Wrong. I tried to explain how you’re wrong but you just won’t accept it or really don’t get it. There are dozens, not exaggerating here, dozens of counter examples in GD right now. You are wrong. Get over it already.
I’m sorry you read “GD” in my previous post and went looking for more pit threads. ralph’s OP was idiotic, and if you can’t see that through your glasses of hard-line conservatism, then I’m really sorry. His substance-less post deserved the hostile reception it got.
The first piece I quoted in this post is proof that your explanation is idiotic bullshit. You’re a drama queen, a primadonna, a whiny baby, and I’m starting to question your reading comprehension skills.
Can SA think of a country with UHC that decided it was a bad idea and gave it up and then went for private health care insurance as its major health care option?
Can SA think of another ‘western world’ or ‘first world’ country that does not have UHC at it’s core?
Do any of those countries not allow private medical insurance?
Starving Artist I just don’t understand you and yours. I know you are a genuinely caring person. But I just don’t understand how it is not as clear as mud to you that there are two things everyone SHOULD be entitled to, requardless of how much money is in their pocket. Health care and education.
In thirld world countries it is a tragedy that many people do not get these basic things but in the US? The richest country in the world? UHC should just be expected! It is unacceptable that a society with so many resources balks at looking after its least fortunate citizens.
American’s are well known for their charity but much of that seems to be from churches. Surely a little more tax and a little less tithing could mean everyone had the opportunity to recieve healthcare.
If it really took this many posts before you started to question SA’s reading comprehension skills, then I’m going to have question your reading comprehension skills.
I apologize for not having responded to your post yet. I’ve been pretty busy the last few days and just haven’t had time to wade back into the thread.
I know you don’t understand my point of view, but it’s not born from a lack of wanting to see people with health care coverage. It’s just that I feel the government is woefully unable to function efficiently or to respond to people’s needs on an individual basis, and that once single-payer becomes established we’ll all be at the mercy of whatever the government says we can have and when we can have it. And to make matters worse, we’ll have little ability to do anything about it. Private care facilities will largely be driven out of business and whatever private care remains will have to be paid for on top of whatever we’ll already be having to pay the government.
85% of the people in this country are happy with the coverage they have. They get quick, immediate, high-quality care, and they have several options when it comes to choosing and obtaining treatment. Of the remaining 15% who either don’t have coverage or arent’ happy with the coverage they have, only a relatively few are in dire need of health care.
So my position is that we should formulate some sort of plan to address the needs of those few rather than forcing us all to live under whatever largess the government decides we can have.
You mention the wealth we have in this country and suggest that for a few more tax dollars we can all have the health care we need. But the fact of the matter is that half the country is carrying the load for the other half already in terms of federal income tax, and when you add up all the taxes people have to pay - Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, federal income tax, state income tax, local sales taxes and such things as property tax and excise tax, most of the people in this country are already paying out over half of what they earn in taxes already.
But even at that the tax bite isn’t my primary concern, which is that the government of the United States is extraordinarily capricious, irresponsible, inefficient and utterly incapable of handling a major undertaking such as providing health care for all of us in anything that even vaguely translates to high-quality care.
People in this country (save, curiously enough, government employees) are forced to contribute 8% of their gross income to Social Security for the approximately 40 years that they work, and then don’t get enough money to live on once they retire. (And yeah, you’ll undoubtedly hear from people around here that it was never intended to provide a living but only assistance, and yet it was supposed to keep people from starving and becoming homeless in their old age. If this isn’t a defintion of “living” I don’t know what is.) The government has “borrowed” money from this fund repeatedly to finance other goodies it couldn’t get the money for any other way, and now it’s mulling over cuts to Social Security and Medicare due to inadequate funding for the future.
I have long felt that if I were one of the unfortunate souls living in a country under some dictator and the U.S. told me to rebel because it had my back, I’d tell it to go jump in a lake. We abandoned Cuban freedom fighters at the Bay of Pigs and we abandoned people in Iraq whom we encouraged to take a stand against Hussein during the Gulf War. We bailed from the war leaving Hussein in power and we did nothing to protect the people who had risen up against him upon encouragement from us. The result was tens of thousands murdered. Absolutely unconscionable.
