Hey Lib, what do you think of the mantra
The (1) needs (2) of (3) the (4) many (5) override (6) the (7) rights (8) of (9) the (10) few (11)
Meanwhile, Europe suffers terribly under their mismanaged government heavy health care system, and the people are upset about their tax rates and want a return to private medicare.
Wait, what? They don’t? They’ve worked out their own functioning systems?
I have lupus. Does that make it your responsibility to provide health care for me? Hell no. It means that I more than a healthy person have a reason to put ‘paying for health insurance’ much higher on the list than ‘buying new DVD.’
The quality of care and lack of waiting lists is worth it, that’s why. What makes good economic sense is for you to start prioritizing. Health care and food are both necessities, but guess which one too many people think someone else should buy for them?
No, actually, I don’t have to pay a premium for health insurance I don’t use. I have a choice as to whether I take the coverage my boss pays for, or I take the money per month that he spends on my health coverage and go buy my own somewhere else.
Cite?
The boss pays the $250/month or I pay it. If I choose to pay it, then there’s no deduction from my paycheck. If I choose to pay it to a different insurance company than the one my boss uses, I get that $250/month in my paycheck.
Unfortunately I am paying for health care for people who are too damned lazy or stupid to make health care more of a priority than cable TV and Abercrombie.
A military is necessary for the existence of a free society; it works to prevent coercion from the outside.
Police and courts and probably some sort of punitive institutions are necessary for the existence of a free society; they work to prevent coercion from within.
Any other functions can be better provided on a private basis than by government, education and healthcare included.
I’m not sure as to what would be a morally acceptable way of funding these two functions, as reduced percentage-based taxation is just a reduced evil. Liberal and Smartass, please help me out here.
I’m still not clear whether you are deliberately missing the points I am making or if you are really that confused. I argue from a libertarian perspective because I am a libertarian. The society that I live in was founded on predominantly libertarian ideals. While it isn’t libertarian, it is still closer to libertarianism than it is to socialism.
You believe that socialized healthcare is good because of your socialist views. I believe that it is bad because of my libertarian views. My views are based on a set of principles, yours are arbitrary.
I am against the taxes that I am currently paying for healthcare for the exact same reasons that I am against socialized healthcare. The argument is the same. You seem to be asserting that, since something is already a little bad, I should not argue against its becoming worse.
I don’t advocate the elimination of “society”, nor do I advocate anarchy. There is no need to lecture me that life is better when society exists.
You really need to be careful with the word “we”. The reasons that you think that people create societies are not necessarily true. In the society that I live in, we specifically stated our reasons when we established our government, and these are not them.
This is your definition of society. In the society that I live in, we think it is important for members to be able to disagree and still be members.
Taxes come before everything else. In implementation, the dictates of the government are in fact ranked above any needs that I might have. This is one of the things that you can’t seem to get. When you advocate to achieve your goals by means of government fiat, you are advocating to place them above any needs I might have.
Ease up with your prejudices and try to understand that this is not about my money, or the degree to which I “cherish” it.
You also need to ease up with the twisted logic. Most of the things in society are not paid for by any “collective”. When I buy a TV, I pay for it. When the government taxes me and hires DEA agents, THAT is paid for by the “collective”. You conflate anything that happens within a society with action by the government. The fact that I am a member of this collective does not mean that everything I do is an action OF the collective. This conflation allows you to pretend that everything that happens in a country is an action by the collective and nothing is the action of an individual. By your logic, there is no difference between actions taken by free individuals and those taken by an all-powerful government. And yet you support socialized healthcare. If my coffee is available because of the actions of the collective, I could argue that healthcare is already being offered to every citizen by the collective. In which case, why are you advocating change?
That is not what I insist, and I don’t appreciate these George W. Bush tactics of claiming that I insist things that I do not. Once again, if you don’t see any difference between actions taken by government and actions taken by individuals, then why are you advocating any change at all?
So, either you have a society or you don’t? There are only two alternatives? I would say that the alternative is not having a socialist society. Do you honestly think that a society without socialism is not a society?
Ah, now, I get it. You don’t understand the difference between functions that protect rights and those that redistribute wealth. See, here it is again:
Absolutely. And, I have to say, you are the only person I have ever encountered who didn’t.
