In many other industrialized countries, including our “neighbor to the north”, you’ll find demonstrably effective healthcare systems (variations on the ‘single-payer’ theme) that seem to work absolutely fine, or at least roughly fifty thousand dozen times better than our current system in the U.S. Yet for some unfathomable reason (or, well, quite frankly because our political system is profoundly broken and special-interest money always supersedes public interests and needs, and private insurance companies have a shitload of money), our politicians are doing everything possible to avoid adopting anything resembling any of these systems.
It’s like if they were setting out to build a car, and they looked at the general composition of a motor vehicle, and then decided “nah, fuck it, let’s put eighty wheels on it and make the engine out of wood and butter.” Then, when the whole thing inevitably breaks and is about a hundred times as expensive as they anticipated, as anyone with half the goddamned reasoning skills of an ear of corn could have predicted, they end up wondering what went wrong.
Meanwhile, instead of eliminating private insurance — the single-most fuckawful and destructive business model that has ever been birthed from the minds of bloodsucking, rent-seeking, sinister shitwads like some monstrous, sentient, peanut-encrusted, gluttonous turd that can only be fed with the desperate, the dead, and the screams of horrified children — we develop some bafflingly complicated welfare system to ensure its continued survival, at the expense yet again of the American people.
In fact, insurance is so much worse than rent-seeking behavior, because it’s basically rent-seeking directly at the expense of people’s lives and safety. And instead of simply financially benefiting from a transaction without contributing anything to it (which is the general definition of ‘rent-seeking’), they benefit from a transaction while doing whatever they possibly can to interfere with the transaction actually being carried out successfully, meanwhile taking your money to pay people to ensure that this interference is successful and you are denied the service you’ve been paying for.
Of course, the Democrats’ half-assed attempts at “healthcare” which are really just thinly-veiled corporatist accommodation and kowtowing are all doomed to failure. Likely it’ll be a lateral move to a system just as broken as what we currently have, and in the end, nothing will be accomplished and people will still go without the necessary medical treatments they so desperately need. Republicans and liberal economists will point to it as vindication that government programs don’t work. And years from now, when the subject of socialized healthcare is once again broached, everyone will say “but we TRIED that and it didn’t work”, even though we really didn’t try — we made the car with eighty wheels and a wooden engine.
Well, it’s commonly known that the US health care system is an absolute mess, but the situation over here in Europe isn’t perfect either. Here in Germany health care costs have spiralled out of control because of fraud on the part of privately practicing doctors and because of the greed of the pharmaceutical industrie. Even the spending caps on drugs that were introduced some time ago have had only a limited effect and that effect will soon canceled out by the arrival of new and costly cancer drugs. On the whole though, I think we are somewhat better off over here, although the Brits might have a thing or two to say about their NHS.
Well, Germany’s system is somewhat different than what I’m advocating. Germany is multiple-payer, if I recall correctly, with regulated private insurers. What I would like is being promoted here as “Medicare for all”, a universal expansion of our existing single-payer insurance system for the elderly. That’s similar to the Canadian single-payer system, which works better than ours by any measure other than how long it takes for an affluent person to get heart surgery, oh my god, I had to wait in a LINE, that NEVER happens in the US, I just fly my private JET down to the MAYO CLINIC and I get RIGHT IN.
government programs work alot better than the corporatist system we have (assuming the government programs didn’t pay corporations…). If you want universal healthcare, allow me to suggest having it State run (rather than federal). As you admitted, a universal healchare system at the federal level would probably be so bogged down with corruption that it might actually be WORSE than the system we have now (which is hard to imagine, I know). The other countries to do it have relatively little population compared to the united states, and State run health-care allows for experimentation and competition between private and public insurers, and will guarantee a better system overall.
T Garrett: Suck a dick. Because ‘leave it to the states’ hasn’t resulted in a dive for the bottom yet, oh no, it hasn’t.
I’m not interested in a program designed to lick the most elite dicks the most efficiently, nor am I interested in your Randroid bullshit.
I agree – America needs healthcare that guarantees that all people are assured adequate treatment for any medical condition. Actually, all humans ought to have the same guarantees of treatment – but if the US government can at least make that guarantee a reality for the segment of population it’s supposedly responsible, it ought to do it.
Unfortunately, one of the consequences of the American perception of uniqueness and exceptionalism is attitude that “just because it works in other countries doesn’t mean it’ll work here.” Female presidents and prime ministers and socialized healthcare have worked fine for other countries, sure, but it would be against the AMERICAN SPIRIT, or the PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS, or the CHRISTIAN VALUES ON WHICH WE WERE FOUNDED, to entertain such filthy liberal commie ideas here.
