If you could debate someone with (by your standards) a liberal viewpoint who would make a point of not resorting to personal insults, who would in fact stipulate that the first person who resorted to personal insult lost the debate, would you? At this point, your claimed victory seems to be because you got liberals angry, not because your facts were better, so how would you fare in a debate where facts were all that mattered?
Have you ever seen a picture of Starving Artist? How do you know he can dress himself? Maybe he’s this guy.
Please, don’t judge America by SA. Most of us who’ve been giving him a bad time here are Americans, too. His mental deficiencies would be considered deplorable in Texas. And even most Texans are less coldly cruel, bless their hearts…
Let’s ease back a bit on the anti-American rhetoric. I noticed in a few of my posts I expressed the same frustration. There are over 320million Americans, and just about all of them want to see at least some health care reform.
The way I see it, right now the 40% that are Democrats are happy to see the reform they’re getting (with many saying they wanted more).
If a Republican was in office, and put in the exact same reform, the 40% that voted for them would be happy with reform.
There are very few Americans unaware of how bad things are and how good things could be, and of course there are differing opinions of how best to achieve the best results. I know over the past few years I’ve learned a lot about conservative philosophy that would greatly help the Canadian health care system. And by listening to the conservatives on this board I have been able to adjust my opinions.
It’s unfortunate that the debate gets framed by people like Starving Artist who think that by repeatedly yelling the same lie over and over again it will some how become true.
This moron still thinks it was the government that denied Smith the procedure. And that under a privatized she would have been able to pay for the procedure on her own. Even though the article specifically states that the hospital refused the treatment, he continues repeatedly to claim it was the government. He continuously claims that under a single-payer system the government will use a cost-benefit analysis to determine care.
A differing opinion is welcomed and desired. And if we were talking about a hypothetical situation your opinion would carry the same weight as everyone else. Except that we’re not talking about hypothetical. Every developed nation in the world (except South Africa) has a form of UHC, and none of them have “deliberate denial by a government functionary.” As far as I can tell even the US doesn’t have “deliberate denial by a government functionary.” As this case shows, Smith wasn’t denied because the procedure was expensive, she was dropped because the no longer qualified for coverage.
This is an example of “deliberate denial by a corporate functionary,” which is exactly what the proponents of UHC are trying to get rid of.
The point of an opinion is to express it, hear how it’s fundamentally wrong, and then adjust it.
You said it’s your “opinion far more than 45,000 will be dying each year due to inadequate or denied coverage once single-payer goes into effect” which would be fine to say on page one, but this is post 457, after being repeatedly told that it doesn’t happen. That’s not how single-payer systems work. It’s okay to realize that your opinion is wrong, and it’s okay to make mistakes. Now it’s time to man-up and apologize for all the dishonest and misleading things you’ve said in this thread.
The problem is that he truly believes he is dazzling use with his brilliance, that his opinions are facts, and his anecdotes represent data. He really thinks that the information we’re telling him about all the other countries with UHC is bullshit. It’s actually a little sad.
Texas, the state that actually has death panels.
Most countries, including the USA, have some good things and some bad things, and all countries have some idots. Starving Artist is an idiot who exemplifies a lot of the bad things about the USA. Too bad it diminishes attention to the good things about the USA, of which there are a great many.
It’s been nice to see Obama and liberals try to start taking back the USA from the lunatic right. The improvements to health care are a good example, but they have a long way to go before they get to UHC.
And this is exactly why there are so many people whose houses are allowed to burn down: because some faceless government bureaucrats decided to deny coverage. These “inferno panels” have literally caused millions of deaths across the US.
Clearly if the fire departments were run on a for-profit basis, there would be a much higher quality of service for those who could afford to pay for it, and those who couldn’t could ask a local charity to set up a bucket brigade from the nearest river or lake.
I don’t see why my tax dollars should subsidize some careless smokers or juvenile firebugs who are at high-risk for housefires.
Typical liberal nanny-state nonsense! Look, your house catches fire, you can take out a loan to pay for having it put out, or mow some lawns!
Why is it *my *problem that you built your house out of flammable materials? What happened to personal architectural responsibility?
This. You are, in practical effect, arguing with a religious fanatic whose theology admits of no doubt.
I wonder how he reconciles the fact that, while there are other board conservatives, and certainly those who have been vocal in their opposition to the health care reform… going on 15 pages, not one of them has entered this thread to support him. He’s an embarrassment even to those who agree with his basic principles.