We are debating what the rules should be, not whether or not to play by them. Your implication that I don’t obey any rules I don’t like is nothing more than an unwarranted attack on my character, of which you clearly know nothing. Why is it that, if I don’t like the rules you propose, you insist on portraying me as some sort of antisocial deviant?
The individual people ARE the collective. This is the part that YOU insist on ignoring.
Careful, your disdain for other humans is showing.
Um, healthcare is the topic.
Do you think there are any principles involved here, or is it just what the majority happens to support right now?
Stop, just for a second, and think about what I am saying. Do you honestly not see any qualitative difference between rules that eliminate choices and those that protect them? Do you not see any difference in my desire to let you do what you want and your desire to control what I do? Do you think that slavery is just something that collectives decide whether or not they feel like having, or there is a shared principle involved in deciding whether it is okay?
Yes, here is the heart of it. In fact, I’ll skip the rest because we seem to be repeating ourselves. It is in fact a moral issue. A key difference between us is that you are in favor of moral decisions being made collectively and I am not. Your apparent inability to draw distinctions–or recognize alternatives–causes you to claim things that simply are not true. It is NOT true that having a society requires that every choice be made collectively. It is not true that when people disagree, one must be declared the winner by the collective.
Some things ARE required for society to exist: Some sort of legal system (which includes police and courts) is required in order for there to be resolution of disputes and for any rules to be enforced. Unfortunately, a military is often required in order to protect the society from other competing societies. The alternative is anarchy, if not necessarily living in caves.
All the other things we talk about, including socialized healthcare, are NOT requirements for society to exist, and your belief that I cannot support having a police force without also being in favor of socialized healthcare is nothing short of bizarre. My beliefs are not contradictory; yours are. If taxes are used to fund courts and the military, it is permissable because these things are minimum requirements of society–and they simply cannot be implemented without the force of government. On the other hand, socialized healthcare is not a requirement of society, it is a redistribution of wealth to provide a service that does not require governmental force to provide.
Government creates and enforces the rules of a society. As such, government is not subject to the rules of society in the way that citizens are. Government is powerful, corrupt, and stagnant. It is NOT subject to market forces or competition and its member are not incented to perform well, increase productivity, or even be fair. In fact, government authority creates incentives for people to perform poorly and to create ever-growing bureaucracies. As “mechanisms” go, government is not a very good one. For that reason, most thinking people try to minimize what government does. Libertarians are in favor of minimizing government to just those functions that are necessary for society to exist.
And this leads to the moral argument. You believe that it is unfair and immoral for some people to have DVD players while others want for “life-saving” medicine. Many Republicans believe that it is immoral for one man to have sex with another. All of you believe that you are right. However, there is no absolute “moral” authority that can determine whether either of you is right (if God exists, It is not taking questions). To me, the both of you are really no different, because both of you are convinced that you cannot properly enjoy your moral beliefs without forcing everyone else to go along with them. It is not enough to say, “I believe that homosexuality is immoral, and therefore I will not engage in it.” Instead, what we get is “I believe homosexuality is immoral, and therefore I insist on having laws that discourage or prevent it.”
You cannot be happy with “I believe that it is immoral not to provide healthcare to those who need it, and therefore I will give as much as I can in order to help provide it.” No, you insist on , “I believe that it is immoral not to provide healthcare to those who need it, and therefore I insist that you pay for it.” You claim to be different, but the difference is just details. Many Muslim fundamentalists cannot be happy with “I believe that female flesh is sinful and therefore I will not display it or look at it.” Instead, they say “I believe that female flesh is sinful, and therefore I insist that no one display it.”
If there is a real difference in any of you, I’m not sure what it is. All of you want to “enslave” me to your moral positions against my will. Actually, I just thought of one difference. You have claimed to be able to weigh and judge between my needs and the needs of some other citizen and determine who is more deserving of my money. While the religious fundamentalists believe that their moral positions were given to them by God, apparently you are convinced that you ARE God and your dictates should be enforced by the collective.
