How can they accept a government which now routinely steals 50% of their income?
... exsqueeze me? No, you have to be in a pretty high tax bracket for that to be true. Some people make so little that they only pay Social Security - which is split with the employer unless you are self-employed so that's around %7.5 last I checked. The highest paying jobs I've ever had (at least, on the record) ending up taking somewhere between 20-30% for taxes (total, including social security).
How can they accept the Soviet-style healthcare system being pushed on us,
Please explain to me:
1. What makes you think anything is being "pushed on us"; 2. What you know about the former Soviet union's health care that makes what has been proposed in this country a good comparison to that; 3. What exactly you think is the solution, considering how many people currently do not have even the option of having health care either due to preexisting conditions or employment situation?
... because frankly, I have had it with the ignorant, baseless slams on the idea of a public health care option.
With all this, how can they continue to hymn praises of the "freedom" we enjoy?
How much time have you spent living in other countries or speaking with immigrants about their home countries?
How can they accept a government which now routinely steals 50% of their income? ... exsqueeze me? No, you have to be in a pretty high tax bracket for that to be true.
I usually say that rhetorically. But now I'm taking a look at a recent paycheck to get actual numbers:
17.9% federal income tax 5.9% state income tax 6.1% social security tax, my portion (but yes, I've heard it's 7.5% on average) 6.1% social security tax, employer-paid portion (which would otherwise be available for my pay) 1.4% medicare tax 7.8% sales tax (assuming I spend everything I have remaining) _____ 45.2% total
That's pretty close to 50%. And I didn't make six figures, that's for sure.
That said, it's easy to fall into the trap of debating whether taxes are "too high". (And this is way too high.) Instead, I'd rather debate the philosophy of taxes themselves. I think taxation ... at any level ... is highly unethical.
Consider your own situation. You don't have kids. But you're still taxed to pay to educate other people's kids in the government-run public school system. That's wrong and unfair. I say, if someone chooses to have kids, they should be responsible for picking up the costs of raising them.
But perhaps, since you're already paying for other peoples' kids, you feel justified in demanding a government-run healthcare system so their taxes can help pay for your healthcare. But that just leads to the cutthroat dog-eat-dog world of today, where we're all angling to grab whatever money we can out of our neighbors. That is not the basis of a neighborly, just, and ethical society. How about a libertarian society where we leave each other alone, and where we treat each other's lives & property with respect? That's the society I want.
I'm sure you'd agree that it'd be wrong for someone to break into your house & steal money from you, even if they thought they could spend your money better than you can. But in that same vein, I say it's wrong for someone to vote for a politician who can legally steal from you (by taxation) to get the things they want, under the threat of kidnapping (because prison is what happens to those who fail to pay taxes).
Stealing is wrong. Kidnapping is wrong. Even when the government does it.
I am sorry, but you don't get to count the portion of social security that your employer pays, because no, they would NOT pay you more if they could. Business exists to make profit. They would add it to their profit. This is obvious.
You also do not get to count sales tax, because especially people in higher tax brackets definitely do not even come close to spending all of their income, and often invest their savings in some pretty high-yield investments, or manage to hide it in ways that you or I cannot so that it doesn't even count as their assets.
This brings your taxation to: 31.3%
Consider your own situation. You don't have kids. But you're still taxed to pay to educate other people's kids in the government-run public school system.
ALL OF SOCIETY benefits from children being educated. Or maybe you'd rather there be even more unsupervised, bored, uneducated children that have nothing better to do during the day than steal your bike and spray paint your garage whom, assuming they make it to adulthood, will be unable to hold any kind of job (even McDonalds requires basic math skills) and turn to more serious crimes. Does that really sound like the society you want?
I say, if someone chooses to have kids, they should be responsible for picking up the costs of raising them.
??? Look, I don't know about you, but there's no way I would have been able to go to school if my parents had to pay for it all themselves. And if you are suggesting that it would have been fair or right for me to then have never been educated? FUCK YOU SO FUCKING HARD. Education should NOT be a privilege for the wealthy. Neither should having children be a privilege for the wealthy. And by saying that society should not be taxed for a public education system, that is exactly what you are saying.