I also agree that the Democrats seem to contribute more to the maintenance of the status quo than the Republicans. After all, their existence depends on reinforcing the Two-Party Pepsi-Coke binary system which results in all debates being boiled down to two options when there are usually hundreds of ideas available, and a general impoverishment of the electoral process resulting in a demoralization of voters in general. It seems more and more that if you want something done in government, it’s better to chant your opinion in the streets than to discard them in the ballot box.
Its a good thing your a cocksucker Djur (and no, I don’t mean homosexual), otherwise I would have taken that as an insult. But since your a retard, I’ll take any insult you have to give me a clear compliment, even if unintended.
So please stop trolling dumbshit, it is just too entertaining. I want to hear some REAL points of view, not your cocksucking, dicklicking, elitist bullshit.
SOCIALIST HILLARYCARE FOR ILLEGALS AND THEIR PARENTS
Sorry, ocialist Clinton-like hillarycare for illegals and their parents.
I think maybe you guys think US health care sucks because it is expensive, not because it sucks insofar as quality. Well, it is expensive, but so is malpractice insurance and unregulated punitive damages in malpractice cases. So, while I think the government ought to be taking care of people who can’t afford to take care of themselves, I think they would do more more effectively by capping ridiculous judgements against doctors by those people who are only litigious for monetary gain.
Malpractice makes up relatively little of the cost to health insurers and doctors. The major cost is the profit that pharmesudical companies and insurance companies reap by nearly monopolizing the industry through the government and laws governing corporations. A monopoly that would only get worse, I might add, if we ever got universal healthcare.
So suck on that Djur, and let its warm creamy goodness float around in your mouth a little before spewing shit from between your teeth.
Yeah, because those Canadians are sure languishing under the yoke of massive pharmaceutical prices.
Sit on it and spin, glibby. You can’t even spell ‘pharmaceutical’ correctly. But, of course, that’d require you to actually read information about the topics you discuss rather than closing your eyes, opening your mouth, and hog-goggling out an endless stream of laissez-faire dogma.
are you still blind, or did you stab yourself in the eye again to try and dull the pain of your own stupidity? Canada is not America, different political systems–corporations don’t dominate their politics like they do here.
Criticizing spelling on the internetz is a brilliant tactic BTW. I like it when you stick your hand up your ass and rub it all over your attempt to create a dis. I might have had the time to look up such an important word if I wasn’t a lonely fat she-man sweating at her air conditioned terminal who obviously has nothing better to do than wishing she could have a penis up her ass.
Actually, it’s fairly reasonable to expect a person who’s bloviating on an issue to be able to spell a word that’s closely bound to it. If it were a typo, I could understand. If it were an unrelated word, again I could understand. But what you did there was the equivalent of boneheaded yellow-dog liberals shrieking about ‘facism’. If you’ve read enough to be even reasonably informed on health care issues, you’ve read the word ‘pharmaceutical’ enough times to spell it correctly.
You compound your error by making the hilarious claim that corporations don’t dominate the political system in Canada. I’m sure the average Canadian would have a few words for you — probably including “Stephen” and “Harper.”
In conclusion: you don’t need a menu, fool, cuz you just got served. Now get out of here before I go all Halo-frat-boy on your ass.
somehow your ridiculous argument doesn’t sit with me. “You misspelled one word, therefore you are dumbz.” Sounds like your just a motherfucker with no argument in sight, grasping at strawmans and red herrings.
The only thing I got served was your bullshit, mixed with blood because of how hard you had to squeeze it out of your ass. My point stands, smaller States could do better than a federal government, because corporations would have to bribe and lobby ALL of them in order to do what they can do by just bribing the federal government. I think you can see which one is easier.
Partitioning states and leaving taxes up to each of them individually with nothing on the federal level would — among other pretty disastrous things — have a pretty hilarious effect on individual economies. Picture, for instance, the GDP, but without New York City.
Income distribution exhibits such an enormous gap that, while New York and California could have really fucking spectacular systems because of the numbers of extremely rich people living in both states, basically every other state in the nation would be fucked pretty hard.
Look, I don’t trust the government either, but if you think the government is somehow not a business, and that corruption in business is impossible, you clearly have no understanding of economics on any level.
Oh, also: You think it’d be that much harder for juggernaut businesses to bribe about twice as many politicians as they currently are? And really, all they’d need were some bribes in the right place. I dunno, the “smaller is intrinsically better” thing just doesn’t have any logical basis — it’s really just ideological dogma based solely around individual desire for power over others. Scaling down the size of the pond makes the big fish relatively that much larger.
Also also: My typical argument against those who think that spelling and grammar don’t count for anything, and that errors with either are beyond reproach is:
If you don’t give enough of a shit about your own argument to present it in a way that’s readable, with at least the minimal effort required to understand the difference between, say, “your” and “you’re”, then how can you really expect anyone else to give a shit about it, either?