As a libertarian, I think that we should each be allowed to live according to our own moral rules as much as possible. Specifically, I am okay with you believing and living how you like, as long as you don’t insist on telling me what to do. And, yet, somehow I am the bad guy here and you are offended by my beliefs. My question for you has not changed: Why can’t you be happy with your beliefs without forcing them on me?
-VM
It’s perfectly clear - “you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” A right always supersedes a need by my book, regardless of the numbers attached to either.
Well, the knee-jerk answer would be that it should be paid for by the people who want it. A slightly less snide approach would be to say, any (and every) way you want to, as long as it doesn’t depend on coercion.
Usually, when this comes up, these answers are interpreted to mean that private schools–as they exist now–would be the sole answer. Barring that, libertarians may try to come up with ideas that might be implemented. In truth, an honest libertarian does not claim to know what the best approach is. In fact, we are convinced that no one person–or all-powerful entity–is capable of providing a good solution, and that this is one of the reasons that command economies don’t work. The benefit of market-based solutions is that a great many ideas are tried and compete with each other, and, of course, resources are not wasted on providing things that no one wants. In other words, rather than saying we know what the right answer is, we race 'em.
In addition to purely private schools, there would probably be pure charity-based schools, schools that neighborhoods “band together” to provide, schools sponsored by companies (Microsoft might sponsor schools that focus on skills that they hire for), Church-based schools, you name it. The point is not that one of these is the right answer, but that all of them would be worth trying. In fact, there might be religious schools that teach Intelligent Design as if it were science (and thus putting their students at a competitive disadvantage). By not dictating one answer, many answers are allowed and the cream rises to the top due to market forces.
And let’s face it, it simply is not the case that every career requires a high education level. Succesful football players are rewarded for athletic prowess, not engineering knowledge. It is one thing to recommend a college degree; it is another thing altogether to impose it. A football player with no other skills is definitely making risky choices, but I personally believe that freedom means allowing him to take these risks.
In terms of full disclosure, I should also say that, if I were handed a button to push that would “turn off” things like public education in one fell swoop, I probably would not push it–the results would probably be somewhat catastrophic in the short term. Part of the reason is cultural: It has taken a number of years for the public to adopt the attitude that the government is responsible for taking care of us, and I expect it would take some time to replace this with an attitude of personal responsibility for our lives–and for making improvements to society that we think are needed.
While it is a change that is well worth making–and would be better for everyone in the long term–I would more likely favor as gentle a transition as possible to cut down on unnecessary suffering in the short term.
-VM
And I got kids to feed and that cotton ain’t gone pick itself, boy. So how ‘bout you get out there and start pickin’ fore I half to give you a whuppin’.
-VM
Hey, guys. I’ve been in enough of these “economics” debates that I’m more than happy to let you carry on, but I have to ask: How come nobody is mentioning the way government intervention is distorting the market? The Canadian government is dictating prices of medicines that are below-market and the American market is left taking up the slack. Everyone acts like research and development is free (and that people will invent things if they won’t be rewarded for them). Is it any coincidence that all the good new drugs are coming from the USA? Is it any surprise that we are paying more for healthcare, since we are subsidizing research and development for the rest of the Western World?
I am actually surprised that any Canadians or Europeans would encourage us to adopt their model. If we did, where are the new breakthroughs going to come from, when government-dictated pricing models don’t allow enough money to cover risk, research, and development? When the trial-and-error required to create, test, and market new drugs and techniques can no longer result in profits, how much of that do you reckon will be happening?
Let’s face it. We Americans are so damn selfish that we’re willing to subsidize drug research for the rest of the world rather than give it up ourselves. Go figure.
-VM
You also probably went to an in-state college. If so then you collected about 25k in state subsidized welfare over those 4 years (colleges say things like ‘in state tuition $5000/yr, out of state $12000/yr’ in the brochure. You probably already know about state funding of college education but some people may not). You collected another 100k in K-12 education (In 1997 $5,873 was the average spent on a student per year, in todays dollars it is probably closer to $7500). So by the age of 22 you collected over 130k in welfare. Will you be paying this 130k back anytime soon? No, and I do not expect you to or feel any sense of outrage over this investment. And it is an investment.
