Basically. Both sides can trot out statistics showing that the vast majority of people want UHC, or the vast majority don’t want to have the tax hikes needed for UHC. They’ll claim that these polls show that the majority of people are on board with their agenda, but what it really shows is people want more healthcare but don’t want to foot the bill.
I like it too, except the government already takes the proceeds from natural resource leases, arbitrary seizure of frequency spectrums, and other assets from the common and pumps it into the general budget.
I’ll hazard a guess that while the utilities are public, they periodically hire private contractors when it comes time to expand or repair the network. The competition for these contracts (assuming they don’t all just go to the city supervisor’s brother) drives innovation.
I live in NE Ohio and the winters here can be deadly. There are in fact subsidy programs for heating the homes of poor during the winter. It saves lives and it also saves houses since if the gas goes off the pipes freeze and cause water damage and repair bills.
Funds come via donations and business sponsorships mostly. In Virginia, Dominion has a program in connection with the Department of Housing & Community development.
I don’t know about water subsidies offhand but providing clean water to a city is one of the most important developments of the last century. It’s why cholera and typhoid epidemics are unheard of these days. I would be surprised if there wasn’t a plan similar to Dominion’s for Ohio’s water needs. (I forget the name of our water company or I’d look it up for sure.)
So the answer for the OP is - we do subsidize those things because overall civic health depends on maintaining a certain shared standard of living.
I also lived in NE Ohio for several years, and concur with your assessment. Winters are indeed brutal.
Housing is also cheap, schools are pretty good in most areas, and it’s a reasonably short trip to Southern Ohio, or other places where winters aren’t so deadly.
So it seems like people who stay there trade off benefits vs. costs , much like most other decisions in life.
So why should we subsidize heating oil for NE Ohio? Actually, it doesn’t seem like we do according to your example…it seems like it mostly comes from the private sector. Which is good.
Should we subsidize air-conditioning for Arizonans in summer? Oxygen tanks for high-altitude living in Leadville, Colorado? Mosquito repellent for those living in the swamps of Louisiana? Hurricane protection for those who choose to build in US territories of the Carribbean?
People make choices about where to live based on a whole multitude of factors that involve tradeoffs of benefits vs. costs. If they choose to live in NE Ohio, like I did, it seems like cold winters might be one of those costs to consider. It’s not at all obvious to me why that should be subsidized via the public purse.
For sake of argument let’s look at it this way, health care is NOT something to be earned.
It’s a matter of public policy.
For example, in the old days you didn’t have fire insurance, you actually paid a fire company to service your home or business. What did this mean? It meant that if you had a house and you thought it might catch on fire, you paid a fire company to come put it out.
So now Mr Marxxx pays a company and my house catches on fire, so I call and The Acme fire company comes and puts out my fire. Sounds good, but what about the houses on either side of me? If their houses catch fire, unless the Acme Fire Company (my company) is also their company, they wouldn’t bother to put out the fire.
Now let’s think about this. I have a minor fire, I call my company and they come quickly and put it out, but my neighbor on one side, his house catches fire and he has no fire company, so his house burns down, on the other side of me, my other neighbor has the Road Runner Fire Company but they aren’t so fast, and while they put the fire out, his neighbor’s house catch. (That would be two doors down from me)
As you can see this isn’t a very good system, if my house caught on fire, it would be much better for everyone if that Acme Fire Company, just put out my fire and prevented it from speading.
At one time in this actually existed, this was how fires were dealt with. Till someone said, “You know what? Fire preventino and fire protection, shouldn’t be a matter of whoever can afford it, it effects everyone, it’s really a matter of public policy.” So now our taxes pay for firefighters, who put out all fires regardless.
Same thing with schools. At one time public education wasn’t free. Till someone said "You know what an educated population is in society’s best interests, public education shouldn’t be a matter of “if you can afford it,” but at one time it was. So now we pay taxes and education is a matter of public policy.
Other countries look at health care as a matter of public policy, like education, police protection or fire protection. We don’t.
