Opinion - Personal Accountability in Socialized Health Care - v 2.0

[theincubus]

1) Basic Medical Care should be a right, but extraordinary care should remain a privilege.  The challenge is to be able to accept the life and death reality of this triage and figuring out where to draw the line.

2) Health habits must have an effect on the cost of health care for the INDIVIDUAL.  Example: Smokers and physically unfit must buy a

Comments

[theincubus]

reference:

Fat Politics By J. Eric Oliver, Oxford University Press, 2006

- a darn good read -

Triage

[sombrereptiles]

We had a discussion years ago about spending (to pick an arbitrary, unresearched number) hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix congenital defects in a baby's lungs or heart. You came down on the side of this being positive under cost/benefit analysis. Does this still stack up under your less kind, less gentle suggestion?

Mind you, I am on the same page, sort of. We still have to draw a line through the massive grey area between Basic and Extraordinary. And then, the availability of extraordinary health insurance would become the new "crisis".

Health Care

[anonymous]

Jordan,

One of the things you were saying was that free enterpise had failed for both the banking system and housing industry. In fact your wrong on both cases. The banking and housing industry failed because the govt. got involved in both. The goverment started requiring banks to give low interest loans to people who had no right in buying a house with the income the made. Fannie mae and Freddy Mac are both Govt run banks that were pushing this the most. In fact if the govt. kept out of both industries we would not be in this position now.

Re: Health Care

[sombrereptiles]

a) banking is a different discussion

Re: Health Care

[monodemuerto]

Dear Anon

Re: Health Care

[theincubus]

Hiya (Charles?),

It's funny, I thought that the worst crisis in decades was caused by the deregulation of subprime mortgage market and allowing investment banks to leverage three times as much as they did in 2004. Silly me, what was I thinking. We need MORE free market.

I'm not against free enterprise, but in the face of mega-corps who are big enough that the can buy and sell influence (auto industry, CAFE standards) and then credibly claim national disaster if they are not bailed out (US auto industry bankruptcy) it's clear that we need to hold companies in check or they'll use gamesmanship to play our economic system for their own good and the country's woe.

Think about it.