This country cannot be counted on to do anything permanently. Our two party system and elections every two to four years ensures that. One year the Dems are in power and certain things get done, and two to four years later the Republicans are in power and they’re making decisions on what should be done. One party cuts back on what they other party started and vice versa.
On the one hand, the country was designed that way and so it could be said that this is the way things are supposed to work, but the fact of the matter is that our government was not set up with a nanny state government in mind. This country is 234 years old, but it has only been during the last eighty years or so that all these social programs have come into existence. So the country was not designed with social programs in mind, and now that they’re here, funding and benefits and people’s very way of life ebb and flow according to the capriciousness of whatever Congress decides it wants to do in order to buy votes with other people’s money.
We have a huge national debt thanks to those people. This country pays around 400 billion dollars a year simply in interest on the money we’ve borrowed to pay for things we haven’t had the money to pay for ourselves. As I said, it has robbed Social Security time and again and now wants to cut back further on the already meager benefits Social Security pays out now. We keep paying more and more in taxes and pressure is always on to increase them even further, yet the average tax payer sees very little benefit from it because what their taxes are mostly going for is to pay for things for the ever increasing number of people who aren’t the average tax payer. The primary purpose of taxation in this country now is income redistribution, and it’s to the point now where a family of four earning $50,000 dollars a year is exempt from federal income tax. It’s ridiculous! And now this irresponsible, wastrel and capricious govenment wants me to let it take charge of my and family’s health care? I don’t think so.
So to recap, I have no problem with the government creating some sort of system to provide care for those few with serious health care issues and who lack the resources to take care of themselves. But there is no way I am ever going to support a single-payer form of health care financed and run by the United States government.
But apart from all that, how’ve you been? Long time, no see. I hope all is very well with you. Take care.
And why is it you think I’m an asshole at all, much less a “complete” one? I don’t make a habit of calling people the names that I get called around here all the time. I don’t assign hateful motives to their actions and I don’t claim they want to see people die, even though a great many have died and are dying due to the consequences of liberal ideology. I’m rarely ugly with anyone who isn’t ugly with me first, and I certainly don’t assail liberals and Democrats on anything even approaching an equal level with the hatred and bile spewed around here constantly by this board’s liberal postership. The reality is that I am but a lonely voice crying in the wilderness, striving to be heard above the din. But typically you are so arrogant in your belief that your is the only true way that any dissent at all is regarded as the height of unreasonable assholiness. So while there may indeed be an asshole present whenever the two of us meet, thankfully it ain’t me.
Just speaking for myself, I don’t assign hateful motives to your actions, even though a great many have died and are dying of boredom from having to read the same unsupported bullshit over and over and over again.
Um, you just did it. And you’ve done it several times through this thread: remember when you said the goal of UHC is to provide everyone with slow, mediocre care? Go back through and look at what you think the stated “goals” are of the other side. You think they’re out to get you. That you and your family will be taxed to death, then left to die. This makes you an asshole.
Well, let me see if I can find an example of you being an asshole:
Proponents of UHC are actually very reasonable, that is why there are as many variations as their are countries that provide it. But you didn’t know that, because you think there is only one form of UHC. It’s why that “cite” of yours is such bullshit. Which makes YOU the one so arrogant in your belief that your’s is the only true way.
No, I don’t as a matter of fact. I believe slow, mediocre care is the inevitable result of government care but I don’t regard it as a “goal”.
Again, not goals. Results. They are not the same thing.
Horseshit. I think no such thing.
(Are you sure you aren’t young? I mean, not all young people are so prone to imbecillic exaggerations, misunderstandings and misstatements, but usually when one finds them stated in such naive ways as yours, it’s coming from someone who’s immature, and immaturity can usually be found among the young.)
No, only that we might.
So basically I’m an asshole because I disagree with you on healthcare. :rolleyes:
Why does it only seem to be on the liberal side of the political aisle that one finds the kind of arrogant, conceited, elitism that states the only reason one could possibly disagree with you is either evil or stupidity? Liberals do not have, and have never had, any legitimate claim on moral or intellecdtual superiority. For every one thing they make better they make a dozen other things worse, and then of course the standard procedure is to trumpet about how they made the one thing better and to utterly ignore or deny the things they made worse.