In the USA we find oddiies like spending $200,000 to treat a heart attack instead of of a couple hundred dollars of years for meds to prevent that heart attack.
If you look the USA shines far above other Western countries in things like new technologies, experiemental treatment and forefront medicine. However in everyday things like general health we are miserable. In some states we are at par with African nations.
The result is overall our longevity rates are less, BUT on the other hand if you have a rare cancer or a new treatment, or a unique situation (like say unjoining conjoined twins) you will be better off in the USA.
The debate simply falls to this…Should healthcare be a matter of public policy?
As for ERs, they only treat you if it’s life theatening. In my youth I had a kidney stone, and it hurt like anything, no insurance…No one would help me. Not one single hospital would even bother. So the fact is you can be in a tremendous amount of pain, and they’ll say “Tough.”
Unless you’re gonna die, don’t count on an ER, and even then we’ve seen studies in L.A. for instance, where homeless people even with heart problems and life threatening conditions have been turned out.
Some of the things you cite above involve externalities (houses catching on fire from their neighbors) and some don’t. That’s big difference.
Some of your examples also can be solved by a simple transfer of resources and deregulation…if people cannot afford to buy insurance, you can give them money to buy insurance policies, once you deregulate the market.
The same holds for education.
That is a far, far cry from launching a government program to act as the delivery mechanism for those services, and make choices on behalf of their citizens.
All the more reason for Americans to adopt a Canadian-style single-payer system, rather than go overboard such as you describe and as fear-mongering advertisements claim.
How is giving money to people who don’t have it, to buy health insurance, ‘going overboard’? It’s about as simple and ‘underboard’ as one can possibly make it.
It’s your suggestive alternative that government bureacrats will take all medical choices away that mirrors the panic-seeking advertisements I sometimes catch on American television.
That’s a strawman. And an ad hominem attack. Lazy debating.
How about we start from the other side of the argument?
Why would you willingly disempower yourself and give them that authority in the first place? Why don’t you prefer to keep it for yourself? Wouldn’t that be better?
The Canadian government never had the authority you describe, so it looks like in order to start from “the other side of the argument”, I have to assume the mindset of a communist, or something.
But that’s not what happens in the real world. In the real world, it’s the government or some corporation that will be making the decisions. I choose government. If anything, the government is likely to offer more choice. Most people are not independently wealthy; they have to take what is offered, if anything at all is.
Bryan Ekers is right; what you are saying is exactly the same kind of panickmongering false choice that the Right likes to push in TV ads. Government provided health care would empower, not “disempower” most people. Which of course is one of the real reasons the Right opposes it. Including, yes, the libertarians who are very much enemies of freedom.
Cite for a case in which this is true, when the market is not monopolistic? Even the dysfunctional employment-linked healthcare environment we have now is more competitive than government.
All over the industrialized world ? America has if anything the least choice among them, where most people live under the “take it or leave it” system; where most people have no choice but to take whatever pathetic health care their employer is willing to dole out. And where it’s often used as a weapon against them, for that matter.
Yeah, the area’s got a lot going for it provide you have central air.
As I said above, subsidizing this accomplishes several goals: it provides heating for needy families and it prevents damage to homes via frozen pipes.
You seem to be suggesting that the population which can’t afford to heat their homes should move south for the winter months (which, since you’ve lived here, you know may or may not occur any time between September & June.) Having just moved, I think this is both financially unworkable for people who can’t pay their heating bill and also would be a real burden on employers if a section of the workforce (and a corresponding section of the consumers) were migratory.
One of the programs outlined on the Dominion page is in fact subsidized cooling for those living in Virginia. This subsidy program is the one that works in conjunction with the VA Dept. of Housing and etc. The reason for this is partly because of the social contract in American societies which includes helping out those less fortunate. If a society can’t prevent its people from freezing to death than what’s it good for?
