soulcougher73
Lifer
- Nov 29, 2006
- 15,663
- 4,137
- 136
Your entire post sounds like moronic dogma coming from someone who is good at spouting off pre-canned dogma but who is awful at critical thinking and introspection. Did you just copy and paste this crap from some other website? I'll be surprised if you actually read this thread or respond to my post.
You do have to wonder, how much was your ability to earn the hard-earned money dependent on the government and society at large in some sort of a way?
Oh, cry me an Atlas Shrugged.
Actually, socialized medicine has proven to be less expensive and superior to free market medicine in many ways. In fact, in the U.S. much of the money spent on health care is skimmed by people who have nothing to do with actually providing health care, such as insurance company executives and their employees, insurance brokers, benefits plan managers, and medical billing specialists.
The U.S. is spending about 16% or 17% of its GDP on health care while leaving tens of millions of people uninsured or under-insured with the rest living in sheer terror of losing their health insurance while having hundreds of thousands of medical bankruptcies every year and while having (surprise) private businesses suffer from the burdens of paying for and providing health insurance. (Ironically, real socialized medicine would probably be a boon for businesses and entrepreneurship.) In contrast, other nations spend a smaller percentage of their GDP on health care while having 100% coverage, a more content and secure populace, almost zero medical bankruptcies, and businesses that aren't burdened by health insurance concerns.
Did you know that many of those evil Kantian excrement-grubbing socialist people's states even have more doctors per capita than the U.S.? See:
http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/02/health-care-costs-opinions-columnists-reform.html
What makes you so certain that people in the evil socialist nations aren't receiving good health care? Do they have shorter life expectancies? What about the people in America who are receiving marginal health care or no health care at all?
How do you explain the situation where an insurance policy's death panel rescinds a cancer patient's health insurance on the day of her surgery? Is that "great health care"?
Under socialized medicine there's no reason why a wealthy SOB couldn't just purchase private, exquisite health care with his own money. It's not as though private doctors and hospitals would be outlawed if people wanted to pay for them.
Could that be because free market dogmatists destroyed the U.S. economy by shipping jobs overseas, importing foreigners on work visas to take college-education-requiring, knowledge-based jobs, and then imported millions of immigrants to displace even more Americans and further depress wages?
Come back and let us know what you think about our current health care system after your job is sent overseas or filled by someone on a work visa or after equally qualified Americans offer to do your job for half your current wage. That having been said, I agree that tax on the Cadillac plans does seem a little unfair.
What makes you so certain that you too might not become the fat bastard playing the PS3 or reading discussion forums one day? What if for some reason you lost your job and/or your ability to work and needed government-provided medicine. This could happen in any number of ways. Let's suppose that you are diagnosed with cancer and can no longer work or perform your job well so your employer has to let you go. Afterward you are unable to pay your new high premium. Then what? Let's suppose that someone plants child pornography on your computer (or that you are falsely accused of child molestation or rape or whatever) and that after copious amounts of media publicity and an acquittal people still regard you as a criminal and you cannot find work (at least not work that would provide benefits or pay you enough to purchase insurance on your own)? Let's suppose that next week it is revealed that your company's CEO has been slowly looting the company for years, leaving your company bankrupt and out of business and that he has now taken off for Bimini with his favorite bimbo and because of the current state of the U.S. economy you are unable to find another job?
Not everyone who advocates socialized medicine is a liberal wack job. Heck, some even greatly admire the likes of Ayn Rand and might even regard Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead as being two of their favorite novels.
I suspect that most advocates of real socialized medicine disapprove the Democrats' plan, which really does almost nothing to address the nation's fundamental health care problems (such as spending huge amounts of money on middlemen that do not directly provide health care).
Sometimes yes and sometimes no. Many people who worked hard and trained and obtained college education are unemployed or underemployed-and-involuntarily-out-of-field. The notion that we have a real meritocracy in this country is very much a myth where often success is based not on what you know but on who you know. Success might even be correlated with height and good looks.
What's ironic is that under real socialized medicine, the American people would either end up saving money or breaking even while having better coverage. It's been proven to be far more efficient and less expensive than our current system in many other countries.
Why can't we properly regard the high health insurance costs and inefficiencies of free market medicine as a tax? Does it make a difference if the checks you write are to a private company or to the government? If the check you would write to the government is smaller than the check you would write to the private insurance company then isn't that a "good tax"?
It's not an issue of knowledge, it's an issue of efficiency. Everyone needs or is going to need health insurance at some point. If a government-run system could save money and be more efficient than what the free market could provide then in essence, wouldn't the "government know better what to do?" Likewise, when it comes to national defense, the government probably "knows better what to do" than individual citizens.
It doesn't matter to a person or a business whether they write a check to the insurance company or to the government. The difference is that when it comes to health care, the check written to the government will be smaller than the one written to the insurance company. (Other nations spend a smaller amount of their GDP on health care and spend less per person while having 100% coverage and often more doctors per capita.)
I do agree with you that if free market dogmatism were to destroy the nation's economy as it is already doing that the government would have less tax revenue.
Other nations seem to be able to motivate their doctors to work and to provide health care. As far as I know the UK even pays bonuses to doctors who keep their patients healthy or improve their health. (Now that is a great incentive.)
I don't see any reason why government-funded medical and scientific research could not continue nor why independent researchers and pharmaceutical companies would not be allowed to reasonably profit from their patent-protected innovations.
You could keep a good portion of what you earn and if the government does a good job with its economic policies you'll be able to keep a larger portion or earn more in the first place. The irony is that under socialized medicine most people would have more wealth and a higher standard of living and quality of life than under free market medicine (where you could be subject to a private insurance company's death panel).
What makes you think that the overpaid banksters are really all that talented or that they could not be easily replaced? It's not as though our nation doesn't already have unemployed MBAs and other bright people who would love to have those jobs and/or to train for those positions. I don't buy the "they are like professional athletes" dogma.
By fleeing the country perhaps? Good riddance. I don't see how these people are irreplaceable. They just push paper and money around; it's not like they are the top 2% of all scientists or engineers. If you need to have an IQ in the top 5% to do those jobs, in a nation of 300+ million people we would have 15 million people who could potentially do those jobs.
What exactly do those guys do anyway? Make decisions about what businesses should and shouldn't receive loans? They don't provide actual health care. They do not engage in scientific or engineering innovation. They do not manufacture any actual products. What is it that they do for our economy that makes them so unique and irreplaceable, exactly? What are they doing that we cannot train your average MBA graduate to do 98% as well as what they do for a mere $200,000/year?
What exactly is it that you want? Do you want real laissez-faire capitalism or some sort of a capitalist-leaning mixed economy where the government has reasonable regulations?
I'm all for having a strong economy and for having less need for the government to have to provide social welfare services, but I truly doubt that real capitalism is the best way to attain that.
Maybe you think your post is the second coming of Atlas Shrugged or something, but it just came off to me as being knee-jerk teenage-like angst.
Very well stated. Hats off to you.