But perhaps, since you're already paying for other peoples' kids, you feel justified in demanding a government-run healthcare system so their taxes can help pay for your healthcare.
OMG, dude, FUCK YOU. Just like education, I don't think health care should be reserved for the healthy and wealthy - which it is right now. To say that poor people should just die because they can't afford health care, or to pay for their diabetes medication without insurance because they are considered "uninsurable", is so incredibly classist and unethical. WE'RE ALL HUMAN, AND THUS EQUAL IN VALUE. Worried about rationing? WE ALREADY HAVE IT. Worried about being taxed? Um, who do you THINK pays for it when someone declares bankruptcy? TAXPAYERS. Want to take a guess how many people, even people who have insurance, end up declaring bankruptcy because they can't afford their medical bills?
Not to mention, does it really seem ethical to you for health care to be based on profit? Shouldn't health care be more concerned with, oh, I don't know, HEALTH?
How about a libertarian society where we leave each other alone, and where we treat each other's lives & property with respect?
Saying, "You should die young and uneducated because you're poor," is NOT treating 45-60 million of your fellow Americans lives with respect.
I'm sure you'd agree that it'd be wrong for someone to break into your house & steal money from you, even if they thought they could spend your money better than you can.
TAXES ARE NOT STEALING!!! Or maybe you'd rather NOT have roads and police and streetlights and fire fighters. Good luck with that.
ETA: Ah yes, and let's not forget the military. You like having a military, right? You recognize that as a necessary public good? Because military defense makes up something like half of government spending (i.e. that's where half our tax money goes.)
I am sorry, but you don't get to count the portion of social security that your employer pays, because no, they would NOT pay you more if they could. Business exists to make profit. They would add it to their profit.
Maybe some businesses might pocket the money ... at first. But other businesses would see an opportunity to attract skilled people over from their competitors by offering higher wages, giving themselves a competitive advantage. Eventually, all employers would have to pay out the extra money in wages.
But even if they didn't, and that money went into the business's profit, so what? What happens to those profits? They get re-invested. Owners have more money to expand their businesses & factories, and hire more people. Either way, it would benefit workers & society.
ALL OF SOCIETY benefits from children being educated.
True. But all of society benefits from ALL TYPES OF BUSINESS. When you buy vegetables from the supermarket, it benefits you & the supermarket, but it also benefits the truckers who shipped the food, the farmers who grew the food, the people who supplied the seeds & fertilizer to the farmers, the manufacturers who built the farming machinery, the businesses who supplied steel to the machinery manufacturer, et cetera. If the food supply chain doesn't need to be run by government, then why does education?
Education should NOT be a privilege for the wealthy.
I agree 100%. The reason education is so costly is because it's poorly run by the government. Private enterprise could educate people much better & at much lower cost. I just bought a Spanish tutorial CD set for $31; I wonder how many $thousands the govt spends trying to teach each child Spanish (and turning them off to it). Personally, I'd get rid of the athletics programs (which were mandated in the 1950s because bureaucrats worried Americans were becoming too fat ... look around you, that hasn't worked too well), and history classes (which are mostly a litany of power-hungry presidents & senseless wars). Yet kids graduate financially illiterate (unable to understand compound interest, or know the difference between stocks & bonds) ... things they actually need to know! Someone starting an education company could offer classes at lower cost & teach things kids actually need! Education is too important to be left to the government. Same for healthcare.
FUCK YOU SO FUCKING HARD.
No need to be rude.
TAXES ARE NOT STEALING!!!
When people take money from you against your will, what else would you call it?
Or maybe you'd rather NOT have roads and police and streetlights and fire fighters.
If you believe these can only be provided by the government, simply because that's how they're done now, then you have a limited imagination. It's like the Russians, who once wondered "Who will build cars, if not the government?"
does it really seem ethical to you for health care to be based on profit? Shouldn't health care be more concerned with, oh, I don't know, HEALTH?
*sigh* I don't know what school taught you economics, but you really need to call them and ask for a refund.
1. What makes you think anything is being "pushed on us";
Everyone will be forced to accept it. Even if we don't choose to use a government-managed plan (assuming a "universal" plan doesn't pass & some private options remain for a while), we'll still be burdened with paying for it with even more taxes.
