OK, I want my Ferrari. And a hot model wife too. Some guys have them, why don’t I? Doesn’t the Declaration Independence guarantee me that?
Declaration of Independence says people are equal as in before the law…if I got free gov’t healthcare and someone else didn’t you’d have a point. I have to pay for it though.
Expanding coverage and cutting costs at the same time. Sounds like quite a feat…the CBO says it’s nonsense. The history of gov’t projecting healthcare costs doesn’t fill me with confidence that they’ll be able to “cut costs”.
Nothing to do with before the law, the Declaration is not a legal document. But it does represent the ideals of America, and it says that we have th right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Someone dying from not having access to health care had his right to life violated, someone unable to live a life due to untreated illness is not good in the pursuit of happiness department.
Other countries have more coverage at less cost then we do, so it is perfectly possible. It will take some time no doubt. No one predicts anything ten years out. We don’t predict government costs or revenues ten years out either, but that doesn’t mean we don’t make a budget. Anyhow, predictions and cost control have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
And how many times are you going to make the asinine claim that someone has no more right to be able to see a doctor and not die or suffer than he does to have a fast car?
I come from a family that is probably pretty similar to our usual suspects in the health care debate - RandRover, Shodan, bri1600bv. I got a nice job right out of school, paid into insurance like everyone else, and was slowly building up a nice little savings account.
Then I got laid off.
All I can say is that I’m damn happy right now that I’m Canadian, because I’m not going to go bankrupt if I need treatment, and neither will my family, who would help me out. I’ve got enough crap to worry about right now, at least I don’t have to worry about what happens if I need medical treatment!
You’re confusing two things. I never said that a sick person doesn’t have the RIGHT to see a doctor. He has the RIGHT to do whatever he wants.
His right to see a doctor and my obligation to pay for it are two different things. And yes, he has no more “right” to force me to pay for it than I have a “right” to force you to pay for my Ferrari.
Why has no one noticed until now that the country guaranteed free medical coverage?
<typical conservative> Get a job! Who cares if there is 10% unemployment, if you don’t have a job it is because you are lazy. </typical conservative>
It appears that Europe is pulling out of the recession faster than the US is, and one of the reasons, it seems, maybe the major one, is that they have a better built in stimulus package than we do. People laid off there get both health care and better unemployment than we do in the US. They therefore are less frightened of running out of money, start spending again faster, and help to kickstart their economy. They didn’t have nearly as big a stimulus package as the US did, and there was some back and forth from that, but it looks like they maybe were right in resisting doing it our way, since their way has worked pretty well.
In the US many of the cheaper insurance packages you can buy have gigantic deductibles, like $2500 for a person and $5,000 for a family. If I had this, I’d be busy saving so an unexpected expense won’t get me into trouble. That money doesn’t stimulate the economy. You guys do it better.
And they are just not worth it are they? These people think their lives have value but you put them straight. If you get sick, tough shit. If your insurance company refuses to pay, too damn bad. The worst possible scenario would be if your illness threatened to cost SHODAN money. That would just be wrong.
When I said that paying for COBRA was about the same as me buying a Mercedes, my point was that I could afford NEITHER.
I don’t want anyone to buy me a fuckin’ car…I can walk, take the bus, ride a bike or hitchhike (although I am sure you will turn hitchhiking into a socialist method of transportation, because someone else is paying for gas, insurance and upkeep of the car.)
What I do want is the same opportunity to get health care when I need it - and you freely admit someone else (your employer) is kicking in $300/mo towards your cost of insurance! Must be nice. Enjoy it - personal experience has shown that can change quickly.
Assume your employer, through no fault of your own (like what happened to my SO) suddenly drops you from their insurance plan - and now you got nuthin’ - and the only equivalent insurance you can find (COBRA for instance) costs so much that, as in my example, you could buy a luxury car for that outrageous monthly sum, which I assume you also cannot afford.
In other words, you, like most Americans without an employer kicking in funds, can’t afford to insure yourself!
Now what do you do in case you suddenly feel a lump under your arm and they determine it is cancer and you need surgery, chemo and radiation?
Oh well, I deserve to die because I don’t have a job with great insurance anymore.