Some of us are fortunate enough to have jobs where we’re treated like grownups and allowed to do what we like with our free time when we’re caught up on our work. Not all of us have more burgers to flip, as I assume you must.
SA, I would love to take you out to dinner. I will bring a copy of this post of yours with me, printed out. I will order several dishes, and force myself to eat all of them. Then, after the check has arrived, I will walk to your chair, re-read that post, and vomit copiously all the fuck over you, so that you are drenched in my puke. Then I will write the waitstaff a giant tip and walk the hell out of there.
I’m quite surprised that everyone is denying universal health care performs rationing; certainly in the UK we do.
Perhaps Hector the Librarian has failed to notice that - conservatives being believers in personal responsibility and all, combined with the fact that we don’t define victory in a discussion by how many people can pile on with stilly, stupid, inane, and off-topic insults - don’t typically join in for tag team matches or pile-ons against our opponents. No, we each feel we can fight our own battles - as with most things in life. In other words, we don’t posess the hive mentality typical of the left. (Nor do we think we can score subliminal points with our audience by mentioning our opponents’ names as many times as possible while we are spouting our silly, stupid, inane and off-topic insults. :rolleyes:)
Typical. I mention one of several different ways in which people can pull their own weight by paying for insurance and/or saving for or paying their more routine medical bills and it becomes “Let them mow for their cake”.
Readers might want to be aware that it was people of a liberal turn of mind who were so murderous in the French Revolution, chopping off the heads of people who’d done nothing wrong but to have been born with wealth and position. This type of attitude, though to a less developed degree, is evident in elucidator’s reaction to the audience in the Elton John video I referenced, in which he referred to them as “upper class twits” who couldn’t dance. Now, what have these people - people who were there to enjoy Elton’s show and financially support the Royal Academy of Music - done to elucidator to earn his enmity? Why, they were born with money and position! Who better to chill the cockleburrs of the liberal heart than people with money and manners?
Do you guys want to wise him up [again], or shall I?
Oh, hell! I’ll do it. The dazzling/baffling remark was aimed at elucidator, you immature twit. Remember how I gigged him for taking the lesser route?
And I see you’re still clinging to the fiction that the government wasn’t responsible for Smith’s denial. So lemme ask you this: why is it that without government Medicaid coverage she couldn’t get her operation, but with it she can? Hmmm…? So which entity then was most responsible for her plight? And which one blew her off when she tried to correct the situation so as to save her life? Answer: THE GOVERNMENT!
I must admit it’s entertaining the lengths you people will go to to excuse the government’s behavior and to deflect blame from where it really belongs in you effort to make believe that we are really in good hands when we’re in the loving care of government bureaucracies.
And here we another example of high-minded liberal discourse. I recall hearing once that “To tell the truth is self-defeating if you’re a liberal”, and I suspect that this is why people like you prefer to resort to name-calling and accusations of moral turpitude and use any way you can in an attempt to belittle or otherwise make fun of your enemies. Hur, hur…hey, guys, I bet Starvey looks like this guy! Hur, hur. What a dolt you are.
Pretty well, I suspect, if the facts were actually at hand. But just like with malfeasance in police departments, hospitals, attorney offices, etc., wagons get circled and genuine facts regarding wait times and deaths that result from inadequate treatment or lengthy wait times are hard to come by. But even when evidence of the problems inherent in government health care can be come by, as we’ve seen here with regard to the cites I’ve posted in the past with regard to problems in the Canadian and U.K. systems, they get ignored, excused, or met with “Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah? Well…I don’t see 'em wanting to adopt OUR system!” Cites and evidence around here are a waste of time. I learned this early on and it’s why I prefer to simply voice my opinions and give real life examples of the kind of things I’m talking about, rather than go scampering off to see what I can find through Google. You seem like a reasonable person. Do you really think that inside information about people having died due to lengthy wait times, inadequate facilities and equipment, and denials resulting in death are going to show up in a Google search? And do you think the dearth of this information is proof that those problems do not exist?
And he paid it by force of law, with no say over how much it cost or what benefits he would receive. How would you feel if the government were to pass a law requiring everyone to pay for insurance with one private company (i.e., not run by or financed by the government), to pay the amount that company says they have to pay, accept whatever treatment that company says you can get and to wait as long as that company says you have to before you can get treatment. My guess is you would think that it was a pretty shitty deal. And a pretty shitty deal is exactly what I think we’ll get if single-payer UHC ever gets passed.
