public and the institutional elite of both parties or the validity or effectiveness of using such techniques to begin with or what that might say about our political system.

No, instead you spend multiple paragraphs defending the rhetorical legitimacy of a single scareword (even the sentence you quoted says “words like socialism,” not “socialism”), and in so doing artfully deflect the conversation away from the specific context of the OP, and away from the substance of the OP’s concerns, to some abstract rehashing of “socialistic” programs and “use-value” and the same tired debate about the free market and efficiency that we’ve had on this board ten million times before.

Which is fine. Nice job. Well-deflected. I certainly rose to the bait just as much as anyone else. But don’t claim that it’s how the thread started, because the sentence you yourself quote shows that the OP was complaining about a hell of a lot more than the validity of “socialist” as a rhetorical label. Lord knows I would never think you were being intellectually dishonest, so I can only conclude that your parsing skills need some pretty serious work.

I can’t remember whether you weighed in on the whole “Obama thinks rural Pennsylvanians are bitter people who cling to guns and religion” imbroglio, and I don’t have the time to search through the archives right now. Did you think those comments reflected poorly on Obama, or did you defend him by noting that many rural Pennsylvanians are disaffected, armed, and church-going?

85

If the politicians you support were as honest as this, the whole debate would be over in about five minutes. The horrified reaction of the population would sweep Obama’s plan (or something even more radical) into implementation faster than you could say “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.”

I thought about responding to some of your earlier points, because they were points worth making, but i really don’t see how we can debate this issue, given how far apart we are on the fundamental normative question at the heart of the matter.

I respect that there may be more and less efficient ways to provide healthcare for people. I understand that, in some circumstances, the free market probably does pretty well. But every post i make on the issue of health care rests on a basic and unshakable belief that, in a society as advanced and wealthy as the United States, everyone should have access to basic health care, whether or not they can afford to pay for it themselves. I honestly can’t comprehend a moral universe in which a person could feel otherwise.

86

We do not have to speculate on what would happen with a private Fire Department. It has already happened.

(Yeah I know that is a cite to Cracked but they cite it in the article and their writing is funnier than most)

87

What? You think removing the burden of health insurance premium payments from corporations (which would be the result of implementing true UHC) would negatively impact their bottom lines?

Because the country doesn’t go bankrupt if corporations are financially healthy. Isn’t that a conservative mantra? We need to preserve the financial health of the wealth-makers at any cost. Is this not so?

I am shocked to see your change in position. Truly, wonders never cease.

88

If we’re going to debate health care reform, Bricker, you have to acknowlege that our current non-system is an intolerable mess.

My wife had her gall bladder removed a few months ago. Luckily we had insurance through my job. That pays for a portion of the surgery.

The procedure itself went smoothly. From diagnosis of the problem by our family doctor, to ultrasounds confirming the diagnosis, to scheduling the surgery, to performing the surgery a few days later.

Except now the festering hellscape begins. We get dozens of bills from all kinds of providers. Which ones are paid by insurance? How do we know that the claimed service was actually even provided, given that my wife was unconscious in the operating room at the time the alleged service was provided. Bills show up months later. Bills that were paid are adjusted because new things are found. The insurance will pay for certain things but not others. Which are those? Nobody knows.

And that’s the cancer eating away at our health care system. Nobody knows what anything will cost, least of all the doctors and patients.

It would be one thing if a guy without insurance could get a quote for a gall bladder removal, find out that it costs $10,000, and decided to pay or not. But that’s utterly impossible. It IS possible for certain types of ELECTIVE surgery. If you want a breast augmentation, you can get a firm quote on the cost. But for regular treatment? If your kid has a sore throat and you want to take him to the doctor to see if it’s serious? Try calling your doctor’s office and see if they’ll give you a quote. It can’t happen, and it won’t happen. And of course, if you want to just pay cash, you’ll pay two or three times what someone who has insurance would pay, because the insurance company negotiates with the provider for the final bill.

You have health insurance, right? The problem of third party payment for health care doesn’t change whether your insurance provider is a for-profit company, a not for profit co-op, or some sort of government program. It’s still third party payment.

Which means that the price discipline from fee-for-service health care is impossible. Competition between insurance providers is essentially non-existant, and individual patients can’t choose that anyway, because their employer makes that choice. So we’re locked in to a third party payment system.

So as long as we’re locked into a third party payment system, what’s so horrible about a public system? The private insurance system is a fucking scam. It’s uniformly awful, a toxic bureacratic swamp that is impossible for anyone without special training to navigate.

If there were a public system of health insurance, people would line up to join. You know it, I know it, the American people know it. So why are you dead set against any sort of public health insurance? Because it conflicts with free-market principles? Dude, we wouldn’t be having this conversation if we had a free market system that worked. We have a free market system that’s utterly fucked up. That’s the status quo that the Republicans are fighting tooth and nail to preserve.

And suppose the Republicans win this one. The health care bill is voted down. What next? A reform bill that introduces free market discipline to the insurance industry? That’s never going to happen. The answer is, nothing. There is no free-market plan.

