Were you under the impression we were talking about Medicaid? You must have stumbled into the wrong thread. Kindergarten is the other way.
Hilarious. He’s even too stupid to debate in the Pit.
The thing of it is, this thread was rather inane from the beginning. The OP has been told the error of his ways from legal experts on both sides of the political spectrum, so there isn’t really much to “shit on” at this point. The court case will go on, and we’ll have another round of threads once the decision is announced.
I hope that the quoted section of your post made you feel better. In this instance, specifically, he was right and you were wrong. A simple acknowledgement in that thread that you had grabbed the wrong word, (it happens), would have been sufficient. (For that matter, Bricker was not even responding to you, but to an intervention by running coach, during which he made no attack on your post or your person.)
You might want to re-calibrate your outrage meter.
Hey, do you guys think that I can get the same kind of orgasmic high from this video of GOP governor Scott Walker demolishing the King argument as conservatives got from Grubergate?
Nah, it doesn’t fit into the bullshit vertical integration that has fueled this meritless anti-ACA crusade. :smack:
Care to start by agreeing to an objective definition? Inhumane has one of those, or more than one depending on which version you use.
Let’s start with Google: “without compassion for misery or suffering; cruel” I’d drop the cruel part, it’s inflammatory and not probative, and simply go with:
Without compassion for misery or suffering
as a working definition of "inhumane’.
OK, I’ll accept that.
So, does lack of universal health care represent a lack of compassion for misery or suffering?
I think I can say that there are a fair number of people in the US who suffer as a result of the high cost of health care, and a lack of public funded options. I know people who have faced serious financial difficulty over the high cost of insurance after losing their jobs, and people who have avoided necessary treatments because of the cost.
Our government has not made a serious effort to reform the health care system, despite the fact that dozens of other countries have systems that cut the cost so significantly, they can cover all of their residents health care at a public cost less than our current public cost that covers a small portion of our residents. We have Governors refusing Medicaid expansion moneys, and people fighting to strip away subsidies that help people afford private health care.
Where is the compassion for misery or suffering in these decisions? Where is the compassion when you prefer the US system with more per capita public spending than Canada, and leaves large segments of the population with no coverage at all?
At a minimum, it does not remotely stretch the bounds of reason to state that these choices, made by our representatives in government, lack compassion for those who suffer under the current system.
I think you can only conclude that the current system is inhumane if you reject the conservative critiques of more universal care. You cannot do it persuasively merely by observing that the US system does a bad job of providing care.
A lot of conservatives oppose other systems out of sincere if misguided concerns about the fairness of having the government ration care, or the consequences for efficiency and innovation of reducing the influence of market forces, or the fairness and perverse incentives of compelling one person to pay for another person’s bad choices, or some combination of the above.
If those concerns are right, then opponents of reform would be correct that different systems are not more humane–they just distribute their harms to different people and sometimes in less obvious ways. So you really have to quarrel with those concerns to get to your conclusion.
If you pass a person on the streetcorner who is holding a sign reading, “Homeless - Hungry - Out of Work,” and you fail to give that person money, do you lack compassion?
Or is it that you believe greater harms may result? Perhaps you believe that your contributions should go to an infrastructure instead of individuals, perhaps you believe that any money would be spent on alcohol and not food. Are those reasons that don’t exclude compassion?
I say they are.
By the same token, I say there are reasons to disfavor the ACA that do not rule out compassion.
Therefore, I reject the conclusion you offer in your last paragraph. It DOES stretch the “bounds of reason” to conclude that representatives who disfavor the ACA definitively lack compassion for those who suffer under the then-extant system.
Beyond the points raised by others in response to this post - which are also valid - I think you also need to measure the benefits against the price.
Suppose you found out that if you donated 75% (or some other high percentage) of your income to certain charities and lived on an extremely reduced lifestyle, your money could make a real difference in reducing the suffering of people who lived in extreme misery - even worse than people in the US without healthcare. And you don’t do it. Do you lack compassion for misery and suffering?
If the answer is no, then you accept the general principle that a person can have compassion for someone else’s misery and suffering but still be unwilling to significantly sacrifice to alleviate this. After that, it’s all about where to draw the line.
[An additional complicating factor is that many who support these laws are not so much compassionate as they are people who expect to personally benefit.]
Don’t say there are reasons, say what those reasons are. I’m not swayed by a claim that reasons exist, I may be swayed by the reasons themselves.
