Had a lot smaller insurance companies as well, IIRC.
Wait, how could the free market have been freer in the past if the free market doesn’t exist?
Could I get out of this semantic sandtrap with you if I said “private market” instead of “free market”?
Think of it as a continuum of “Free Market” on end and “Socialism” on the other end. If you compare where we are today with where we were, say, 50 years ago, we’ve moved farther toward the “Socialism” end. That is not to say we have a “Socialist” system, just a relative comparison. Or, substitute “fully government regulated” for “socialism” if you don’t like that word.
It would be accurate to say that our current system of "government regulated market system " has made prices what they are.
And it’s not semantic. The Free Market means something very specific. It would be highly inaccurate to call what we have now a free market, especially since so many people have their h/c financed by the government (medicare and medicaid and military/veterans). Add in the tax exemption which drives so much of our h/c coverage to be tied to employment, and we have this weird mixed-bag thing that doesn’t exist anywhere else.
Right. So to make a ‘right’ to UHC equivalent to the ‘right’ to own a gun, what you’re saying is that the government will not pass laws that prevent you from buying health care on your own. Because the ‘right’ to own a gun in no way implies that someone must provide one for you if you don’t have one. All it means is that the government won’t stop you from buying one on your own if you should so choose.
This definition of a ‘right’ to health care would actually force the government to give up any control over it that it has, because if the government sets rules under which you must obey before you can receive health care, then they are violating your right to health care. Is that what you mean?
So you DO agree - if it’s ridiculous to believe that a right to own a gun means that the government must provide you one, then it’s ridiculous to believe that a right to health care means the government must provide it to you if you don’t have it. Correct?
Do you understand what ‘universal’ means? Universal Health Coverage generally means that the government will ensure that ANYONE who needs health care can have it. If a country were only to give health care benefits to males of a certain age, then by definition it would not be universal health care.
Really? And you’re going to wave a magic wand and just make the private health care system suddenly capable of providing unlimited amounts of care? It’s just that easy, huh?
Do you know what else is ‘segregation’? The fact that not everyone can have a BMW. Or the fact that not everyone can live on the waterfront in San Fransisco. The word you’re looking for is ‘scarcity’. There are only so many health care resources. Not everyone can get all the health care they want. Not in the USA, and not in any country that has UHC. Somewhere, somehow, care is rationed.
This is a different issue, and a strawman argument in this debate. We’re talking about a right to health care, and whether or not such a thing can be said to exist. No one disputes that there are people unable to get the insurance they want or need.
Really? So, if I can’t get insurance because of a pre-existing condition, and the government mandates that someone provide it to me anyway, who’s picking up the cost for that? Because whoever provides it will be doing so at a net cost to them (or it would be available in the marketplace anyway). So who pays that cost?
It seems pretty much axiomatic to me that if I receive a benefit I didn’t pay for, someone else must have paid for it, assuming that benefit costs something.
And I want a magic pony.
I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that the reason your group plan is only $800/yr is precisely BECAUSE only select groups of people can get into it? It sounds like the company is providing low-cost health insurance to people who are reasonably good risks. If you pass a law that forces that insurance company to accept everyone who wants in, I guarantee you the rates are going up.
You’re wrong. An insurance’s company’s business is one of buying risk for a premium. The product it sells is risk mitigation. For which it charges a price. If you pay the price they offer, then you have paid for your health coverage if you get sick, even if it costs the insurance company more than the value of your premiums paid.
It is a total distortion to say that if someone has an insurance payout, they did not ‘earn’ it. They earned it through the simple fact transferring their own wealth in exchange for risk reduction under the terms mutually agreed upon by both parties.
As an analogy, let’s say there’s a parcel of land that has a 10% chance of having a million dollars worth of gold under it. The value of this land is $100,000. But if I dig for the gold myself, I may make a million dollars, or more likely, I’ll find nothing and the value of the land drops to zero. If I can’t afford that risk, I may choose to sell the land to someone else. That person will not pay me $100,000 - he’d be a fool to do so. But he offers me $90,000, comforted by the fact that if he does the same with 1000 other parcels of land, he’s reasonably sure to make a profit. He mitigates his risk by buying many plots. I mitigate mine by selling my single plot to him.
Now, if he mines for gold and comes up with nothing, would you say that my $90,000 is unearned? Or if he actually finds a million in gold, would you say that he ripped me off, and that his $910,000 was unearned? No. Because the good what we actually traded wasn’t gold or land - it was risk.
When you buy a corporate bond instead of a government T-bill, you expect to earn a higher interest rate. Why? Because of the additional risk. Along with the time-value of money equation, you are buying up the corporations risk, and they’re paying you extra for it. Same thing.
Oh, I can easily show you how government policies have driven up the cost of health care.
First, medicare and medicaid have increased access to care for the poor and aged, which in turn creates more demand for health care services. That in turn leads to higher prices unless the supply can be increased to meet the demand, which for structural reasons it has a hard time doing.
Second, the goverment regulation of medical devices and drugs has driven up their costs substantially.