And the other, less altruistic, reason is because it’s bad for cities’ prosperity levels overall when large sections of the town are slums with damaged houses and high mortality rates. The more prosperous a city looks, the more likely businesses and investors will be to move their and the better standard of living for everyone.
Are you proposing to subsidize bus tickets for everyone so they can go to Phoenix each winter? Most people’s choice about where to live is determined by where they were born. Leaving costs money upfront which people living hand to mouth are unlikely to have.
The point of banding together as a society is so that each individual can have the greater strength of many. Weak individuals have as great a right to the society’s resources as the strong individuals do. Helping the weak become strong makes the group stronger as a whole.
P1. Agreed. And my house didn’t. Which sucked in the summer.
P2. Well, the investment in the capital stock of home ownership comes with certain, ongoing costs. That’s part of the investment decision. I don’t buy a car and then expect someone else to pay for oil changes, a new timing belt, and four new tires every now and then.
P3. No, although that would be an interesting bit of financial analysis (is it cheaper just to pay someone to move…or keep heating their house for them every year?). I’m saying that the cost of heating a home is one of the bajillion inputs that work their way through the local financial ecosystem of employer/employee wage negotiations, school property tax rates, road usage, food prices, etc. People can make decisions about if/not where to live based on these factors, and they do.
Distorting the market via means of subsidizing one input (home heating oil) makes no sense to me. It could also be counterproductive (for example, it could raise the price of existing homes, thereby raising the price for starter families looking to stay/move and buy their first home, thereby raising local wage rates, etc.)
P4. I don’t remember signing any social contract.
Although I like the Dominion program you mention, since they seem to have weighed the pros/cons of support against their own economic incentives and acted accordingly.
It’s the same logic I use when supporting low-income wealth transfers (cash is my dream in its purest form…I’ll settle for education and healthcare insurance vouchers). The key, however, is to get the government out of the role of delivery mechanism and keep them solely as a wealth/income transfer machine.
By they way, what was my part of the deal with regards to the social contract to which you refer? Since I’ve never seen it, I’d like to know my rights and obligations.
P5. Absolutely agree with this point. My guess is that is the incentive behind the Dominion power program. More power to them (no pun intended). Do you see the difference between that program, and the government stepping in and starting to muck things up?
P6. I don’t agree with this at all. We’re not living in the dark ages of Eastern Europe, where mobility is largely determined by how far you can walk in a day, or if you have access to a yak.
Any able, lucid American adult can move to and live anywhere they want. If they want to stay close to their place of birth (due to family reasons, or whatever) that is their choice.
The fact that the people in your examples above already pay rent, or live in their own homes, suggest they have the means to be mobile if they wish to do so.
P7. Wow. There’s a sizeable chunk of left-wing, social justice gobbledy-gook in that paragraph that seems incongruent with the rest of your well-written post.
I don’t know what ‘society’s resources’ are. Is that the money sitting my checking account? Do the weak have a right to that?
I liked most of your post, but that last paragraph is a zinger. Are you sure the people who need heating oil are ‘weak’ and need my resources to become ‘strong’? Is there any chance they could become ‘strong’ on their own, by making a few other choices and tradeoffs along the way? That’s how most of the people I grew up with did it.
I remember being ‘weak’ by your definition for quite a few years, back in my grad school days. Should I have taken advantage of some social contract, somewhere, to get access to someone else’s resources to become ‘strong’?
It’s a bummer I missed out on that. But like I said, I don’t ever remember signing or seeing any social contract, so it’s probably my own fault.
That’s got to be the worst link ever posted on this message board; a link to your own post, which links to another one of your own posts, which links to a New York Times link that doesn’t actually prove (or even strongly assert) what you have presented here as being undeniable fact. It states that preventive care might not save money if health care continues to be delivered as it is now, but admits it might save money if people’s understanding of what constitutes effective health care is changed. The point of the article is that saving money with preventive care would be DIFFICULT, not impossible.
And at that, the article is generic in nature. It doesn’t even clearly address a specific health care proposal.