It’s only fair that I don’t get treatment, because otherwise it might be a financial burden on some people who, although they have employers paying for 75% of their insurance, might have their deductibles increased.
Sell your car and hope you get enough to pay for that casket.
Wonder why so many people don’t give a shit about your health care situation because, hey, it’s you’re tough luck buddy. “You should have gotten a better job with a better company - idiot. Oh, and don’t scratch my Mercedes when you pull it out of the lot.”
Er, yeah. That’s how employment works: bri1600bv does work, and receives compensation in exchange. Even if some of it is used to pay for services on his behalf instead of going straight to him, it’s still coming out of the same pool of money allocated to keeping Bri working for them.
I understand what you’re saying. You want reasonably priced insurance, not a car! Well things just don’t work that way, sorry. Health care is expensive. I could just as easily say “I want a reasonably priced Ferrari!”.
What one thinks of as a reasonable price doesn’t really enter into the equation…if they figure you cost on average $5K…then that’s what they’ll charge. You may think it outrageous (kind of like me thinking 100K for a car is outrageous), but there’s nothing you can do about it.
That wraps it up for me. I’m happy to debate about the best ways of solving the problem, but when someone’s position is that someone who is either unlucky, or perhaps was born without the skills needed to get a job with insurance in today’s society should not expect to get treated when sick, I give up. That is one of the more immoral positions I’ve seen around here.
Perhaps a trio of ghosts will visit you this Christmas and convince you to change your mind.
Well, I agree with you that people should get treated if they get sick. But I’d be curious to see what part of the post you replied to you take issue with. There is the reality that health care cost money. It just does. And someone has to pay for that. Now while most everyone would be happy to throw in $5.00, there’s a limit to how much someone is willing to pay to care for someone else. Surely you’d agree with that. If someone you don’t know needs a very expensive procedure, just how much are you willing to kick in personally? That’s a serious question. While bri1600bv might frame things a bit coldly, what part do you think he has wrong?
Also, we do have emergency rooms. Not that that solves everything, but it’s not the case that people can’t get help when they’re sick.
The only way that sentence is intellegent and honest is if you yourself don’t have health insurance, but pay every doctors bill directly out of your pocket or savings account.
Because every insurance - whether public or private - works on the principle of spread risk: thousands of people pay into a big pot, and the costs for treatment are paid out of that pot. Yes, private insurance assess your individual risk and set the premium accordingly … but it’s still other people’s money paying for your treatment, and your money paying for theirs. Including other people who made bad choices.
And how do people make bad choices given that not all illnesses are life-style caused? Yes, diabetes II could be avoided, and can be treated with healthier eating and more sport. But diabetes I is genetic and starts in early childhood. So you want these people to not get treatment?
Good job of completly ignoring the cites about middle-class working people going bancrupt from healthcare costs.
Who said anything about paying for
able-bodied people?
every person in the world?
Your mindset of comparing people to parasites betrays your ideology.
You seem to be suffering from reading incomprehension. But for the record, Hitler kept the established Public Health system, because he would have lost the workers otherwise, and damaged the economy.
You and him share the ideology that certain people are parasites, and thus die, though.
come to Europe (ooh, socialist!;)) where Public Healthcare is available, bring all your sensible friends, and leave the loonies in their librartarin hellhole
push the loonies all in one place, let them have their rules, and keep the rest of the country sane.
Because option 3, making your own country a better place for everybody, seems to be about to fail because the decent and sane people cower in fear of the screeching loonies.
Shodan and the others, I would like to know how you see Europe in your alternate reality:
Does it not really exist, because only America (and it’s big bad enemies) are real, the rest is just a hallucination?
Does it have some kind of alternate law thing going on, because Europe is “socialist” (it’s really not, but I’m trying to go from your perspective), so the law of supply and demand, inflation wrt wages etc., and common human behaviour, are all completly different, and thus, what works in Europe - public Health insurance for everybody - doesn’t work in the US?
Is only the US govt. incapable of doing anything competently - since everything the govt. started so far was inefficient and costs too much (except for making wars, that’s always good) - and the American people obey different human psychology of screwing everybdoy over and every person abusing the system because it’s free, so what works in Europe doesn’t work in the US?