Differences in regulatory policies between states has made it difficult or impossible to seek insurance across state lines. This limits competition, which drives up prices.
Governments are deflecting costs from medicare and medicaid by deliberately under-paying for such services. Doctors and hospitals have responded by transferring those costs to others.
The legal environment in the United States leads to more malpractice suits, which drives up the cost of malpractice insurance, which drives up the cost to consumers for health care.
The regulatory reporting requirements for doctors and hospitals who provide medicare and medicaid has caused a paperwork explosion.
Government tax breaks for employer-provided insurance has punished people who wish to save for their own health care. This means more people have their health care paid for by insurance companies, which puts a third party in the mix. This makes it hard to control costs, and also increases the paperwork burden.
Since hospitals are legally obligated to treat people’s critical health issues regardless of their ability to pay, one of the major costs in hospitals involve underwriting the amount such health care costs them. One way or another, this cost winds up being transferred to others.
We can debate how much effect these things have on costs, or whether they are good things to have or not, but the fact is that the government heavily interferes with the market in health care. Therefore, any failings there may be may not be the fault of the market - they may be the fault of the government interventions.
I think John Mace’s point is that it is not fair to simply assume that this is a failure of markets, and therefore the answer is more government and less market. It could easily be the opposite. At least, you don’t know which is true until you fully analyze the existing market and its flaws.
A “magic pony” like, say, free and accessible K - 12? 
This whole post is a non sequitur. I didn’t ask how government involvement has driven up price, I asked how a model without government interference would be better. If you had your way we’d still be treating brain tumors with Doctor Butthole’s Bottled Hog Snot.
I don’t know that it would be better. I just don’t want to blame the “free market” when what we have can’t reasonably be described as such.
WHAT???
Yourassertion is that the ‘free market’ is at fault for high prices. I point out ways in which the government’s actions may be responsible for price hikes, and your response is to call this a ‘non-sequitur’?
Then you throw in some cheap shot about how I want quack medicine? Is your contention that it’s government that keeps us from treating brain tumors with bottled Hog Snot? And furthermore, isn’t YOUR last sentence the non-sequitur here?
If the market were really free, the HMOs would have been happy to go head-to-head with a public option.
That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Fact is you ignored my question and decided to answer something I didn’t ask. That’s a non-sequitur. And in the process you included statements such as:
, which prompted the Dr. Butthole statement.
What I’m interested in now, and what you conveniently ignored, is if you think that free and accessible K through 12 is a “magic pony,” and if not, why is free and accessible healthcare? Education is important, of course, but surely being alive and well is more important, no?
You said this:
I responded with a post which showed:
A) That health care prices have a causal relationship to government intervention
B) that government control is part of how you got here.
That is a DIRECT response to what you are asking.
Yeah, in your world. Because you think that the only thing standing between you and Dr. Butthole is the benevolent hand of government on your shoulder. Some of us believe otherwise.
I’m not talking about how important anything is. I’m talking about whether you can have a ‘right’ to health care without someone else paying for that right. Likewise, I would say that you can’t have a ‘right’ to a K-12 education without paying for it yourself, unless the government agrees to guarantee that you have access to that education even if you can’t pay, in which case it IS forcing someone else to pay for it.
If you said to me, “I believe everyone has a right to a K-12 education, and I don’t believe anyone has to be forced to pay for it”, I’d compare that belief to the desire for a magic pony as well.
Really? You think Nana Rand would’ve just solved those problems all by her lonesome?
I don’t know if this is meant to be addressing me, but I DO believe everyone should be “forced” to pay for it (though I question whether you’d call all taxes “forced” :dubious:.)
No, I think that the market manages to regulate itself pretty well. Many other countries don’t have anywhere near the level of regulation on pharmaceuticals as does the U.S., and they get by just fine.
I’m surrounded by high-quality goods of various types, all of which do what they were advertised to do - and none of it required government intervention to ensure. I’m guessing that the software you’re using in your computer never saw a government inspector - nor did the software this message board is running on. And yet, they appear to have very high quality - certainly as high as anything the government could manage to mandate. How did this happen, if government is the sole source of quality assurance?
Perhaps I mixed up my responses, because the debate I was having earlier was whether or not a ‘right’ to health care can exist without someone being forced to provide it.
That is correct. It would also mean that companies (private entities) can’t prevent you from buying health care on your own. And it would also mean that you can’t sell health care to a segregated group. Everyone would have equal access. I know you don’t like the government, but private industry has a roll in all this too. So making UHC a right opens up the market and provides and opportunity to challenge a lot of the crap that built up.
No, they could be involved at least to the same extent as with gun rights, or the right to free speech, religion, and assembly. They can still provide a regulatory body without violating your rights. They can still license physicians. But it would also limit the control that private entities have over health care. Anti-competition, price fixing, collusion, monopolies, wouldn’t be allowed. I personally hope it would put an end to all this in-network/out-of-network bullshit but that’s wishful thinking.
Yes, it is ridiculous to believe that a right to health care means that the government must provide it. That was my premise all along. It’s one of those right wing arguments that kept coming up that I just didn’t understand.