The spectre of government-run health care is certainly disturbing. I wouldn’t be in favor of it, except for the fact that our current system costs Americans twice as much as in other first world countries. And what do we get out of it? Here’s the chart.

We could spend HALF what we do currently, and provide universal coverage for everyone (just like in every other first world country), and get better outcomes. We already pay as much for Government health care here in the US as they do in other countries, except we also have to pay as much again on top of that for our private insurance. Meaning, if we had UHC like they have in Europe, we’d pay the exact same amount in taxes that we do now for Medicare, Medicaid, NIH, and on and on, except we’d cover everyone and wouldn’t have to pay for private insurance.

It would be one thing if paying twice as much as everyone else resulted in better health outcomes. Then it would be a matter of allocating priorities–hey, we spend a lot on health care but we get good value for our money. But we don’t. We get worse outcomes, despite paying outrageous amounts.

I agree that any goverment program should be required to justify itself. It it can’t pass the “Why the fuck are we paying for this?” test, then it should be scrapped. But health care coverage turns out to be one of those things that the evidence clearly shows can be provided more cheaply, more efficiently, more fairly, and with better results by the public sector. That’s simply the only conclusion that can be drawn from looking at the evidence.

89

Including private fire companies in the US squabbling at the scence over who has dibs on fighting a fire, so as to determine who gets paid from the building’s insurance company. http://www.ashfordfire.org/tidbits.html

90

Yes.

Not in this thread, but it’s a fair question. No system can operate without some protocol for rationing. Our current system does not. No future system can.

Of course. And I have the right to argue against that choice.

Society should not help anyone as a matter of right, of entitlement. Society – non-government aspects thereof – should certainly maintain public charity work of all kinds, but no person may demand public charity; he cannot insist on it as his due.

Admitted. Absolutely true.

Surely you don’t mean my response, which explicitly acknowledged, as a numbered point, that Obama was not a socialist.

Yeah, it was really going overboard when I showed up at your kid’s school with a doll’s head cut off and said, “Tel your parents THIS is what will happen to you if they discuss anything except what I want discussed.” Maybe I shouldn’t have gone quite so far in forbidding anyone to discuss any other aspects of the OP.

Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe productive people are tired enough of being forced to ay the freight for non-productive people.

You’re not alone. Many people do. The debate has been very successfully framed in those terms. But I reject that premise.

Mind you: I don’t reject the premise that we should make changes that allow better access to health care. But as long as we start from the proposition that as a matter of right, of moral and legal claim, everyone should have access to basic health care, whether or not they can afford to pay for it themselves… as long as we’re starting there, I reject the premise.

91

Oh, hijack all you want. Just don’t innocently absolve yourself of any responsibility for the derailment by claiming that it’s what the thread was originally about.

92

Sure, but saying “it’s not a right” is not an argument against it. It’s the equivalent of trying to argue that “X should not be a law because X is not a law.” It’s meaningless.

93

Very fair point.

It shouldn’t be a right because the more rights we load up that require the productive citizenry to pay the freight for the unproductive citizenry, the more impediments we have to future productive citizenry.

94

We’d actually be taking a load OFF the citizenry. That’s the part that seems to be escaping a lot of HCR opponents (and it’s no accident that it is. The insurance industry has been paying a buttload of money to make SURE that point escapes people. That’s exactly why they do things like bus people in to disrupt town hall meetings).

95

So how does the lucky sod who has never met you or read anything you have to say go about determining which system is best? Where do you fit in? Why is your happiness regarding rugged individualism a factor at all? Other countries obviously want the best system they can manage, should they refer to the opinions of all American conservative superstitious lawyers, or just you? Why?

96

People tend to ration quite well among themselves when left to their own devices. No protocols are required for the rationing of, say, good seats at a movie theater. This strikes me as a rather odd objection.

97

You’re already bearing the cost of the unproductive citizenry. When an uninsured poor person goes to the hospital who do you think foots the bill?

As long as the cost to you is buried in other costs it is ok since you can pretend you are not paying for all the layabouts?

98

What, to you, is the distinction between productive and unproductive? Is it that a person who becomes sick thereby becomes unproductive and to hell with him? Or is it that productive people can always afford, and obtain, insurance anyway?

Either of those views is too absurd, or too amoral, to discuss seriously, so it must be something else you’re trying to sell us. What?

99

I didn’t want to chop up your post to make a point, so I’ll just quote the most relevant part. Your last sentence makes no sense when reading what came before it. We do not have anything remotely like a free market system for health insurance in this country. The “free market” hasn’t failed-- what failed is our heavily regulated health insurance industry.

As for whether or not the current bills are a move towards socialized medicine, I think that’s a fair assessment-- especially since many of the Democrats want to see a single payer system. This would be one step in that direction.

100

In fact, the productive citizens (which I assume means “tax-paying citizens”) are paying MORE right now than citizens of other countries with UHC. Countries with UHC such as Canada don’t seem to be doing too badly right now. Unless you want to jump on the Rand Rover bandwagon, and try to argue that Canada has high unemployment, and a poor economy when the figures clearly show that it does not.