Is health care being given too much attention?

Airbeck · August 21, 2019, 11:43pm

That’s a good point. I mean who the hell wants to go to the doctor? I try to avoid the healthcare system as much as I possibly can.

Max_S · August 22, 2019, 12:01am

bump is talking about what is and you are talking about what ought. I hope that clears up the faux disagreement between you two. Why don’t you two put your heads together and figure out how to go from what is to what ought to be.

For example, should you lobby your school board to add a section about universal healthcare to high school world history class? That would make an interesting topic for those who agree that universal healthcare is desirable.

~Max

Voyager · August 22, 2019, 12:03am

I think there are some old people who like to go to the doctor for company. But they don’t get expensive healthcare - and they are already covered by that form of UHC called Medicare. Anyone worried about freeloaders can maybe point to some statistics.

Max_S · August 22, 2019, 12:03am

I agree. The focus on the President is based on his influence over Congress, which is based on his veto power.

~Max

Northern_Piper · August 22, 2019, 2:02am

Ah, but that’s because you’re only accustomed to the drab hell of profit-driven healthcare, where no-one can splurge on anything without getting it double-checked by the adjuster and then approved the green-visored accountants.

Come to a UHC system, especially a single-payer, where it’s all tax-funded and no-one keeps track of costs! It’s a party!! The waiting rooms in our clinics are like Studio 54 in its heyday, but with better drugs, handed out by white-coated apparatchiks!!! And our ERs are even better - people are dying to get in!!!

GIGObuster · August 22, 2019, 4:04am

Kimera757:

Climate Change: Say “pollution”.

The risk communication formula is as follows:

(Perception of) Risk = Hazard + Outrage

https://www.prnewsonline.com/risk-communication-formula-avoid-half-truths-manage-the-outrage/

The hazard is the “real” risk. Outrage is the emotional reaction. The hazard is dire. The outrage is … not (except among committed environmentalists). The outrage over pollution is high. The climate change movement won’t follow the formula though because they “know better”.

Outrage over pollution caused tremendous anger over lead in water scandals, mercury in water scandals, and E. coli in water scandals. It led directly to removing lead from gasoline. It resulted in the elimination of DDT, which had dire effects on wildlife but little effect on humans (so I guess we’re not that selfish). Why throw away a successful playbook?

The very sad thing is that even that talking point you press is coming from contrarians (I even saw that complain coming from a conservative comic) that try to ignore the hardest that the playbook was not tossed away, but the propaganda from the right has also done wonders to blunt what should indeed be a success.

When President Obama invoked the phrase “carbon pollution” 30 times in his climate policy address at Georgetown University last month, he was building on a thematic foundation that had been laid three weeks before.

At the end of May, the administration released its “Technical Update of the Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis.” In 21 pages, the administration enumerated and tallied detrimental impacts burning fossil fuels has on the nation’s economy, public health, and environment. This “technical support document” treated carbon as a pollutant, whose real costs were previously underestimated and externalized.*

Analysis

Conservative critics pounced, mounting a counter-campaign focused largely on negative economic consequences they foresee from any effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These predictions often carried dramatic headlines: “Obama’s Global Warming Folly“; “The Cost of War — on Coal“; “In the War on Coal, the Enemy is Us“; or “The War on Carbon (and Jobs) in the Motor City.”
Contesting Carbon’s Character

A few commentators, however, directly contested the carbon dioxide=pollution claim that underlay the administration’s strategy. Their efforts benefited from a piece published in The Wall Street Journal just three weeks before the White House adjusted the social cost of carbon. In their op-ed, “In Defense of Carbon Dioxide,” former astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt and Princeton physics professor William Happer argued that “the demonized chemical compound is a boon to plant life and has little correlation with global temperature” — this latter part in the face of seemingly overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In the op-eds, letters to the editors, and online comments written in response to Obama’s June 25 speech and its coverage, several others also defended CO2 by highlighting its service to plants.

But it is wrong simply to assume that these benefits come without any environmental or societal costs.

Imagine, for a moment, the waste that would be produced if all the horsepower we harness in our vehicles, machines, and power plants was actually supplied by horses. (Former Secretary of Energy Steven Chu conducted a similar mental exercise in a speech he delivered in September 2011. Cities would be buried in manure. But instead of gathering and then disposing of the millions of tons of plant matter these horses would have consumed and then excreted, humans now burn high-density fuels — coal, natural gas, and oil — that were formed as, over millennia, millions of tons of plant matter were decomposed, fermented, condensed, and compacted. But this burning still produces wastes that interact with our ecosystems. This time, however, it is the global atmosphere — rather than a river flowing through a particular village or city — that is affected.