I was debating whether to post some remarks on this fine individual in the Omnibus thread or start a new pitting, but I think it’s appropriate to resurrect this old thread because it’s so remarkably pertinent. It will shortly be noted how Fotheringay-Phipps’s argumentative techniques haven’t changed in a decade: whether he’s advocating for torture as a terrific technique for information-gathering as he does there, or putting forward a pack of lies in the service of immoral health insurers, he’s still an unethical disingenuous fuck who rejects as not worth addressing any arguments he doesn’t agree with, and always winds up on the wrong side of ethics. My current beef is with his antics in this thread.
I have occasionally expressed the view that in the context of health care, the health insurance industry is completely useless, and in fact worse than useless, because it adds zero value and contributes enormously to unnecessary high costs. They provide no value added because nothing they do has not been done far more ethically and efficiently by a universal public single-payer system. Insurance companies don’t provide medical services, they block access to them. They don’t fund medical research, they suck money out of the health system. They’re parasites on the system. Sometimes, they kill people by willfully withholding medical care. It’s hard to think of a more contemptible way of making money that isn’t run by the Mafia. Yes, It’s a business opportunity that’s been created by the failure of public policy, but it’s public policy that’s been made to fail almost single-handedly by this industry’s lobbyists.
It turns out that Fotheringay-Phipps works for them. As an actuary. Think about what this means. Since ethical UHC systems are premised on the idea of community-rated costs (the general idea that everyone pays the same premiums and receives uniform unconditional coverage), it means that Fotheringay-Phipps inhabits the very core of the worst practices of privately insured health care: he makes his living deciding how much more sick people and old people should pay for health insurance compared to healthier people.
All of this of course makes him so knowledgeable about the perils of single payer and UHC – that scourge of socialism – and so incredibly impartial, angelic, and piously unbiased – that he has announced his intention of refusing any further discussion with any advocate of such terrible systems of socialized medicine, such as myself. Note the similarity to the pitting in the OP. This is understandable, since all I know about single-payer comes from a lifetime of experience, whereas Fotheringay-Phipps has the full benefit of being employed by a for-profit health insurer and therefore has a totally fair and completely impartial viewpoint that I can never hope to match. He has, indeed, analyzed all the facts impartially, and amazingly it turns out that insurance companies are in no way to blame for any problems whatsoever in the health care system, and are in fact its heroes and its blessed salvation, and anyone who believes otherwise based on things like “facts” is kindly invited to talk to themselves, because they won’t be talking to Fotheringay-Phipps.
I only mention this because people might naturally be inclined to conclude that Fotheringay-Phipps himself is completely useless, and perhaps worse than useless, and that his opinions on the subject are loathsome and worthless, and that he himself is a worthless self-serving unethical piece of shit. That would be too bad – at least for Fotheringay-Phipps – if anyone thought that.