I do not mind this investment and I do not see crowds in the street calling for an end to universal education access since this investment grows the economy and is something the majority of people in a country that prides itself on its humanity and long term planning want to see happen. As I said before, not insuring the 43 million costs 2x as much as insuring them and is less humane. And we in the US pay 50-100% more for healthcare than people in other countries with universal access. Even if we eliminated all government sponsored healthcare healthcare costs would still be insanely high because people would put off healthcare until it was an emergency. When they did they’d find they couldn’t pay their bills, so their bills are passed onto someone else, ie you. People would also get sick and die more often and as a result be less productive on their jobs and these costs would be spread out among everyone. Universal coverage makes good economic sense and I still haven’t seen any good arguments based on economics saying it is a bad idea.
Lack of waiting lists? Is it better to have a waiting list in a country with a 50-100% discount or to have our system with 100 million people who can’t afford any care and who would love to be on a waiting list? You do have a point about lack of good economic planning though. However even though that may be morally offensive, neither of us knows the full story of these people and we are talking about healthcare here and how universal systems are cheaper than our system. Besides, most nations with universal access let you opt out of the system if you do not like it. Take Canada and the statistics that Muffin keeps quoting. If we had a system like Canada you could afford universal coverage and still get decent insurance for yourself for the same price.
Good. You still spend 50-100% more than people in the systems you are decrying though.
The $1300 per car cite was in post #63. It may apply to other consumer goods too, I am not sure but it would not suprise me since many employers provide healthcare for their employees.
I do not know the ins and outs of your system, but it would not suprise me if your employer already pays a good deal of your insurance and your insurance is closer to $600/month, its just you who are left with paying $250 of that $600-ish payment. Then again I could be wrong as I don’t know anything about your plan. I just know that a good deal of the time when the employer gives insurance to an employee they are subsidizing at least some of it, and according to the article I posted earlier they subsidize around 72% on average.
Cable TV is $45 a month. Healthcare for a family of four with the parents in their 50s starts at $600 a month for a $5000 deductible plan as I showed earlier. Healthcare for a family witha pre-existing condition is probably closer to $1000 a month. This is not abercrombie vs. healthcare unless you are in your 20s, have no medical history and are not paying healthcare for anyone but yourself. My total living expenses right now come to a little under $1000 a month (excluding college costs), saying its a choice between abercrombie and healthcare is false. I pay for my rent, utilities, car, gas, auto insurance, food, misc. things, gym membership and a few other things for the same price that some families spend on health insurance.
http://www.phrma.org/publications/publications/brochure/leading/lead9.cfm
U.S. pharmaceutical companies will spend $20 billion this year to discover and develop new medicines.
How does $20 billion in US R&D translate into 1.5 trillion in healthcare costs?
http://www.abpi.org.uk/statistics/intro.asp
The industry invested £3.5 billion in UK research and development in 2003– nearly £10 million every day
So the UK pharma industry, with healthcare that costs 1/2 what ours does, spends about the same per capita as the US pharma industry does.
I forgot to translate the british pound into USD. That is actually $6.5 billion USD. Seeing how the UK has 1/5 the population of the US they spend 50% more on pharmaceutical R&D and still have healthcare costs 1/2 what we do.
We reach cataclysmically worrisome economic deficits?
As I’ve already said healthcare costs are going to go up, not down, with universal healthcare.
Because on top of the current medical infrastructure we’d be adding a whole layer of bureaucracy with god knows how many offices across the country and god knows how many employees making god knows how much money.
Furthermore there is a good chance quality of healthcare will go down, because doctor salaries will probably decrease and the “elitist” doctors (who often represent our brightest doctors and often have a big hand in doing some of the biggest medical research) will also probably take a hit in pay. Which means the incentives for becoming a doctor will go down, so we get lesser qualified people coming in and ultimately the whole medical system downgrades to the common denominator in quality.
Then furthermore just dealing with government bureaucracy can be a problem. I older family members who are on Medicare and the billing can be nightmarish and sometimes it’s just plain maddening trying to get everything worked out, for both the patient and the doctor.
I have a cousin who I’ve tried to help get Medicaid (he’s schizophrenic, not able to hold down a job and in dire need of a vast array of government assistance) and he’s on it now but Medicaid (and other associated social services) are a monstrous bureaucracy and sometimes my cousin ends up short medication that he needs to be able to function with a sound mind day to day because Medicaid is extraordinarily slow.