Canada has universal health care. Canada’s government spends less per capita than the US government spends per capita on health care, and the US Gov’t covers a fraction of our population.
I don’t want to increase our cost, I want Canada’s costs. I want our government to cover every person who lives here with good, basic health care, and not raise taxes one cent. It has already been done, in dozens of countries who have modern high quality health care.
You shouldn’t have to sacrifice anything to get universal health care.
That’s overly simplistic.
It’s by no means clear that the US could do what Canada does in terms of universal health care at anything close to the same cost as Canada does it. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen any expert suggest that such a thing might be possible. (Among many other things, a lot of other countries piggyback off the US spending on medical R&D.)
Are we just stupid? Does American Exceptionalism mean we are exceptionally dumb? I’m not asking us to be leaders, just follow the path that others have laid out for us.
You talk about sacrifice… you spend twice what people in France spend on health care. TWICE! And you don’t get noticably better care.
Look at this fucking thing.
How can a person, a group, who purports to embrace fiscal conservatism and economic efficiency look at that chart and not vomit? If this was a chart presented at a board meeting, the CEO would be escorted out by Security, and deservedly so. It’s crap, it’s completely insulting that we have to pay so much more than everyone else for (at best) the same service. The people who should be mad as hell about this chart are actively supporting the continuation of this model.
It depends on why you think the health spending is higher in the US, doesn’t it?
Perhaps our health outcomes are worse, for example, because America is different. We have the freedom to ride motorcycles without helmets while saying “fuck you” to the moon. We buy way more guns and shoot each other more. We eat ourselves into diabetes like nobody’s business.
Perhaps we also spend more to get marginal gains, like extending our lifespans at the back end just a little bit. Or fixing the knees of fifty-year-old marathoners. Or catching just a few more cases of breast cancer, or saving a few more premature babies. Or inventing a new drug that just makes people a little happier or a little healthier. Maybe we do those things even if they make no social utilitarian sense, but because we are more averse to rationing care.
The problem is that even if you are right about everything you say you are still going to have to raise taxes, because payments that were previously going to HMO’s would now go to the government. Now it may be that everyone’s out of pocket health care costs go down by $2,000 a year and their taxes only go up by $1,000 and so they end up ahead, but all you will hear from the Grover Owned Party is that taxes went up, and so it was bad policy.
I’m curious as to why you clipped off the part of my post where I suggested a possible reason, and proceded to imply that the reason must be that we’re “exceptionally dumb”.
To add some detail, what I was observing is that some of the same medical products and services cost a lot more in the US than in other countries. Part of this is due to government price controls in those countries, but part is due to Americans effectively absorbing a higher percentage of the R&D costs than other countries. The way this works is that a lot of other countries simply won’t allow the product or service to be offered at more than Price X. The product costs less than X to manufacture, so it’s worthwhile for manufacturers to sell it in those countries. But the cost of R&D needs to come out of somewhere, and it comes from the US, where there are no price controls. In that sense, the US is like the early purchasers of a new technology and the other countries are like the people who buy after the prices come down. If the US similarly imposed price controls, then a lot of those products would never get invented to begin with, as the prospects for profitability would be low. (If you ask me, the government should crack down on this, by disallowing disparate pricing, and challenging those other countries to go without or pay up, but that’s another story.)
The big part of the problem here is that a lot of medical procedures and technologies don’t result in better outcomes. There have been a lot of studies that support this about things from mammograms to C-sections. And yet, the people want them. In a country with govenment controls, you can tell the people to stuff it. In America - land of the free and home of hypocondriacs - you can’t. So when you measure how much people are getting in services, it’s a lot higher in America. It’s when you measure actual health outcomes that you don’t see improvement.
[All that said, there’s no doubt that the insurance infrastructure in the US is very costly - not just costs and profits for insurance companies, but also the innumerable people that healthcare providers have to hire just to deal with insurance companies and their forms and procedures.]
What fraction of the US populace is covered by government-funded healthcare? Including those now covered by Obamacare that receive subsidies.
Regards,
Shodan
Because I reject the argument entirely, based on:
It’s not another story, it’s part and parcel with being fiscally conservative, efficient non-idiots. The government should crack down on this, should NOT explicitly support subsidizing other country’s health care systems on the backs of Americans. Half our government is pissed off that poor Americans get money for food, and the same guys argue in favor of subsidizing cheap French medicine.
This is where the free market is terribly inefficient, despite the supporters claiming that government is the inefficient one.