The flu shots aren’t free. They mightn’t cost you any money out-of-pocket, but they are paid for. If this is a public health program and you are getting a flu shot at no charge to yourself, then you are benefiting from something that you have made quite clear you are opposed to.
Please try to keep up - I’ve already said that I have never had a flu shot, and that I know that as a taxpayer, I’m paying for the free ones.
Please forgive me for not reading every golden nugget that drops out of your mouth. I can only take so much of your filth.
No, no, I want the last word!
Over 40,000 people a year die in traffic accidents. Why isn’t the government trying to take over and micro-manage our use of automobiles?
In a country of 300,000,000 people, a certain number of people are going to die! It’s a fact of life.
And besides, I’ve seen absolutely no cites or data to indicate that even more people wouldn’t die anually because of waiting lists, government ineptitude and efforts to find the cheapest way of dealing with serious health conditions rather than the most effective, which would be the situation with what would inevitably become government-run health care.
Europe. Idiot.
This is perhaps the silliest example I’ve seen used to argue against government involvement.
Ever heard of speed limits? Traffic signs? Seat Belt laws? Police officers handing out tickets for violating the rules of the road? Mandatory car insurance for every driver?
You could say that to nonchallantly dismiss any unneccesary and preventable deaths!
But I know the second we have a terrorist attack that kills even a mere three thousand people, you’ll be glad to throw a trillion dollars on a massive government program (war) to combat terrorism.
Goverment-Funded Health Care? We’re Already Two-Thirds There.
Actually, I’d like to replace “idiot” with “liar,” because I know damn well Slobbering Knobbist has seen the studies that show the US health care system getting it’s clock cleaned on just about every major mortality measure by countries with “socialized” medicine.
Fucking liar.
Noted. Thanks for the confession.
NEXT?
That’s where I am. I’d still like to know where these freebie shots are.
You, like almost everyone else on this board, are making the mistake of thinking that the way things are now is the way they will always be. Socialized medicine is not sustainable for the long run.
Eventually, costs will increase just like they have under private medicine (unless technological progress stops, which is also a threat, and populations continue to age without offsetting increases in population growth) and there will come a time when the government can no longer pay for the care it has promised. When it reaches that point is when the types of decisions brought to mind by the term “death panels” begin to come into play.
That is when actuarial tables will begin to determine who qualifies for what care. And it is when the government will likely start to disqualify people for lifestyle choices that have led to their conditions, and when it will most probably start to deny coverage for people engaging in those lifestyle choices but don’t yet have health problems.
And when that time comes, people will have nowhere else to turn. At least now people can switch jobs, buy their own insurance or pay privately for the care they need. When the government runs out of money (and probably out of doctors – where’s the incentive for people for people to go through the time and strain of learning that profession when they get so little reward financially and have so little say in their patients’ care?) and says you have a three-year wait for your triple-bypass operation, you will have little choice but to hope you live that long – provided they don’t just tell you that you’re too old (or too fat, or you’re a smoker or whatever, and that you aren’t covered accordingly.
Government does not care about people. Look at the hurdles government has put in place for people who genuinely become disabled. There is a six-month to a year’s wait just to see if benefits will be granted, and in the state I live in they are almost never granted upon first application and/or individual appeal. Lawyers are almost invariably required in order to get benefits, and then of course it’s up to the litigant to pay the attorney fees. I know of a woman who had a stroke and was paralyzed on the entire left side of her body and was turned down because she was still capable of “doing some kind of work.”
This is not how beneficent governments operate. This is how governments that put their own rules and financial concerns above those of the people they are supposed to be serving operate, and it is S.O.P. for the U.S. government. It’s all well and good for the government to trumpet it’s Social Security and disability programs to in order to make people think it cares about them and will take care of them – this in order to gain votes and citizen support – but when the chips are down and you need that care, you can go pound sand for all the government cares.