Now sure, for him it’s better than nothing. Just. But middle class Americans would be putting themselves in worse condition with universal healthcare because then they too would be doomed to suffer through the Medicaidish nightmares my cousin does and they would have no other recourse because they could not afford both their increased taxes to cover universal healthcare and private medical coverage.
Personally in implementation I see universal healthcare doing nothing for the extremely poor because they already have Medicaid, hurting the middle class because they will be forced into an extremely inefficient system that reduces their quality of life and quality of medical care, and doing nothing to the rich because they will simply pay their taxes and continue to go to the most expensive doctors money can buy and ignore the public medical system.
And no, I don’t find Canada or Europe to be nightmares. But I do think that more socially, culturally, and economically homogenous countries like Europe and Canada have a much easier time implementing big government programs like universal healthcare.
Plus many countries have not had the tradition of private medical care on the scale of the United States, and a switchover could theoretically be nothing short of disastrous.
Plus Europe and Canada don’t have security concerns or responsibilities like the United States that drain away a large portion of our GDP.
Personally I think things for the middle class are okay and they are obviously okay for the rich. I think our focus should be comprehensive coverage for the poor, and in addition to being comprehensive it should be more inclusive and only influenced by factors like poverty level and in the long run ability to work/employment status.
Wesley, I think it’s a little rude to ignore pretty much all of the various arguments I have taken the time to post here and cherry-pick one detail that you think you can refute.
Also, the battle of statistics is one that I have been through a few times too many. If you are convinced you are right, you can always come up with a set of numbers that seem to prove your claim (as opposed to starting with the numbers and trying to figure out what they mean). I am more interested in the more “moral” side of the debate. My post was actually intended for those you are debating, as a suggestion for something to include in their arguments.
The simple fact is, I could show you pages and pages of data that support my opinion, and you would be no more convinced than you are now–and it would be a lot of work for me to achieve no purpose at all. It is this conviction that “I am right and therefore my rules are the best” that I would prefer to confront. Ultimately, this is a discussion of what people are entitled to and are therefore owed by their fellow citizens. There is no right answer. I just don’t understand why so many people refuse to make room for multiple answers in their utopias. My way is right and therefore should be enforced by law. See, look at these numbers…
-VM
25,179,316 ("The New York Times World Almanac-2004,p. 163) (Including expats)
And either 1,373,889 (page 161) or 1,411,634 (page 164) active duty (worldwide), *op. cit. *
I can’t see in the libertarian / anti-universal-healthcare arguments so far presented any connection between the individual “I do not want to pay for xyz” and any connection to what the field of healthcare actually involves.
What else could go wrong under socialized health care in the U.S.? How about:
In countries with socialized medicine, one of the ‘cost controls’ is often a cap on drug prices. This causes a lack of investment in pharmaceutical research, and is one reason why the vast bulk of pharma research occurs in the U.S. In essence, many countries keep their drug costs low by ‘free riding’ on U.S. R&D.
Another industry that is much, much bigger in the U.S. than elsewhere. Because medical devices in their early stages are horrendously expensive. Want a titanium knee joint? If you’re the first person to ever get one, you might pay hundreds of thousands for it. Wait until government bureaucrats are deciding how much care people ‘deserve’ - high risk, high cost treatments will vanish, and with them the R&D that creates those treatments.
This is endemic to government control of complex economies, and the U.S. health care system is a very complex economy. It goes like this: The government guarantees health coverage for all. Now medical practitioners have no incentive to be price-competitive. So the government is forced to cap salaries, or implement fixed fee schedules. Fixed fee schedules lead to ‘assembly line’ medicine, and the government is forced to bring in more regulations. This creates more paperwork, and more healthcare money winds up being funneled to lawyers and accountants. In the meantime, it turns out that the fee schedules don’t reward people appropriately, so you get a mismatched balance of resources (shortages of nurses, gluts of something else). And so it goes. Governments are LOUSY at managing the minutae of the economy.
