I forgot to add: there’s no guarantee that it’s available to us now. That’s the main point of the health care reform–people either being too poor to afford insurance or being turned down because of pre-existing conditions.
With a government plan, there would be more of a guarantee that people would be taken care of than they are under the current system. And they would have more of a legal leg to stand on if they get turned down or mistreated by the beaucracy, since the plan is a public program and comes with all the entitlement that such services come with.
Blue Cross Blue Shield isn’t obligated to take you even if you throw a million bucks at them. Sweet, isn’t it?
There’s no reason to think that UHC won’t be cheaper than what we have now, just like it is elsewhere. It’s what we are doing now that is spendthrift. And our present system already has horrible inequality and a lack of freedom.
Conservatives have demonstrated that they all those things. If you can dig up a few exceptions, that doesn’t make them anything but a tiny outlier; it’s the “dicks” who are in control, who are the essence of conservatism.
“Responsible conservative” is something of an oxymoron, at least in America. An American conservative among other things is someone who denies all responsibility, someone who thinks in terms of “who cares?”, “screw you!” and “I don’t owe you anything”.
A question I’m not sure how to go about analyzing. If the health “insurance” companies were forced to abandon loathesome practices they have indulged themselves in, would they still be profitable? They are quite profitable now, but engage in some pretty wretched shit. So if they were unable to do so, would they go bust?
You owe everyone, as do I. Ideologically driven sociopathy isn’t a smart or moral way of running a nation.
And when you get right down to it, the “we don’t owe you anything !” conservatives are being carried on the back of the people who think they DO owe things to the larger society. Conservatism is largely parasitic; a philosophy designed for leeches who want to pretend they are not leeches. They take and take, and call it rugged individualism instead of amorality and greed.
Do you think you could get where you are today without anyone else’s help? If I stuck you on a primitive continent all by yourself with nothing but what mother nature provides you, how long til you can send me an email?
Every single civilized country I can think of charges a tax on their citizens and has done so for hundreds if not thousands of years, but Crafter_Man is here to say HE DOESN’T OWE IT!
You are seriously delusional if you think your life would even slightly resemble a shadow of your current life without the help of many, many other people. In fact, you would probably be dead. Humans did not evolve to survive well on their own and you would almost certainly not be the exception.
Selfishness that hurts others. Selfishness that goes beyond self interest, to the point where the needs and desires of other people don’t matter. Selfishness like, say, yours.
Maybe ,but where is the voice for them in the Republican Party? There is none. They string the old fashioned repub along as they morph into a party that excludes them and does not address their problems.
When I was in kindergarten, there was one kid who these days would likely be labeled a “problem child.” He liked to snatch the construction paper, crayons, glue, etc., that were put out for all of us to use, clutch them to his chest, and exclaim “MINE!” If anyone challenged him, he’d continue screaming “MINE! MINE!” until he was red in the face and on the verge of tears.
One day when he was out of the classroom (with a school nurse who was helping his pants after a little accident) the teacher instructed us to just ignore him when he acted that way. That the supplies were for all of us to share, regardless of what he said. And sure enough, when we ignored him and he saw he could no longer get a rise out of anyone with his “MINE! MINE!” he soon forgot about proving that the supplies were his and his alone, and began behaving pretty much like a normal kid.
It’s a real shame that you regressed after that, Crafter_Man.
It’s kind of interesting that he puts qualifiers on what he owes his wife and children. One gets the impression of contractual obligations.
I think you have to have a limited cognitive construction of the world to be a conservative.
But we have to take it easy on Crafter_Man. It’s hard work making your own electricity and potable water and food and fighting off marauders with the weapons you’ve built and putting out fires and educating your own children and curing them of illness and injury. It leaves very little time to use the computer you constructed from raw materials to compose message board posts on the internet you created.
It’s called hypocrisy. The thing is, for all their clamoring about the dangers of an encroaching government, I’ve never met a single conservative who would not exploit a government-run program to the fullest when they can. I suspect there’s a cognitive dissonance at work in their minds: “Government-run health care is evil and socialist! … Now, where’s my Medicare card? I need to get to the doctor.”
Basically, these people have a need to hate, but they can’t summon the hatred for anyone they actually know. So, they fantasize.
Doesn’t he pay for all those things? While I disagree with Crafter_Man’s point of view, he didn’t say he takes care of all those things himself - he said he doesn’t owe anything to society for them. I mean, do we owe society for our electricity, or do we owe the electric company? Because it’s not society that sends me a bill for my electricity every month.