Starkers, you’ve been repeatedly contradicted, with cites, on every single “point” (not scare quotes-- these are stupid quotes), from the slippery slope to the difficulty receiving present benefits.
Every. Single. One.
And yet you continue to spew this tripe over and over again, apparently going by the right-tard axiom that constant repetition, especially loud repetition but any old repetition will do, actually changes a lie into a truth. The whole “we create our own reality” horseshit.
Please stop; I’ve gone past puking into dry heaves.
One man’s truth is another man’s propaganda (or at the very least, the result of skewed data by people with an agenda).
Common sense and life experience tell me differently than your so-called proof. The only way a conservative ever gets credit for being right around here is when he does a 180 and embraces the liberal view. It’s laughable.
And I happen to know for an absolute fact that no one has refuted either my point about Social Security disability benefits, because I have first-hand knowledge of them.
Neither has anyone disproven anything about my slippery slope concerns because: a) no one has knowledge of the future; and b) one only has to look at how government social and entitlement programs have grown since their inception, how little they actually provide to their recipients (especially vs. the amount those recipients have been forced to pay into them), and the arbitrary way in which they are administered to see that my concerns are legitimate and prescient and that your denials are the result of nothing more than blind partisan support of nanny-state government.
Learn to read in context, you pig fucking moron.
The Republican party is currently a champion of Medicare. 
BTW, 20 years ago on discussion at UC Berkeley I was told that “any day now” the health care systems of countries that have UHC would fail.
Today they continue, and while some had troubles none of them think that switching to a system that pays more than is needed is the way to go.
What’s beautiful about your world view is that it’s completely unfalsifiable. Your personal stories trump all data that could allow the issue to be looked at from a bigger picture perspective (automatically dismissed as biased), and of course it trumps everybody else’s anecdotes as well.
She should have got curlcoat’s lawyer. She works here all day and still collects my tax dollars.
What is the conservative view on flood insurance? Private insurance writes the policies and collects premiums, but the government pays the claims. Is this considered an acceptable type of socialism, or should we put a stop to it?
Actually, I would love to be able to look at data on the various issues and feel that I could believe it and make my decisions based on that data. Life would be a lot easier. Don’t you think I’d love to be able to believe that the government could pay for health care for me and my family with no overriding negative consequences? That government care would be equal to or superior overall to what we have now and that it would always be adequately funded? That no one would have to wait a long time suffering in pain or perhaps dying before they get the help they need? Or that what started out as government largess and a desire to keep people healthy won’t eventually turn into total government control of how we live, what we eat and what care we will or won’t be allowed to have?
I would like to believe the data and anecdotes that purport to tell me these things are so, but I can’t. Not only is the data suspect, but the very notions of these kinds of things fly in the face of everything I’ve seen over the course of my life about how the government in this country operates.
Every side has an agenda and it virtually always skews its data and its studies and its conclusioins to support those agendas. Take just about any issue: global warming, the environment, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economy, health care, etc. and you can find, with no trouble whatsoever, completely contradictory data and statistics purporting to prove that what each side claims is borne out by the data.
This is why I rely so heavily on what common sense and life experience tell me rather than what this or that set of data contends.
You may have noticed that not only do I often disregard data and statistics that my oponents post, but I don’t often go ferreting around for and posting data to support my side either. This is once again because I don’t believe that any data is absolutely believable anymore, not even that which supports my own conclusions. And you have no idea how much I wish that things were not this way.
I’m not really any more obtuse or stubborn or intransigent than anyone else around here. I’m just less willing to uncritically accept data that I can’t have confidence in, whereas most people around here appear to feel that as long as its data that supports their beliefs, it’s gospel, and only a fool or blackguard would deny it.
So in a sense, because I don’t immediately latch on to whatever I read from either side I’m actually one of the board’s more open-minded posters (:D), choosing instead to let life experience and common sense dictate my positions on the issues.
Is she all right?
In other words,
I know what I know,because I know it, and I won’t let the facts get in the way of my knowing it. And this makes me open-minded.