The problem with entitlements is that once they are in place, they are impossible to kill. When the free market controls an industry, that industry will rise and fall with the economy, which is as it should be. When people don’t have as much money, they spend less, and the economy shrinks to accomodate reality. With entitlement systems, there is no such check and balance. That’s why during recessions private industries shrink, but deficits balloon. Taking 10% of the economy and removing it from the requirements of supply and demand is very dangerous.
Every country that has implemented socialized medicine has seen a brain drain of their best and brightest - the main beneficiary being the United States. Where will they go if the U.S. socializes? I expect a new ‘free market haven’ in health care will open somewhere - maybe in the tropics, or Russia, or some other country that sees the advantages of providing the kinds of high-priced medical care that is no longer available in the U.S.
Also, you need to remember that the U.S. has acted as a big stress offloader for other socialized medical systems, because people in other countries who need expensive, complex procedures often go to the U.S. and pay for it. Canadians flock to the U.S. in pretty big numbers, seeking out treatments that are either unavailable in Canada or waiting lists are too long. Heart surgery, cancer treatment, and orthopedic surgery in particular. Expensive, complex procedures that socialized medical systems avoid having to pay for. When the Premier of Ontario, a champion of our single-payer health care system, contracted cancer, he went to the United States for treatment. I guess he wanted to avoid the fate of the head of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, who died while on a waiting list.
I haven’t read the whole thread because its 154 replies, so I don’t know all your arguments.
In all honesty, if you showed me pages and pages of data I would read them and probably admit I was wrong if I thought I was wrong.
I can understand the moral objectivity to the government stealing money at gunpoint and redistributing it, but I think it is worth it, because in order to function as a society you have to make sacrafices. Ask the majority of americans if they want to eliminate state funding for social security, medicaid and k-12 education and they will say no. Why should universal access be different?
“Riding free”? Oh come on. Where do you think we get the drugs from, if it’s not from the same companies with better negotiating power? (GASP a single player in the free market doesn’t necessarily have as much power over the drug companies as the NHS does)
As with many of the counter-arguments offered throughout this thread, I suggest you go and do a bit of research into how things work in countries with universal healthcare (and no, that doesn’t mean cherrypick the cases where things have gone wrong)
I hate to burst the bubble, but titanium knee joints were about as much a product of free-market economics as nuclear power stations.
(ie both draw on developments made for military purposes. See plenty every other posts in this thread for details.
All this seems to assume that the only reason that doctors do the job they do is to earn money. That simply isn’t true (for the pay they get, despite it being good pay, it’s still a shitty job that I wouldn’t do even if I could.)
You’re basically trundling out antiquated anti-socialist arguments without making them relevant.
There’s nothing like hyperbole to defeat the opposition, is there?
Public health is an industry now, is it?
Oh, for goodness sake, there’s also been a brain-drain to Canada - it’s nothing to do with public-vs-private, and everything to do with salaries and quality of life. Are you really suggesting that Russia will suddenly become an attractive prospect to a med school graduate from England, or Spain, or Austrailia, just because America now offers slightly-lower salaries that are still more than they’d earn back home?
Evidence, please. And we’ve already established that Canada is very much the exception in outlawing private healthcare entirely.
From what I can tell the pharma industry in the US spends about $20 billion and the NIH spends another $20 billion.
http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/label_france/ENGLISH/ECONOMIE/pharmac/pharmac.html
That says
The country (France) ranked third
as « discoverer » of new drugs"
The link I posted earlier shows the UK pharma industry spending more per capita on R&D than the US pharma industries. I have seen several articles saying the US does more R&D than the EU but the EU is trying to catch up.
Do you have any proof on points 1-3 & 5? I would rather someone in a country with socialized medicine address these because I do not have experience. But these seem like conjecture based on political philosophy and they seem hard to prove one way or the other (how do you prove that ‘more medical research’ comes from the US or EU?) The US has the same number of doctors per capita as any other developed country, and in several cases less than other developed countries. Why is that if all the doctors are moving over here? Shouldn’t the US have a glut of doctors and other countries have a shortage? And even if the doctors do move, why is that a bad thing? Can’t people just hop on planes and go visit them in the new country, assuming they leave in the first place?
http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/printout/0,13155,901040119-574849,00.html
Well this article says there actually is a brain drain to the US.