2. What you know about the former Soviet union's health care that makes what has been proposed in this country a good comparison to that;
In the Soviet Union, the government controlled all industry. It drove that society into the ground. Everyone became impoverished ... except for the politically-connected few, of course (a seminal book about life in the USSR is We The Living; while I don't agree with all of Rand's views, the book is excellent & fundamentally shaped my views toward government, although it's quite depressing). The same is true for North Korea, where people are starving. The same was also true for China ... until they decided to allow more freedom into their economy & their society became more prosperous.
The lesson is clear. The more government-controlled the economy, the more impoverished & miserable life is. The more free the economy, the healthier & more enjoyable living is. Increasingly, I'd tend to put America in the former category rather than the latter.
because frankly, I have had it with the ignorant, baseless slams on the idea of a public health care option.
Well, I'm frustrated with people who believe further government meddling in healthcare will somehow improve things and who are ignorant of the deleterious effects government has already had. But I'm even more frustrated that no one is publicly proposing solutions that can really work. The conservatives, who always claim to support "free markets", seem to think the existing system is okay, but that's because they like our current highly-regulated system where giant HMOs profiteer by controlling the market. But then again, Big Business and Big Government have always been in bed together, and neither wants to see a genuine free market. So in the debate between conservatives and liberals, we're given a "choice" between a terrible system, and an even worse system. Neither is acceptable, in my view.
To respond to your other item, I think the public healthcare "option" is a fallacy. The reason is that government and market mechanisms cannot coexist for long. An example of this is what happened in Hawaii, where the state passed a universal child healthcare program. Parents started dropping their private healthcare so they could sign up for "free" government healthcare (they probably decided they might as well sign up for it since their taxes were paying for it anyway). Costs quickly exceeded what officials had planned for (costs always exceed expectations in any government program), so the state decided to drop the program. However, had they continued with it, most likely private insurers would've lost so many customers that they would've been forced out of business ... leaving the government plan as the only one available. So again, government and private plans cannot coexist for long. So I do agree that any government "option" will inevitably lead to a total government monopoly on healthcare. And at that point, you'll only be able to get the healthcare that some government bureaucrat decides you should get, and it won't be pretty.
Want to know how much a bill for an ambulance call is? I can tell you. $787. It's ridiculously expensive ... but at least I could get an ambulance when I needed one. Not so for this poor woman in Britain, where a bureaucrat at the government-run hospital decided she didn't need one even though she was in labor, so she had to give birth out on the sidewalk. Nice, huh?
Solving the healthcare mess, part 1gothaminsereniaSeptember 3 2009, 00:34:38 UTC
3. What exactly you think is the solution, considering how many people currently do not have even the option of having health care either due to preexisting conditions or employment situation?
An excellent question. Unfortunately, there are no public figures today offering a solution that will work. By "work", I mean improving healthcare with better quality and lower prices. But I can offer a solution that would work ...
Let's start by looking at what already works. Lasik eye surgery and plastic surgery are both considered "cosmetic" and so are not covered by most health insurance plans. Both of these were very expensive when they first became available. Only the wealthy could afford lasik, and only high-paid movie stars could afford plastic surgery. But providers don't make much money when services are priced so high that few can afford them ... so they are impelled to innovate, develop better technologies, become more efficient, and lower costs ... while improving quality at the same time. The result is that the price of lasik has gone down from thousands of dollars to hundreds of dollars, at the same time the technology has improved (the first lasiks were done with a scalpel, now it's done by laser). The same is true for plastic surgery; today, you don't have to be a movie star, any middle-aged person can get fairly inexpensive botox.
Meanwhile, all other medicines, treatments, and surgeries which are covered by insurance have continued to escalate in price.
Let's look at something else that works. I bought my laptop computer back in 2000 for $2200. But today, you can get a top-of-the-line new laptop for $300! And these laptops have bigger harddrives, more memory, more USB ports, built-in DVD recorders, and wireless internet capability. Computers cost 10% of what they did 10 years ago, and they're also better, faster, & have more features! Today, even the poor can afford a computer ... and if they still can't pay the $300, they can get a used machine only a few years old that's almost as good for around $75. That's 3% of what the price was 10 years ago!