You can have the government pay for health care with or without health care as a right. You can also forbid the government pay for health care with or without health care as a right.
It appears that I do not know what UHC means, so I’m going to address that in a separate thread. And yes, if a country did that it wouldn’t be universal. In no way did I say that it did, I wasn’t talking about universal gun rights. I was pointing out that some countries provide guns to it’s citizens free of charge.
Why did I say that? Because if the situation was flipped, we already had a right to health, but were debating a right to gun ownership, some douche might point to Europe and say, “Look, see, if we make gun ownership a right, the government will steal money from me to buy someone else a gun, because that’s what happened when they made gun ownership a right.”
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Do you think UHC is magic, as if to say it’s impossible? Do you think you need unlimited amounts of care? Do you think that UHC means suddenly there are a billion people demanding by-pass surgery? I don’t get what you’re trying to say. Can I right it off as hyperbole?
You can’t always get what you want. But if you try some times, you just might find, you get what you need.
Health care is already rationed. In the US it’s rationed based on the company you work for.
No actually, it’s a company of 8,000 people, none of which were selected based on health factors. That’s’ what makes it so stupid. It is a health plan based on something entirely else. Most of these employees are middle aged, disgustingly overweight, and a lot of them smoke. They needed an initiative to encourage people to use the stairs, it’s a two story building. The ones that are in shape tend to either be distance runners like myself, or soccer players. Both groups rack up thousands of dollars worth of ankle and knee surgery (8 of my friends for example). I would say they are anything but good risks. The premium is low because the risk is spread out over such a large group. If we made the group larger, the premium would go down. Bigger risk pool, lower premium.
Imagine if we had a risk pool of 340million.
See, this is where I start to giggle and it gets hard to type. I am forced to subsidize all those other policy holders. But what are my options? Where is my freedom? I need insurance, otherwise I’m being irresponsible. Private insurance is so expensive I’d be better of buying $800 worth of lottery tickets. I only get to choose between the four policies they provide. But this is considered good. I don’t get it. If I could choose a group policy for non-smokers I’m sure we could get that policy down to $600. Rule out the fatties could net me another $100 off. The current system is hilarious. But UHC is consider magic.
Anyways, your analogy was stupid and I think you know that so I’ll end here.
I don’t know what you mean by this. Lots of countries have way more regulation and they get by just fine as well. Isn’t it government regulation that makes pharmaceuticals in Canada so cheap?
I have a rock here that cures cancer and heart burn. Would you like to buy it?
There are government regulations that require an item to do what it advertised. Without that rule, do you think things would get better or worse? I think the shit they are “allowed” to say is criminal enough as it is. Free credit report dot com? Or maybe you’d like a little more lead in your paint. Or more poison in your dog food. Or fucked up wiring in your computer that burns down your house.
Whew! What fun.
Let me clarify my OP.
- The US Constitution legally “justifies” a wealthy oligarchy.
In order to get the original 13 on board, the Constitution had to “legally” fuedalise 90% of the population namely women and the slaves and poor. The basic idea was that those who had been most successful in profiting from killing the indigenous natives and trafficking in human misery for 100’s of years were entitled to keep what they had extracted by force and had the “right” to protection from those from whom it had been extracted by a “popular” govt.
To make “popular” plausible, poor white males were given the vote, albeit it with an indirectly “elected” Senate. The electorate has been grudgingly and incrementally broadened thru the years because, with improving communication, the definition of “all men” necessarily evolved to include all of humanity, and in '65, blacks finally got the vote. A large part of the success of the suffrage movements was corporate recognition that legally expanding the consumer base was just good business.
- We live in a feudal Corporate Kleptocracy.
This was inevitable after The War of Northern Aggression (one thing the South got right 
) when Northern banks and industrial capital declared war on Southern agricultural capital. In an “incompetently” prolonged and brutal war, the South was colonized and Northern capital took over our “popular” govt as evidenced in our Guilded Age.
The idea that a corporation is just another voice of Humanity and deserves no more govt regulation than John Doe has resulted the silliness we look upon today, namely, intelligent people arguing that free markets are self-regulating and govt regulation of corporations is not good for business. I say what’s the difference if the regulators have lots of friends in the industries they regulate?
This debate is like a kindergarten class arguing whether or not the school should provide milk and cookies for everyone or rely on each kid to bring his own. The point is, that experience has shown that everyone having animal crackers produces a much nicer class dynamic than the poor watching on while the wealthy eat mom’s chocolate chips.
I think it is clear that you are not using the term “feudalism” in the same sense that everyone else does. Perhaps if you gave a definition of whatever it is that you do mean, we could proceed. Because the US Constitution does not set up a system where the nobility grants land to people in return for oaths of fealty.
Regards,
Shodan
Oh there you are, chief literalist. Your definition of feudalism seems to require serfs, peasants and peons held in check by fear of the king’s army and required to march into war with pitchforks on behalf of the interests of the lord of their particular manor. Quite a narrow view, I’d say. Times have changed but the boss hasn’t.