I regard the public school system as infrastructure (how would you regard vouchers?). The thing is, I would also regard the health care system as infrastructure.
Hell, maybe even defense!
Is there anything currently in the federal or state budget that you don’t see as infrastructure? Something that might be considered wasteful or unnecessary?
And if you get a chance I’d love an answer to post 58.
There isn’t a single “European system” so let’s use the “British system” to compare.
What Yanks call emergency rooms are part of “Casualty.” Free of charge in the UK, priced at a premium in the USA.
Britain’s system, being state-managed & state-funded, has its share of niggling regulations, and some poor people with chronic or disabling conditions fall through the cracks. In the US system, being only partly state-managed & state-funded, there are still cracks, which even swallow people without chronic or disabling conditions due to financial issue; & sometimes care for the poor involves running around from one potential donor to another.
Really, we talked about this a lot two years ago. It seemed like the anti-socialized medicine crowd couldn’t decide between predicting cost overruns or loss of income due to excessive efficiencies.
I see lots of words but no numbers.
How many fall through the cracks in the socialized system, and how many fall through the cracks in the libertarian system?
That was the comment made.
So what is the answer? How many are slipping through in “Europe” (or even in the UK) vs the US?
Well, technically, the “cracks” we have in America aren’t found in the UK. England’s public system has been means-tested, so it was possible as recently as 2008 to stop qualifying by using your savings to pay for additional care. :eek: There was a change in policy in England a couple years ago to allow patients to purchase expensive non-covered drugs with their own money without losing access to state-funded care. That seems to have closed one “crack.”
Scotland’s system is universal. Not sure about the other two nations. But in all the national systems, the state tries to cover what a doctor considers necessary care.
I’m not sure what all is happening to NHS in the present Cameron “austerity” régime.
As for patient satisfaction (pre-Cameron), I’ll give you this:
Non-libertarian system have better regulations and social protections in place.
Many more people would slip through the cracks.
I don’t assume that libertarians have no sense of charity, but history tells me that charity has never been up to the task of feeding the hungry or regulating the pharmaceutical industry.
The notion that charity would step in where government stepped out but in MUCH better ways because people would police their charitable dollars better than governments program dollars has proven to be untrue.
And what is that proof?
That is a caricature that is every bit as bad as some of the caricatures of the libertarian position.
There are some things that the government can simply do better than the private sector. Primary among them is carrying out public policy.
That is a gross caricature of the criticism of conservative libertarians.
Infrastructure is that which enables citizens to be productive in whichever way they choose. This includes:
Transit systems (to get to work)
Education (to know how to work)
Healthcare/disability (to be healthy enough to work)
Unemployment (to be able to return to work as quickly as possible)
Patents/Copyright (to protect the fruits of one’s work)
Police (to keep internal threats from allowing one to work)
Defense (to keep external threats from allowing one to work)
All of these functions suffer from being tied to the work itself, like health insurance. They need to be placed in the federal or state umbrellas to allow citizens the freedom to pursue the work they wish to pursue without coercion by people with profit motives.
Of all the main functions the government currently provides, Social Security is arguably the most cuttable, as pensions are effectively rewards for giving the majority of your life over to work, and don’t enable productiveness except as an incentive. But it’s also something nobody’s going to budge on without a perfect transitional plan in place.
Yeah, but they seem to be getting a lot of airtime and its not because people want to make fun of them, its because so many people seem to agree with them.
This is verging on true scottsman type arguments. I suppose your point is that most of the people who claim to be libertarianare actually something else but when the same people who fund the CATO institute also fund these borderline anarchists, its easy to see why we might think that their definition of liberatiansim is the functioning definition.
Yeah with the economists from George Mason University on one side and teh rest of the world’s economists on the other. The fact that Austrian school economists disagree with all the rest of the economists in the does mean its a hotly debated topic no matter how passionately the Austrians feel about their position.
Sure we can always identify stupid spending but during a recession, its hard to see how even stupid spending (digging holes and then filling them up again) does provide at least temporary stimulus. After all isn’t that effectively what we did during WWII?
He could also be talking about the rich versus the poor.
The line is not always so blurred. You are not always choosing a cheaper method that lets people fall through teh cracks bversus a more comprehensive system that is more costly and less efficient. Take health care for example. Right now we have a very expensive system that lets people fall through teh cracks and yet libertarians generally oppose the notion of a more universal system that will be cheaper and more efficient purely based on teh fact that the govt is taking on a roel that can be fulfilled by the private sector (no matter how poorly).
I think Ogre said, this is how it is because this is how it SHOULD BE.
Or worsen it.
There is a difference between public goods like roads and defense and non-public goods like education. Libertarians (generally speaking) are not offended by govt spending on public goods as much as theya re by spending on non-public goods.
It depends on what you mean by slipping through teh cracks. If you are asking how many people die on the emergency room steps in each system for lack of care the answer is none in either system. If your question is who has access to health care in each of teh systems then teh answer is that about 50 million Americans slip through teh cracks while almost no Europeans do.
Public education. Feeding the hungry. Unemployment insurance. These are a few areas where charity is not able to approach filling the needs of a society.