Wouldn't it be nice if healthcare worked like that too? So ... what do lasik surgery & computers have in common? They're both paid for by people out-of-pocket, not through insurance. Insurance is part of the problem. We don't need health insurance, we need health care. Instead of trying to shift rising costs onto someone else, which is what health insurance does, we need a system where health care itself can drop in price, so people can afford it out-of-pocket. Other examples of this are aspirin & pepto bismol, which have been around for decades, pre-dating the government's creation of the FDA, which is why they're so inexpensive.
In addition, the improvement in computers has been so dramatic because the computer industry is totally unregulated by the government. There are no mandates by the government telling people they must own a computer. There are no government requirements for size or speed or features or cost of a computer. This is left to the computer manufacturers, who decide what to produce. Their decisions are directed by one thing: what consumers want. Even safety is not regulated by the government. There is no government agency which sets safety standards for computers or any other type of electrical equipment. I'll bet you didn't know that! Safety standards for electrical equipment are set by the UL, a private company. UL creates the standards & performs testing of equipment, and computer manufacturers pay the UL so they can affix a UL label on their equipment. Check underneath your computer, it will have a UL label on it. Retailers refuse to sell electrical equipment without a UL label, because liability insurance companies would refuse to cover them if they did. The system works so well, you've probably never heard UL mentioned on the evening news. Compare that to government safety agencies like the FDA & SEC, which are in the news every month with some new story about how they failed, and how they promise to "reform" (but never do).
Solving the healthcare mess, part 2gothaminsereniaSeptember 3 2009, 01:03:50 UTC
So, to solve the healthcare mess, we need to identify the true causes of the problems. If we don't understand the problem, chances are any "solution" will either make things worse or just shift problems off to another area. Here are two big things that would really help the situation:
1. Abolish the FDA. The FDA's drug testing process costs about $1 billion for each new drug approved, and this cost ends up being passed on to the consumer. Despite that high cost, it doesn't always work, as the Vioxx scandal showed. But the main problem is due to the fact that only the giant pharmaceutical corporations are able to afford it. These expensive testing process costs shut out any small or independent firms which might develop a new drug or product, and that's why today we have an oligopoly of giant pharmaceutical companies which can gouge consumers for the price of medicine. Upjohn, Merck, & Bristol Myers Squibb love the FDA, because its $1 billion approval process lets them corner the market by keeping out new competitors, so they can keep prices high. Furthermore, the FDA is terrible at monitoring food safety. Most recently, it was the pistachio scandal. Before that it was peanuts. Before that it was ground beef, and many other such incidents. The FDA drives up costs and they suck as a safety watchdog. Get rid of them. Instead of government-regulation, let's have market-regulation by an organization such as the UL, which is much less expensive and which actually works.
2. Eliminate employer-provided health insurance mandates. It's ironic that so many liberals are lauding the career of Ted Kennedy, considering that he helped start us on the road to this healthcare mess. Kennedy championed the HMO Act of 1973, which required employers above a certain size to offer group health insurance for their employees. This led directly to the rise of the giant HMOs, because HMOs were the only organizations big enough to offer coverage to large groups of employees. This drove many independent doctors out of business, eliminating competition, and allowing the HMOs to control the market. Furthermore, Kennedy's HMO mandate had a more subtle but even worse effect: it removed the ability of individuals to make market-based decisions. Did you hear about Blue Cross in California a few months ago? To slash their costs, they decided to nitpick the histories of anyone submitting a large healthcare claim. They'd look for incidents where, for example, a patient had seen a doctor for a sore back, then claim the person had a "chronic back ailment" which they hadn't disclosed on their enrollment form, using it as an excuse to deny their claim & retroactively revoke their policy. Basically, Blue Cross was breaching contracts. It was an outrage. Now if we had a genuine free market, and if you & I had coverage through Blue Cross and we heard this on the news, we'd immediately cancel our policies, afraid they wouldn't stand behind their contracts. We'd switch to more reputable firms ... and so would everyone else. Blue Cross would have to immediately stop this unethical practice, or they'd quickly lose customers & be out of business. But we cannot make those decisions because we're "trapped" in our employer-provided plan. So we're left to appeal to government to chase after Blue Cross ... but I'm not optimistic, since government is more interested in protecting big corporations than it is in looking out for consumers. Get rid of government's mandate for employer-provided insurance mandates, and let people buy their own individual policies. (Although, if we had a genuine free market, health care costs would become so inexpensive that people wouldn't even need insurance anymore, except for emergencies ... which is the same reason you have auto insurance or renters insurance.)