Is your alternate Europe the scare-mongering of the UK NHS, where people have to wait months to get appointments, and die while waiting in line for rationed treatment? (No matter how often people who life there tell you it’s different?)
Really, I don’t understand how rational, honest people with a glimmer of knowledge about the rest of the world can continue maintaining that costs would skyrocket for everybody and people abuse the system left and right if a public health insurance option would be implemented.
Again, I live in Germany with a publich Health system. I pay a fixed percentage of my gross monthly pay into the insurance - somewhere about 7% currently, I think, - my employer pays the other half. I can see the specialists I need. I have to wait for appointments that are not emergency depending on how busy the doctor in question is, and how good or bad he is at making appointments (some doctors booked 15 min. for each patient and then spent 30 min. - each day, so of course there was a terrible delay; some of my specialists are so in demand that I wait 2 months for the check-up, etc.)
Each quarter I now have to pay a fee of 10 Euros once if I go to the doctor (the rest of the visits and transfers to specalists are free).
If my doctor writes a recipe for me, the most basic ones are now free, for the rest I pay a fee depending on size of the package, up to 12 Euros for the big one, I think.
The procedures that are denied are not medical necessary, like cosmetic surgery. LASIK and similar comes under this. And teeth are expensive. So there’s some medical tourism towards East Europe, where the education of the doctors is similarly good, but the cost of living = wages = cost for procedure is cheaper.
And experimental, not yet approved procedures are not paid.
Oh, and a stay in hospital costs 10 Euro each day.
People who earn below a threshold are freed from the fees.
The result is not that the German state is bancrupt. It’s not that people pay too much in taxes (well, everybody everywhere complains about the taxes - but we aren’t broke). The employees are treated, and thus healthy to work and to spend money in their free time. A small amount of people game the system - there’s always 5- 10 % of abusers anywhere, in any system. They don’t break it.
We also have incentives from individual insurances, competing with each other. One company will give a bonus if you join a sport club or get a certificate for being fit. My company will pay me 10 Euros back if I do the mandated and some voluntary prevention measures. Others will pay additonal alternate treatment methods for people who want them.
Yes, healthcare costs themselves have risen - wages, new machines, repair of hospitals etc. Yes, we’ve had reforms to try keep the costs in check. Yes, a lot of the system could be improved (some people want more coverage again, some people want to cut to save money, the billing system itself needs reform etc.) But it works well enough compared to the horror stories of the US system.
“The prime minister of France, the country perhaps most associated with the cherished “European model” of job security and social safety nets, warned Saturday that it may prove unsustainable because the region’s economies are too stagnant.”
The story is about France and not specifically your Germany but the EU is mentioned in general.
Again to emphasize, this quote does not come from some scaremongering USA Republican; it’s from a French govt official embedded within the system itself. He sees the math and how the future projections would play out. You can find similar quotes from UK, Sweden, etc.
But, these issues of economic sustainability are irrelevant for most people – they just want “free” healthcare. I’m not saying that’s as sarcasm. That’s how people really look at government entitlements.
Bismarck started the social security system at the end of the 19th century - long enough for you?
Uh, what? I don’t sconsider msnbc liberal-biased, I consider it not reliable.
You misunderstand this. He isn’t calling for an abolishment of the social system and a change to the US system (unless this particular politican is an idiot - we do have some, too). As I said in my earlier post, we talk a lot about reforms to make health insurance still affordable. But nobody in their right mind wants to get rid of it. The question is what services to cut, or how much to raise the percentage, and so on.
Well, people look at free schools and free roads, too, although these are paid by tax dollars. So? And yes, Americans have a mind-blowing sense of entitlement: they receive a bunch of free stuff from the state - education, safety, justice system, roads etc. - then turn around and claim they made it on their own, and don’t want to pay for anybody else. They want to stop paying for others, but not remove themselves from civilsation. In other words, the typical liberatarian or conservative is the parasite.
If the state doesn’t provide basic civilsation, just what do you need a state for? To wage wars of aggression against other countries? Although that’s being outsourced to the private sector, too. Of course, all these people screaming “I don’t want to spend my money on other people!” wouldn’t last 1 day in real anarchy = libertarianism without rules.