Now to get back to assholism, I don’t think you’re an asshole because you don’t agree with me, but you think I’m an asshole because I disagree with you. I think this makes you the asshole.
Supported, unsupported, it’s all the same. I’m sure you’ve seen the other thread started by Angry Lurker where two more young women have faced death due to rulings by an uncaring and inflexible UHC system, and their cases have very typically been handwaved away just like Diana Smith’s case and all the problems outlined in the Heritage piece.
The fact of the matter is that volume upon volume of evidence supporting my position would have no effect whatever upon the thinking of people like you. And the reason for that is based in politics. Being a liberal you are prone to favor the socialistic approach to things and that’s all there is to it. Many solutions exist for taking care of the problems of people who need care buy can’t pay for it, and solutions exist that would address insurance company malfeasance to whatever degree it actually exists in fact. But every time I or anyone else mentions them they lie there like dead fish because they aren’t the socialistic solution.
So how’s about you man up and knock off all this silly shit about my not providing adequate support for my positions and own what you really believe, which is that no matter how many problems it creates you simply favor the socialistic approach to health care, and thus you’re willing to take your chances with having to live months and months with painful conditions waiting for government to get around to treating you, receiving medications based upon which is the lowest in cost, and deaths that would not occur today caused by wait times, and by, for want of a better term, death panel decisions handed down by various government entities for reasons ranging from cost to inflexibility in addressing problems to a patient simply having had the misfortune of coming down with ailments the government has overlooked in setting up the system to begin with and made no provisions to correct and being blown off and told to go die rather than having recognized that unforeseen problems will arise and setting up procedures under which they could be addressed.
Ah! There’s the problem, in a nutshell! No, they are not.
We have fossil records, observations, and a vast, overwhelming amount of evidence that, yes indeedy, evolution is the real thing, it happened. Because we have lots of supporting evidence! Not just a couple incidents and an utterly unsupported opinion piece from a partisn think tank ten years out of date. That’s what we mean by “supported”. With me so far? Good!
Your theory that all government is of a piece, that all forms of human endeavor that might be considered “government” are inherently flawed, by some metaphysical essence known only to yourself. This is philosophy, and as such, does not actually need to be supported, its just ducks breaking wind, empty speculation. Entertaining, perhaps, but not significant, nothing to base decisions upon. That is “unsupported”.
Typically, when a True Believer wishes to advance a case for which he has no actual support, he will speak in broad statements without corroboration, he will accuse others of blindness, of a stubborn refusal to accept what he deems as entirely obvious. He will offer dogma in place of persuasion, because he has no actual support, save for his firm insistance.
You have a philosophy, you have a dogma, what you ain’t got is facts. Go get some. We’ll wait right here!
No, that’s not why I think you’re an asshole. It’s why I think you’re an uninformed moron, touting an ideology you don’t understand.
As a comparison, there are lots of idiots that believe in evolution. But if they don’t understand it they’re still idiots, regardless of being on the right side of the equation. If they posted errors and lies, creationists should shit on them with reckless abandon. Nothing to do with what’s correct (evolution vs creationism), it’s about not understanding what the fuck you’re talking about. You have repeatedly demonstrated that you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.
There are so many simple and straight forward reasons to argue against UHC. In grade 7 we had little mock-debates about all sorts of things including UHC. Grade 7 students in rural Canada are better able to argue against UHC than you are. Angry Lurker found one, gift wrapped it for you, and you STILL missed it. That makes you a giant fucking idiot. You are literally so stupid you try to fuck giants.
Because you’re an idiot. You actually believe that what you described only happens on the “liberal side.” You are so blinded by your own bullshit that you fail to see how much of a raging asshole you’ve been (but then you blame it on us). Sarah Palin has yet to say something that is NOT arrogant, conceited, or elitism (the real America?). And you aren’t smart enough to be evil.
Except that I repeatedly told you it’s not your views that make you an asshole. But now you think I’m an asshole? Well, by your logic that makes you an asshole. QED
Yeah, it’s funny how the more you guys evolve, the worse things get.
Clearly change does not necessarily = improvement.