Computers are almost totally unregulated by the government. Healthcare is one of the most highly-regulated industries we have. It's no wonder that computers are getting better & cheaper, while healthcare is getting worse & even more expensive.
... exsqueeze me? No, you have to be in a pretty high tax bracket for that to be true. Some people make so little that they only pay Social Security - which is split with the employer unless you are self-employed so that's around %7.5 last I checked. The highest paying jobs I've ever had (at least, on the record) ending up taking somewhere between 20-30% for taxes (total, including social security).
How can they accept the Soviet-style healthcare system being pushed on us,
Please explain to me:
1. What makes you think anything is being "pushed on us";
2. What you know about the former Soviet union's health care that makes what has been proposed in this country a good comparison to that;
3. What exactly you think is the solution, considering how many people currently do not have even the option of having health care either due to preexisting conditions or employment situation?
... because frankly, I have had it with the ignorant, baseless slams on the idea of a public health care option.
With all this, how can they continue to hymn praises of the "freedom" we enjoy?
How much time have you spent living in other countries or speaking with immigrants about their home countries?
Reply
I usually say that rhetorically. But now I'm taking a look at a recent paycheck to get actual numbers:
17.9% federal income tax
5.9% state income tax
6.1% social security tax, my portion (but yes, I've heard it's 7.5% on average)
6.1% social security tax, employer-paid portion (which would otherwise be available for my pay)
1.4% medicare tax
7.8% sales tax (assuming I spend everything I have remaining)
_____
45.2% total
That's pretty close to 50%. And I didn't make six figures, that's for sure.
That said, it's easy to fall into the trap of debating whether taxes are "too high". (And this is way too high.) Instead, I'd rather debate the philosophy of taxes themselves. I think taxation ... at any level ... is highly unethical.
Consider your own situation. You don't have kids. But you're still taxed to pay to educate other people's kids in the government-run public school system. That's wrong and unfair. I say, if someone chooses to have kids, they should be responsible for picking up the costs of raising them.
But perhaps, since you're already paying for other peoples' kids, you feel justified in demanding a government-run healthcare system so their taxes can help pay for your healthcare. But that just leads to the cutthroat dog-eat-dog world of today, where we're all angling to grab whatever money we can out of our neighbors. That is not the basis of a neighborly, just, and ethical society. How about a libertarian society where we leave each other alone, and where we treat each other's lives & property with respect? That's the society I want.
I'm sure you'd agree that it'd be wrong for someone to break into your house & steal money from you, even if they thought they could spend your money better than you can. But in that same vein, I say it's wrong for someone to vote for a politician who can legally steal from you (by taxation) to get the things they want, under the threat of kidnapping (because prison is what happens to those who fail to pay taxes).
Stealing is wrong. Kidnapping is wrong. Even when the government does it.
Reply
You also do not get to count sales tax, because especially people in higher tax brackets definitely do not even come close to spending all of their income, and often invest their savings in some pretty high-yield investments, or manage to hide it in ways that you or I cannot so that it doesn't even count as their assets.
This brings your taxation to: 31.3%
Consider your own situation. You don't have kids. But you're still taxed to pay to educate other people's kids in the government-run public school system.
ALL OF SOCIETY benefits from children being educated. Or maybe you'd rather there be even more unsupervised, bored, uneducated children that have nothing better to do during the day than steal your bike and spray paint your garage whom, assuming they make it to adulthood, will be unable to hold any kind of job (even McDonalds requires basic math skills) and turn to more serious crimes. Does that really sound like the society you want?
I say, if someone chooses to have kids, they should be responsible for picking up the costs of raising them.
??? Look, I don't know about you, but there's no way I would have been able to go to school if my parents had to pay for it all themselves. And if you are suggesting that it would have been fair or right for me to then have never been educated? FUCK YOU SO FUCKING HARD. Education should NOT be a privilege for the wealthy. Neither should having children be a privilege for the wealthy. And by saying that society should not be taxed for a public education system, that is exactly what you are saying.