And on preview I see we have yet another factual, dispassionate and, most of all, mature, liberal rebuttal, this time courtesy of Shot From Guns.
(1) Not “everyone” is doing that, and
(2) What is being denied, by the diehards is that the current (previous?) US system does it as well. UHC rations care to those who *need *it, while the “free market is the answer to all problems” approach rations care to those who can afford it.
SA: You are a complete and utter fucktard.
Um, no. Here in Canada we didn’t need to pass a law about health insurance. And you now have a law requiring you to have health insurance for the same reason there is a law saying you must have car insurance, because otherwise everyone else pays for your stupidity. Isn’t that the very thing you’re claiming you’re against?
You’re right he doesn’t get to say how much it costs. Hmmm, I wonder why he’s not complaining loudly? Because he pays less than with private insurance by a substantial amount, a reasonable amount, none of which goes to profiteers or billion dollar executive bonus’. Tell me, do you decide how much to pay or does the insurance company? That’s what I thought. And who determines what you’re covered for? The insurance company, not you. Even when you think you know, turns out, they can still deny you. Us, we’re all covered, for everything except the most edgy and untried treatments. New treatments are actually added into the system very quickly and efficiently.
And again, the doctor says what treatment I get, not the insurance company. I can see why you’re confused since where you live it’s the reverse. And again, access to resources is based on need, just like in the emergency room. What you have described;
sounds remarkably like the system you currently have, throw in several months of phone tag, reams of forms, and several attempts to deny you, the coverage you paid for, and you’re there.
I’ve wasted most of my lunch hour finishing reading this, but I do have a possibly important factoid:
For all y’all who have never tried to schedule a medical procedure without health insurance (or extraordinarily minimal – what I had paid for approximately 1/20 of my +$15k surgery. Learn to read your insurance policy; I know I have), it works thusly – you make the deals with your doctor and anesthesiologist and you pay, effectively, a down-payment to the hospital. They tell you what this is up front. You are expected to pay off the rest as you can. Seems fair, right?
But this was for a relatively cheap surgery, and people don’t pay hospitals all the time. They don’t pay the hospital because they can’t, because surgery is really expensive, because ER bills are expensive, because the hospital has to help them not die but does not have to give them treatments that would prolong their lives. It’s the equivalent of dragging someone out of a frozen lake, knocking the water out of their lungs, providing CPR and artificial respiration until they’re alive again, then walking away after recommending that they find a blanket and a towel. I can’t fault the hospital much because they really DO have to get paid somehow.
From my personal experience, I suspect that Ms. Smith had the money for the hospital’s ‘down payment’, as it were, but because they could not be assured of eventual repayment of the rest and a hundred thou is a boatload of money, even from a hospital’s perspective, she was kicked to the curb.
Is it the fault of the hospital? I can’t say it is, in good conscience, because people with giant hospital bills and no insurance often can’t pay them (no cite, but I know I couldn’t pay off a hundred grand with anything like speed).
Is it the fault of the government worker who dropped her from Medicaid? Probably no government worker did that: if it’s anything like Texas’s system, which I worked alongside for a time, the system is essentially hard-coded to do this. Eligibility is based on income and resources, and if you go even a little bit over that line there’s nobody to say “but it’s just a little and she needs surgery”. There is no manual exception-making for “just this once”. If I, as a bureaucrat, tried to make an exception, I would be met with flat and baffled denial by both computer and supervisor. I could contact the lady in question and advise her that she could get more help she wasn’t getting, but it surprises me not at all that the coverage was denied.
Is it the fault of the government worker who got her the added coverage for her son and couldn’t take it back? I don’t think so. I also think that either it WOULD be possible to reverse this (but after several months) or it was impossible because the extra money was being sent as the result of a mistake being rectified. Once a mistake is fixed, they try not to make it in the same place again.
Is it the fault of our system of healthcare? I think so. I think a system in which a person can be denied life-giving support based on their income or their place of work is intrinsically flawed.
But she can get insurance! you say. So can everyone! It’s not horribly expensive: it will preclude some nice things, yes, but you can get a cheaper apartment in a worse part of town or denude your children’s college funds or maybe just drink less beer.
Back when I was looking for private health insurance, it came to a little under two hundred bucks for non-smoking, non-drinking twenty-two year old, single me. Let’s assume that I was making more than ten dollars an hour and had more than twenty dollars a month over my necessary expenses (like apartment, credit card debt, insurance, car insurance, repair costs for the paid-off car). I could move to a bad neighborhood and save about fifty bucks a month. I could keep my AC at 80 and maybe save a little more, though in a cheaper apartment my insulation would be suboptimal. I could eat beans and rice instead of chicken and fresh vegetables. I could do it.