Notice I did not say “Liberals seek to institute government run and financed care [del]that will[/del] in order to deliver mediocre service to everyone.”
Again you seem to be having trouble distinguishing between goals and results. The liberal goal is government run and financed health care; the result will be mediocre service to everyone. The fly in the ointment, as is usually the case with liberals, is that while they don’t intend that result it’ll happen anyway. Liberals never intended for this to become a nation of drug addicts, STD carriers and latchkey kids raising themselves, but it happened anyway, just like those of us on the right predicted and were called morons for. We are now predicting slow, mediocre care - and care which in certain cases not our fault will simply leave us to die with no other recourse - and once that happens I’m sure you guys will react like you always do and proclaim that more government and more tax money will be the solution.
And you can keep on waiting because unlike fossil records and other facts that can prove things conclusively, facts with regard to issues like UHC which are political in nature and largely subjective, cannot be proven one way or the other with “facts”. You could come up with pro-UHC facts all day long and I could come up with anti-UHC facts all day long and in the end all that would be proven is nothing.
No, what we have to do is go by person experience, observation, and what logic and judgement tell us. Everyone knows, whether they want to admit it here or not, that just about government-run anything is substandard, inefficient, hidebound and virtually impossible to change in positive ways. As I’ve said before, all things being equal one in their right mind would choose governnment housing over that available on the free market. No one would want government-made clothing. No one would choose to purchase all their food from a government planned and operated food source rather than their local market. No one would choose a car designed and manufactured by government planners and assemblers over automobiles made by private companies.
A person only has to look at China and the Soviet block as they existed during the twentieth century to see what homes and cars and food supplies are like with government at the wheel. Governments simply cannot plan and operate and function well, and the results of its attempts to do so are, with rare exception, mediocre in terms of both execution and quality.
The only good thing that can be said about government health care is that it’s better than nothing, and it’s only in order to provide it for people who have nothing that you support it. I say let’s come up with some way to take care of the people who can’t care for themselves and leave the rest of us alone. We would not want to trust the government to make our cars or clothing, so why on Earth would we want it in charge of our health care?
These are the things that people need to be thinking about when they ponder whether UHC would be a good thing or not, and not whichever one of us does the most Googling for incomplete and inconclusive “facts” to support our position. I’m quite happy to have people take a look at what they already know of how government operates and come to their own conclusions about government-run health care. You, on the other hand, simply want to engage in a pissing contest over “facts” so as to obfuscate and obscure what everybody already knows to begin with, which is that government is lousy and has no business making decisions with regard to our health care.
What’s the matter mack, can’t you manage to get all your thoughts out in one post? Hell, I can hardly finish answering your latest dribblings without being confronted with whole new batch before I’m done. Do you really have no idea of what a pissy little airhead you’re coming across as? You sound like some newly indoctrinated college freshman who thinks they have all the answers but can only articulate them by calling their opponents childish insults.
Oh, well, life intrudes and I can’t spend all day arguing against your childish insults. Have a good day, I know I intend to.
I’m busy evolving a beer gut; I can wait here as well as anywhere else.
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Oops! Gotta go! The dryer just quit and I have to hang up my shirts. I’ll come back later if I have time.
It may look like verbal sleight-of-hand to you but that’s really all it is. emacknight misrepresented something I said. You act like his point was valid and I used trickery to yank the rug out from under him, but all I did was go back and point out that I didn’t say what he accused me of. If anyone here is attempting deceptive argumentation it would be him, not me.
Why not, we are left to ponder. Ponder, ponder, ponder. I think its because you have none. Perhaps that’s because your internet skills suck donkey balls, and can’t find them, even though they are literally everywhere underfoot. Or, because there aren’t any.
Ah! Of course! Its because you are the reasonable man, and we are not. So even if you offered us the facts you haven’t got, it wouldn’t matter anyway because we are blind to your wisdom.
But why not try it? Why not marshal battalions of fact, since you know those anti-UHC facts lie thick upon the ground, how hard can it be to gather up a couple dozen, or so? And if your google-fu is that weak, have you no grandchildren? Nephews, nieces, snotty little neighbor kid who could be bribed, so long as you promise not to play any Elton John?