But perhaps, since you're already paying for other peoples' kids, you feel justified in demanding a government-run healthcare system so their taxes can help pay for your healthcare.
OMG, dude, FUCK YOU. Just like education, I don't think health care should be reserved for the healthy and wealthy - which it is right now. To say that poor people should just die because they can't afford health care, or to pay for their diabetes medication without insurance because they are considered "uninsurable", is so incredibly classist and unethical. WE'RE ALL HUMAN, AND THUS EQUAL IN VALUE. Worried about rationing? WE ALREADY HAVE IT. Worried about being taxed? Um, who do you THINK pays for it when someone declares bankruptcy? TAXPAYERS. Want to take a guess how many people, even people who have insurance, end up declaring bankruptcy because they can't afford their medical bills?
Not to mention, does it really seem ethical to you for health care to be based on profit? Shouldn't health care be more concerned with, oh, I don't know, HEALTH?
How about a libertarian society where we leave each other alone, and where we treat each other's lives & property with respect?
Saying, "You should die young and uneducated because you're poor," is NOT treating 45-60 million of your fellow Americans lives with respect.
I'm sure you'd agree that it'd be wrong for someone to break into your house & steal money from you, even if they thought they could spend your money better than you can.
TAXES ARE NOT STEALING!!! Or maybe you'd rather NOT have roads and police and streetlights and fire fighters. Good luck with that.
ETA: Ah yes, and let's not forget the military. You like having a military, right? You recognize that as a necessary public good? Because military defense makes up something like half of government spending (i.e. that's where half our tax money goes.)
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Maybe some businesses might pocket the money ... at first. But other businesses would see an opportunity to attract skilled people over from their competitors by offering higher wages, giving themselves a competitive advantage. Eventually, all employers would have to pay out the extra money in wages.
But even if they didn't, and that money went into the business's profit, so what? What happens to those profits? They get re-invested. Owners have more money to expand their businesses & factories, and hire more people. Either way, it would benefit workers & society.
ALL OF SOCIETY benefits from children being educated.
True. But all of society benefits from ALL TYPES OF BUSINESS. When you buy vegetables from the supermarket, it benefits you & the supermarket, but it also benefits the truckers who shipped the food, the farmers who grew the food, the people who supplied the seeds & fertilizer to the farmers, the manufacturers who built the farming machinery, the businesses who supplied steel to the machinery manufacturer, et cetera. If the food supply chain doesn't need to be run by government, then why does education?
Education should NOT be a privilege for the wealthy.
I agree 100%. The reason education is so costly is because it's poorly run by the government. Private enterprise could educate people much better & at much lower cost. I just bought a Spanish tutorial CD set for $31; I wonder how many $thousands the govt spends trying to teach each child Spanish (and turning them off to it). Personally, I'd get rid of the athletics programs (which were mandated in the 1950s because bureaucrats worried Americans were becoming too fat ... look around you, that hasn't worked too well), and history classes (which are mostly a litany of power-hungry presidents & senseless wars). Yet kids graduate financially illiterate (unable to understand compound interest, or know the difference between stocks & bonds) ... things they actually need to know! Someone starting an education company could offer classes at lower cost & teach things kids actually need! Education is too important to be left to the government. Same for healthcare.
FUCK YOU SO FUCKING HARD.
No need to be rude.
TAXES ARE NOT STEALING!!!
When people take money from you against your will, what else would you call it?
Or maybe you'd rather NOT have roads and police and streetlights and fire fighters.
If you believe these can only be provided by the government, simply because that's how they're done now, then you have a limited imagination. It's like the Russians, who once wondered "Who will build cars, if not the government?"
does it really seem ethical to you for health care to be based on profit? Shouldn't health care be more concerned with, oh, I don't know, HEALTH?
*sigh* I don't know what school taught you economics, but you really need to call them and ask for a refund.
Reply
Everyone will be forced to accept it. Even if we don't choose to use a government-managed plan (assuming a "universal" plan doesn't pass & some private options remain for a while), we'll still be burdened with paying for it with even more taxes.
