I give up. Either I can’t explain it, or you don’t want to understand it. But I can’t think of any clearer way to express the issue than I already have. Maybe someone else would care to try…
[shrug] That’s because the state does it (that is, meets the goal of universal schooling) better than anyone else, as you will see if you look at any country without a public education system. The same applies to health care.
Do you know of any country that has managed to solve the portability problem in any other way?
No evidence for that.
(the “Say anything, something will stick” mode)
By ignoring bankruptcies due to health care costs I still think you and many on the right are cooking the numbers.
Again it is the bankruptcies due to health care costs, when citizens of other countries are not subjected to that, telling us that that is not a problem is indeed the “don’t pee on me and tell me it is raining!”
That is ok, it is not your deluded self I’m replying for, but the others with rational minds, I have concluded that the 4 freedoms imply being free from irrational health care.
What is so hard to understand? A good chuck of people do not have employers or programs that can be applicable to them. The reason why there is so much trouble now.
I don’t think any other country had the same system as the US. But **GIGO **was complaining that his brother didn’t really have “liberty” because he was tied to a job because it was the only one with the type of health insurance that he felt he needed. Why is it that we buy everything else we get with actual money, but we get our health insurance from our employers? GIGO’s SiL should have had private health insurance to begin with, paid for with his/her own money just like they pay for car insurance, and then he could change jobs whenever he wanted without fear of losing his health insurance.
Now, that might not make it any cheaper, but it would fix that specific problem that he was complaining about.
So why we don’t see the rich people in Europe ever changing that discrepancy?
I think it would be because rich people there like to use the system too, cheapskates! 
And it would be ok, if that had been a system used in many other developed nations, however even in more capitalist nations, like in Singapore, patients do finance at least a portion of the costs of their care, but not all.
Well, we do see Canadians jumping over to the US to circumvent long lines for specialists. I don’t pretend to understand European healthcare systems, but it’s plausible that the existence of a cheaper alternative discourages rich people from paying top dollar for a private specialist. Certainly, the specialist deficit would leave fewer physicians performing elective surgery, accounting for a big chunk of that discrepancy.
Do you have a cite for the bankruptcy arguement? The one time I have seen this they simply tacked on ANY healthcare costs waived due to bankruptcy and concluded that HC costs CAUSED it. However, when you file for bankruptcy you put EVERYTHING on there.
Is there a cite that shows that HC costs represent the majority of the debt waived in a bankruptcy case?
OTOH I see many Americans getting health care or medicine in other countries. My parents, that have to take medications, decided to move back to the old country (even with all the violence going on) because they encountered the “doughnut hole” to be too expensive.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/07/26/eveningnews/main1839288.shtml
Fine. Just don’t presume to call it “common sense.” :rolleyes:
Well, my main point is that even if few families had to file for bankruptcy or have problems due to health care costs, the problem is a shameful one to have in a developed nation.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04219/357527.stm
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/short/hlthaff.w5.63
Hey, you’re already way ahead of one poster here (whom I don’t remember seeing for a while); he didn’t think that people had a right to food.
And careful, all; this could turn into a GD, what with all this reasoned arguing.
Sure there is, government is famously inefficient. There’s no real strong evidence that universal health care is going to decrease costs.
Lol. You = dumb.
There’s no “cooking the numbers” because I wasn’t talking about the numbers. If you want to argue that bankruptcies due to health care represent a significant societal cost, fine, do so. That isn’t something I’ve argued about one way or another. My only point was, that going bankrupt isn’t a violation of property rights, period. That was the only point I was making and you trying to associate other points with it makes you very dishonest.
I never said it wasn’t a problem, I’m beginning to worry that you may have reading comprehension problems, you’re attacking points I’ve not only never made, I’ve never approached making. There’s a difference between me accepting that something is a problem and me thinking it is government’s job to fix it.
Then perhaps you should stop actually quoting my posts and then making counterpoints to arguments I’ve never made. If you don’t want to reply to my “deluded self” then don’t, you know, reply to me in the form of direct quotations, because that’s you know, replying to me.
Actually throughout Europe rich people go often spend millions on private health treatment, some even come to the United States for treatment. There are private health care providers in many countries with single-payer systems.
I tend to think my opinion aligns with what is common sense in this particular case.
Note that word “right”, again. I never said food, water, and shelter are rights I said they are basic humanitarian needs. Do I think government should provide for basic humanitarian needs? In general, yes, with some reservations.
Again, there’s a big difference in what I think government should provide and what I think I have an inalienable “right” to have. I don’t think I have a right to ANYTHING, I do believe I have rights to be free of certain things (like political oppression, arbitrary property seizure, arbitrary denial of liberty and et cetera.)
I think governments should provide driver’s licenses, that doesn’t mean I think a right to a driver’s license is a fundamental right (note there is a difference between “fundamental” or “natural” rights whatever you want to call them, in that people can disagree about what is and is not a natural/fundamental right, however legal/constitutionally provided rights are a different matter on which there can be some factual assertion as to what rights exist.)
Common sense, yep.
All discussion about the value of universal healthcare aside, this Pitting is a blatant attempt to take one post out of context and twist it to mean something it clearly did not mean in the original thread.
If we take the OP at his/her word, Martin is saying that no one, not even someone who can afford to pay for it, should get more medical care than, for example, to stop the bleeding. He implies in his second paragraph that were MH a doctor, he’d refuse to treat patients unless they were dying.
Now, let’s imagine that the OP didn’t distort the meaning what **MH **posted, and that he’s Pitting him for what he meant to say with that post…
Going back to the thread in question (thanks to **Trunk **for providing the link), it’s clear that **Martin **is talking about whether a person should be able to demand treatment of a certain level from the government. Now, you may disagree with that as a political position, but it’s a perfectly valid position to hold. I hope we haven’t descended to the point on this MB where a person gets Pitted for his particular political beliefs. Afterall, we’re all going to disagree at some point where we draw the line between critical care that the government should provide and optional care that the patient would have to pay for himself.