But at the first sign of serious trouble, my insurance company would have every reason to drop me. Suddenly I’m no longer a profit! They don’t have to keep me, because what am I going to do? I obviously don’t have the money to sue them, even if what they do is illegal. I don’t have an HR rep to argue with them and threaten to pull the policies of several thousand employees to another company, thereby hitting them in the only thing that matters to them: their wallets. I could argue and bitch and moan and while I’m doing all that I’m uninsured.
Is it good? No. Is the new system better? I don’t know: there’s things that seem good and things that are annoying. Is there a better system that doesn’t involve the government being in charge of things? Well, the new system has the government in charge of only slightly more than diddly, but if there’s some wonderful miraculous way of making sure that all the people in the country can get good healthcare for a reasonable cost that DOESN’T involve UHC, I’m all ears. So’s the rest of the world, I expect.
Because you know what? If the health care isn’t available to everyone, if one citizen has to decide between paying for their medicine or eating that month, if some of the people get to lie screaming in the hallway of the hospital with a herniated disc while someone else with a sprained ankle gets the best treatment money can buy, if in short the basic medical needs of all the people are not met, then it isn’t enough. Right now it’s not. The new healthcare plan isn’t enough, either.
This is, for me, the ultimate hot-button issue. I would rather be assured of healthcare than be assured of food, clothing, or shelter. I lived under some fantastic American government-issued health care as a child (Tricare for the win!), and while I had to sit in the ER for a long time even with a bonked head, no delay or bureaucracy or confusion related to that was anywhere near as terrible as the pain of people who have to do without.
I am grateful, Starving Artist, that you have never had occasion to know how bad it can be when there is no help to be had. I just want you to be grateful for this, too, and to understand that it has more to do with luck than it does with hard work and a good system.
And, er, SA: I think the French Revolution was based a little more on the highly visible and astonishing excesses of the French aristocracy while their people were starving. And other stuff. It’s hard for us to understand because by and large we do not starve to death in modern America, but that actually kind of happened in France at the time.
Well, if you and I can have a discussion laden with facts and very specifically lacking in personal insults, of course these problems exist in the Canadian system or indeed any medical system. We don’t need “inside” information to confirm this. For these problems to be relevant, we’d have to find one form of medical insurance system (say, the American one) and compare it to another (say, the Canadian one), compile stats on preventable deaths, eliminate other factors (i.e. one of the two countries has a higher obesity or smoking rate or some kind of cultural bias against seeking or trusting medical care) and then we can discuss relative merits.
If it turns out that the rates are pretty much the same, then we can consider other metrics, like per-capita cost and life expectancy and anything else you’d care to suggest. To keep things graspable, I’m kind of curious how much it costs in each country (to the patient, hospital, insurance agency, relevant government agency, any other involved entities) to treat something as mundane and commonplace as a broken leg, which many Americans and Canadians will suffer at some point through various accidents and such. We can gather anecdotal evidence (if that’s what you prefer) on individual Americans and Canadians who suffered this sort of injury and their experiences.
Am I off-track here?
I can’t believe **SA **isn’t taking me up on my dinner invitation. 
No, it doesn’t. Not anymore than it “rations” houses, cars, sunglasses or swimming pools. Rationing requires the doling out of whatever goody is in question by a controlling or governing entity. It is specious and disingenuous at the very least to equate free market health care with rationing.
The article in the OP suggests that she had raised all the funds necessary to pay for her transplant. The fly in the ointment was that the hospital wouldn’t perform the procedure for reasons of potential liability lawsuits in the even something went wrong, and Medicaid insurance covers that liability. So by withdrawing Smith’s Medicaid insurance (and even more to the point, refusing to reinstate it) they created a situation where she could not get her operation and was therefore doomed to die.
I suspect it is things like this that inspired the comment I referred to above, which read: “To tell the truth is self-defeating, if you’re a liberal.”
For decades we’ve been expected to pretend that very obvious differences do not exist between the sexes or races, and that anything and everything conservative is stupid, backward, and based on deliberately hurtful and evil motive. Thus anything that would tend to support my claim of government rationing and indifference gets ignored and claims that it does indeed exist get met with accusations of stupidity, moronity and/or ignorance, and result in good, loving, tolerant and humanitarian liberals wanting to engorge themselves with food in order to throw up on you.