2. What you know about the former Soviet union's health care that makes what has been proposed in this country a good comparison to that;
In the Soviet Union, the government controlled all industry. It drove that society into the ground. Everyone became impoverished ... except for the politically-connected few, of course (a seminal book about life in the USSR is We The Living; while I don't agree with all of Rand's views, the book is excellent & fundamentally shaped my views toward government, although it's quite depressing). The same is true for North Korea, where people are starving. The same was also true for China ... until they decided to allow more freedom into their economy & their society became more prosperous.
The lesson is clear. The more government-controlled the economy, the more impoverished & miserable life is. The more free the economy, the healthier & more enjoyable living is. Increasingly, I'd tend to put America in the former category rather than the latter.
because frankly, I have had it with the ignorant, baseless slams on the idea of a public health care option.
Well, I'm frustrated with people who believe further government meddling in healthcare will somehow improve things and who are ignorant of the deleterious effects government has already had. But I'm even more frustrated that no one is publicly proposing solutions that can really work. The conservatives, who always claim to support "free markets", seem to think the existing system is okay, but that's because they like our current highly-regulated system where giant HMOs profiteer by controlling the market. But then again, Big Business and Big Government have always been in bed together, and neither wants to see a genuine free market. So in the debate between conservatives and liberals, we're given a "choice" between a terrible system, and an even worse system. Neither is acceptable, in my view.
To respond to your other item, I think the public healthcare "option" is a fallacy. The reason is that government and market mechanisms cannot coexist for long. An example of this is what happened in Hawaii, where the state passed a universal child healthcare program. Parents started dropping their private healthcare so they could sign up for "free" government healthcare (they probably decided they might as well sign up for it since their taxes were paying for it anyway). Costs quickly exceeded what officials had planned for (costs always exceed expectations in any government program), so the state decided to drop the program. However, had they continued with it, most likely private insurers would've lost so many customers that they would've been forced out of business ... leaving the government plan as the only one available. So again, government and private plans cannot coexist for long. So I do agree that any government "option" will inevitably lead to a total government monopoly on healthcare. And at that point, you'll only be able to get the healthcare that some government bureaucrat decides you should get, and it won't be pretty.
Want to know how much a bill for an ambulance call is? I can tell you. $787. It's ridiculously expensive ... but at least I could get an ambulance when I needed one. Not so for this poor woman in Britain, where a bureaucrat at the government-run hospital decided she didn't need one even though she was in labor, so she had to give birth out on the sidewalk. Nice, huh?
Reply
An excellent question. Unfortunately, there are no public figures today offering a solution that will work. By "work", I mean improving healthcare with better quality and lower prices. But I can offer a solution that would work ...
Let's start by looking at what already works. Lasik eye surgery and plastic surgery are both considered "cosmetic" and so are not covered by most health insurance plans. Both of these were very expensive when they first became available. Only the wealthy could afford lasik, and only high-paid movie stars could afford plastic surgery. But providers don't make much money when services are priced so high that few can afford them ... so they are impelled to innovate, develop better technologies, become more efficient, and lower costs ... while improving quality at the same time. The result is that the price of lasik has gone down from thousands of dollars to hundreds of dollars, at the same time the technology has improved (the first lasiks were done with a scalpel, now it's done by laser). The same is true for plastic surgery; today, you don't have to be a movie star, any middle-aged person can get fairly inexpensive botox.
Meanwhile, all other medicines, treatments, and surgeries which are covered by insurance have continued to escalate in price.
Let's look at something else that works. I bought my laptop computer back in 2000 for $2200. But today, you can get a top-of-the-line new laptop for $300! And these laptops have bigger harddrives, more memory, more USB ports, built-in DVD recorders, and wireless internet capability. Computers cost 10% of what they did 10 years ago, and they're also better, faster, & have more features! Today, even the poor can afford a computer ... and if they still can't pay the $300, they can get a used machine only a few years old that's almost as good for around $75. That's 3% of what the price was 10 years ago!
Wouldn't it be nice if healthcare worked like that too? So ... what do lasik surgery & computers have in common? They're both paid for by people out-of-pocket, not through insurance. Insurance is part of the problem. We don't need health insurance, we need health care. Instead of trying to shift rising costs onto someone else, which is what health insurance does, we need a system where health care itself can drop in price, so people can afford it out-of-pocket. Other examples of this are aspirin & pepto bismol, which have been around for decades, pre-dating the government's creation of the FDA, which is why they're so inexpensive.