I am interested as to which ideology it is dogma from? The understanding that power corrupts is pretty well understood in my opinion, and I find it very odd that you call it “dogma.”
Your statement here just plain confused me.
And then you go and talk about “juggernaut businesses.” If you think that government is a business, then you would want to NOT have “juggernaut governments,” and therefore you would want to stay away from large ones. Doesn’t this support my point?
There’s a difference between a business that’s supposed to be required by law to operate in the public interest and be legally accountable with all of their actions to the public, and a private entity answerable only to its shareholders. When the public at large gets to vote on businesses’ decisions, then maybe your analogy would hold up. Even if the government’s accountability is currently quite less than ideal, there’s still the operational policy that such is supposed to be the case. We can at least have the illusion of some level of control through voting.
I’m not sure how replacing a publicly-accountable business with one that’s explicitly privately-accountable is somehow an acceptable solution. That really seems to just move things in the entirely opposite direction. The solution is to enforce accountability to the public, not to eliminate it entirely.
I don’t know about anybody else, but all of this fighting and acrimony is getting me kinda hot.
accountability is in the public. More than 65% of the GDP is spent on consumer products. That represents the public making decisions on what to buy and what not to buy, i.e. accountability. Sometimes (maybe even oftentimes) the public makes bad choices, but the same can certainly be said about government. Unlike the government, however, even if the public makes bad decisions, productivity is usually still increased, and the state of business seems to change a lot quicker and better for society.
I like making large sweeping statements without backing them up with evidence, but just think of this. What has consumer America done for the environment over the government? True, we are still harming the environment significantly, but technology is rapidly advancing in the things we really need to become green such as better insulation, hybrid cars (although America is not making them, we are buying them), new cheaper and more efficient wind technology, solar technology, and continued research into viable alternative fuel. What is the government doing? They are funding fucking ETHANOL! Ethanol! One of the worst corn subsidies in the history of the world, and they pretend its being fucking green!
Anyway, rant off. I feel I have made my point and will leave it at that.
Yeah, and voting with one’s dollars is always effective. Because no companies are ever entrenched, and everyone always has a choice. If I don’t like the oil companies’ policies, I can just NOT DRIVE. Fuck work, dude. Or, like, groceries? Who the hell needs THAT shit? I’m voting with my DOLLARS, man. I’m going to LEAVE EVERYTHING and LIVE IN THE WOODS up in WYOMING. They’ll be sorry they don’t have JOSH CROWLEY’S BUSINESS anymore, I tell you what! And all those products I WASN’T GOING TO BUY IN THE FIRST PLACE? Well… I’m STILL NOT GONNA BUY ‘EM. How about THAT, huh, businesses?
I agree, the government can be stupid. It’s broken. But again, if a security guard is having a party at the building and letting in all his or her friends, the solution isn’t to eliminate the security guard position but to fire the current guard.
Oh, and P.S. – You think people haven’t TRIED to not buy things and “vote with their dollars”? Wasn’t there, uh, some big movement in the 1960s and 70s that basically tried to accomplish something like that? Look, the only reason to take the “consumers can vote! By buying or not buying things!” tack is if you know it’s bullshit from obvious historical evidence from within the last half century and don’t have anything else more substantial to argue instead.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070613-att-willing-to-spy-for-nsa-mpaa-and-riaa.html?bub
VOTE WITH YOUR DOLLARS
ABANDON YOUR PHONE
FIND ANOTHER INTERNET
PURCHASE IS POWER
RON PAUL
I’m sorry, but I just have a hard fucking time buying your idea that internet users won’t demand to be switched to a more private internet provider. In fact, I find your assumption that they will not put significant dollar value behind such a thing to be absolutely absurd.
it may be that all data passes through AT&T NOW, but that won’t last long if they start to implement this policy. Service providers will be “AT&T free.”
Will AT&T collapse from such a decision? no. But a new market will open, unless of course the government gets involved and prevents it.
Er, who owns the infrastructure? Someone’s going to have to lay down a LOT of lines, and/or buy a SHITLOAD of radio frequency spectrum in order to provide any competition at all to the businesses that are already entrenched and already own or at the very least control the infrastructure.
It’s like if suddenly the government decided to make all roads pay-per-use, and your solution was “but some other private entity can come in and make roads that are cheaper to use!” Yeah, that’d be awesome, but good luck with that venture capital, and good luck finding a place to put the new roads.
I hope you will agree that there is a significant difference between internet wires and roads. The internet can go underground or even through the air (using satilites).
However, you are right that there is a significant infrastructure–and infrastructure not soley owned by AT&T, but owned significantly by it, true. When you build a road, it is economically impossible for a competitor to build a road over or under it–you have a natural monopoly. This is NOT the case with the internet!
However, you are correct in saying that nothing would be instant. To get instant results, you almost always have to use force. I generally find that a poor solution, if a solution at all.