What I mean is more like this:
Which is more important to personal liberty?[ul]
[li]The freedom of employers to deliver part of their employee compensation in medical benefits;[/li][li]the freedom of employees to be paid in more generally useful money;[/li][li]or the ability of a citizen to leave his job without losing an existing health insurance contract?[/li][/ul]Maybe the second, or the first?
What if the question is utilitarian: Which is most useful to personal liberty? Possibly the third!
The first puts liberty in employers’ hands, the second and the third put liberty in employees’ hands, & the third allows more personal security–which can be liberating in a different way.
Or there’s this:
Is it more libertarian to allow businesses to refuse service to would-be customers, or to guarantee would-be customers access to business? The legal minimalist says the first, the civil libertarian may believe it’s the second.
But it’s a question of whether liberty belongs to property holders and managers, or to citizens as potential consumers–supply-side liberty for the fewer or demand-side liberty for the many. The Civil Rights Act increased liberty on the customer side.
A similar argument applies to the employer/employee relationship.
In a choice between liberties, or a choice between rights, surely we should choose the path which serves the general populace over a privileged class. Modern liberalism derived this principle from libertarian concerns; modern minimalist “libertarians” miss the point.
No you illiterate buffoon, you were the one that made the statement about slipping through cracks.
Why would you use an expression that you didn’t know the meaning of? Then you did it again:
So that’s twice now that you’ve claimed more people would slip through the cracks. I don’t mean to be crass, but it’s time to shit or get off the can. And by that I mean it’s time to prove your assertions. I’ve asked a few times now, and I’ll ask again, how many more will slip through the cracks?
Bullshit, flat out bullshit. Everyone in the US has access to health care, the 50million you so dishonestly reported is the number that do not currently have health insurance, a big fucking difference. And not because they can’t have it, many of those 50million CHOOSE not to.
But what you and the rest of the geniuses in this thread failed to realize is that the US health care system isn’t a total cluster fuck because of libertarian beliefs. It is a complete and total cluster fuck because “the government” put in wage controls to try and fight inflation. The shocking result was that employers began offering health insurance as a non-wage compensation. Now when people “fall through the cracks” it’s the direct result of government intervention. So now what you’re claiming is that we need a government program to solve the mess created by the last time the government tried to help out. Maybe stop helping.
Bullshit, prove it.
As far as “feeding the hungry” goes, the government has failed. I just spent 6 years with a private non-profit that fed people with chronic illness that the government didn’t give a shit about, but evil corporations were happy to make sizable donations. The Salvation Army is a another NGO, and you’ll be shocked to find that those “feeding the hungry” are not government but rather private and religious organizations. The best the government has come up with that fucked up SNAP system that amounts to less than $4 per day, meaning that when the government helps “the hungry” they tend to remain hungry.
Where is this magical proof?
This seems to be tapping into the same indignation that was stirred by the notion of welfare queens. Are you aware of the welfare reform act of 1996 because this limits total lifetime welfare benefits to 60 months.
If you are concerned about transfer payments like social security and medicare then please just say so because the arguments of that debate are already pretty well developed and we don’t need to try to argue against your vague sense of injustice at the “eaters” taking from the “producers”
I’m not sure how that makes me an illiterate buffoon. I’m pretty sure it means you are losing the argument and you don’t like it.
I know how I define it, but your posts seem to indicate that you might define it differently.
So about two inches below this, you acknowledge that I answer you and yet you still spout this sort of thing in your post. Why do you do that, does it have something to do with your bizarre take on economics and “risk”?
This is bullshit, flat out bullshit. Like I said, if you are asking how many people are going to die on the emergency room steps for lack of health care, then the answer is zero (see THIS is why I said “it depends on what you mean by slipping through the cracks”). The working poor don’t choose not to have health insurance any more than they choose to eat and pay rent. They simply cannot afford health care and they do not qualify for medicaid.
If in your world “access to healthcare” = access to emergency room or the availability of health insurance that they cannot afford or access to government programs when they are destitute, then we simply have a different definition of what access means. You seem to be satisfied with a level of access that does not amount to meaningful access.
I never said it was. I think the opposition to meaningful health care reform was driven by people who espoused libertarian ideals.
So you think health care coverage was better before employer based health care? Pffft.
Libertarians would get rid of the FDA, OSHA, and social safety nets.
If you think you are a libertarian and you wouldn’t do any of these things then you might not be as libertarian as you think.
Are you under the impression that people don’t go hungry in America because of private charities? That in the absence of government subsidies and aid, that these private charities would be able to handle even a small slice of the need? Pffft.
Does the proof have to be magical or can I simply point to the facts.
Are you under the impression that waste fraud and abuse is less prevalent at the United Way for example when compared to federal programs?
You seem pretty critical of the food stamp program (SNAP) How much do you think it costs to administer the food stamp program compared to how much is disbursed? How well do you think this stacks up against private food charities? SNAP might average $4 but the benefit is scaled so that people who actually only get $4 a day are supposed to be using SNAP to supplement their food budget. A family of four can get up to $700/month?
How well do you think private charities would be able to absorb the extra traffic if medicaid disappeared?
For example?
Again I’ll ask: how many more? What proof do you have?
The Food Bank, Second Harvest, and Salvation Army are all currently feeding the hungry. What is the government doing other than SNAP? In most cases the government contracts through those organizations.
What proof? Show’m if you’ve got’m.