In addition, the improvement in computers has been so dramatic because the computer industry is totally unregulated by the government. There are no mandates by the government telling people they must own a computer. There are no government requirements for size or speed or features or cost of a computer. This is left to the computer manufacturers, who decide what to produce. Their decisions are directed by one thing: what consumers want. Even safety is not regulated by the government. There is no government agency which sets safety standards for computers or any other type of electrical equipment. I'll bet you didn't know that! Safety standards for electrical equipment are set by the UL, a private company. UL creates the standards & performs testing of equipment, and computer manufacturers pay the UL so they can affix a UL label on their equipment. Check underneath your computer, it will have a UL label on it. Retailers refuse to sell electrical equipment without a UL label, because liability insurance companies would refuse to cover them if they did. The system works so well, you've probably never heard UL mentioned on the evening news. Compare that to government safety agencies like the FDA & SEC, which are in the news every month with some new story about how they failed, and how they promise to "reform" (but never do).
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1. Abolish the FDA. The FDA's drug testing process costs about $1 billion for each new drug approved, and this cost ends up being passed on to the consumer. Despite that high cost, it doesn't always work, as the Vioxx scandal showed. But the main problem is due to the fact that only the giant pharmaceutical corporations are able to afford it. These expensive testing process costs shut out any small or independent firms which might develop a new drug or product, and that's why today we have an oligopoly of giant pharmaceutical companies which can gouge consumers for the price of medicine. Upjohn, Merck, & Bristol Myers Squibb love the FDA, because its $1 billion approval process lets them corner the market by keeping out new competitors, so they can keep prices high. Furthermore, the FDA is terrible at monitoring food safety. Most recently, it was the pistachio scandal. Before that it was peanuts. Before that it was ground beef, and many other such incidents. The FDA drives up costs and they suck as a safety watchdog. Get rid of them. Instead of government-regulation, let's have market-regulation by an organization such as the UL, which is much less expensive and which actually works.
2. Eliminate employer-provided health insurance mandates. It's ironic that so many liberals are lauding the career of Ted Kennedy, considering that he helped start us on the road to this healthcare mess. Kennedy championed the HMO Act of 1973, which required employers above a certain size to offer group health insurance for their employees. This led directly to the rise of the giant HMOs, because HMOs were the only organizations big enough to offer coverage to large groups of employees. This drove many independent doctors out of business, eliminating competition, and allowing the HMOs to control the market. Furthermore, Kennedy's HMO mandate had a more subtle but even worse effect: it removed the ability of individuals to make market-based decisions. Did you hear about Blue Cross in California a few months ago? To slash their costs, they decided to nitpick the histories of anyone submitting a large healthcare claim. They'd look for incidents where, for example, a patient had seen a doctor for a sore back, then claim the person had a "chronic back ailment" which they hadn't disclosed on their enrollment form, using it as an excuse to deny their claim & retroactively revoke their policy. Basically, Blue Cross was breaching contracts. It was an outrage. Now if we had a genuine free market, and if you & I had coverage through Blue Cross and we heard this on the news, we'd immediately cancel our policies, afraid they wouldn't stand behind their contracts. We'd switch to more reputable firms ... and so would everyone else. Blue Cross would have to immediately stop this unethical practice, or they'd quickly lose customers & be out of business. But we cannot make those decisions because we're "trapped" in our employer-provided plan. So we're left to appeal to government to chase after Blue Cross ... but I'm not optimistic, since government is more interested in protecting big corporations than it is in looking out for consumers. Get rid of government's mandate for employer-provided insurance mandates, and let people buy their own individual policies. (Although, if we had a genuine free market, health care costs would become so inexpensive that people wouldn't even need insurance anymore, except for emergencies ... which is the same reason you have auto insurance or renters insurance.)
Computers are almost totally unregulated by the government. Healthcare is one of the most highly-regulated industries we have. It's no wonder that computers are getting better & cheaper, while healthcare is getting worse & even more expensive.
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