|
Mr Interweb posted:How would universal healthcare work in libertopia? Clearly there would be no government run programs like medicare and medicaid, and there would be no regulation, and thus nothing to artificially alter prices on the private market. Because the health insurance market is now unfettered, prices for insurance plummet so that even though there's nothing like a mandate to buy health insurance, presumably everyone will buy health insurance because it's so cheap. Often they also include something about medicines being much less expensive and/or obtainable without having to get a prescription as forced by evil Statist drug regulations/medical licensing requirements. As to why this didn't happen pre-LBJ, I think you know the answer: The State. It's always the State that made the bad things happen. It's only the State that makes bad things happen.
|
#
?
Nov 7, 2014 22:06
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 14, 2024 19:32 |
|
|
Also remember that if you have a suspicion that maybe the state can make medicine affordable to everyone just fine, because comparing medicine costs today, it's always more expensive in nations with less state control over healthcare than ones with more, always remember that you're wrong. Praxeology tells us that because we know deep down in our souls that the Free Market always makes things better and the state makes things worse, we can ignore empirical evidence to the contrary because it must be a trick by the Demiurge to get us to doubt our faith in the Free Markets.
|
|
#
?
Nov 7, 2014 22:17
|
|
|
DrProsek posted:Also remember that if you have a suspicion that maybe the state can make medicine affordable to everyone just fine, because comparing medicine costs today, it's always more expensive in nations with less state control over healthcare than ones with more, always remember that you're wrong. Praxeology tells us that because we know deep down in our souls that the Free Market always makes things better and the state makes things worse, we can ignore empirical evidence to the contrary because it must be a trick by the Demiurge to get us to doubt our faith in the Free Markets. That's another thing. Libertarian thought turns the concept of the free market from a tool for commerce and wealth, into basically an angry volcano god whom we must appease and not hinder in any way, or else face an unspecified armageddon.
|
|
#
?
Nov 7, 2014 22:20
|
|
|
StandardVC10 posted:That's another thing. Libertarian thought turns the concept of the free market from a tool for commerce and wealth, into basically an angry volcano god whom we must appease and not hinder in any way, or else face an unspecified armageddon. Basically this: 
|
|
#
?
Nov 7, 2014 22:41
|
|
|
Mr Interweb posted:How would universal healthcare work in libertopia? Clearly there would be no government run programs like medicare and medicaid, and there would be no regulation, and thus nothing to artificially alter prices on the private market. Because the health insurance market is now unfettered, prices for insurance plummet so that even though there's nothing like a mandate to buy health insurance, presumably everyone will buy health insurance because it's so cheap. Uh, what? This is like asking "how do we ensure the workers seize the means of production in libertarianism?". Guaranteeing universal health care is 100% un-Libertarian.
|
|
#
?
Nov 7, 2014 23:06
|
|
|
Mr Interweb posted:How would universal healthcare work in libertopia? Clearly there would be no government run programs like medicare and medicaid, and there would be no regulation, and thus nothing to artificially alter prices on the private market. Because the health insurance market is now unfettered, prices for insurance plummet so that even though there's nothing like a mandate to buy health insurance, presumably everyone will buy health insurance because it's so cheap. The typical response that I've heard is that we shouldn't need insurance to pay for healthcare. Back in the glory days of the early 1900's, why, people would just go on up to the hospital and pay out of pocket for services! It was only once the mean old government began to interfere that prices shot up like a rocket. If we remove the government prices will decrease and then people will be able to make the choice on whether or not to risk going without insurance free of coercion. Whats that timmy? Yeah sure some people will probably have poor time preferences and choose not to buy insurance because they are healthy. And sure some of those people will get hit by a bus, or get cancer or have their hearts explode etc. If they can't afford it, well then they simply don't get treatment, caveat emptor my friend!
|
|
#
?
Nov 7, 2014 23:55
|
|
|
I'm pretty sure you could still get 1900-quality healthcare for pretty cheap compared to chemo. Especially if you grow your own cocaine. Maybe you can't get sulfa drugs anymore but with the money you save on expensive antibiotics you should be able to buy enough old-timey thermometers to work up some mercury treatments.
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2014 00:15
|
|
|
Caros posted:Back in the glory days of the early 1900's, why, people would just go on up to the hospital and pay out of pocket for services! No, my friend. "Men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value."
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2014 01:18
|
|
|
Mr Interweb posted:How would universal healthcare work in libertopia? Death 
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2014 03:58
|
|
|
The real answer is that there's no regulation on doctors so you're rolling the dice on whether you're buying actual medicine from a qualified doctor or tincture of methamphetamine from a traveling con-artist. Either way it's only a matter of time before you're killed by an anti-biotic resistant infection complements of a totally unregulated market for pharmaceuticals.
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2014 04:00
|
|
|
Nah, without the corrupt FDA, the free market will have rating agencies whose business depends on their unimpeachable honour. Much like the financial rating agencies, in Libertopia drug manufacturers will pay them to inspect and certify their products; so just look for that shiny gold AAA sticker and you'll know you've got a greater chance of dying from a civilization-ending comet than you do of getting some toxic financial or pharmaceutical product.
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2014 04:46
|
|
|
In Valhalla DRO you'd be treated to the best health care plan, with integrative medicine battle-poultices crafted by Dr. Andrew Weil, Professor of Medicine and thegn of Tuscon.
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2014 04:52
|
|
|
EvanSchenck posted:The real answer is that there's no regulation on doctors so you're rolling the dice on whether you're buying actual medicine from a qualified doctor or tincture of methamphetamine from a traveling con-artist. Either way it's only a matter of time before you're killed by an anti-biotic resistant infection complements of a totally unregulated market for pharmaceuticals. Well to be fair, it's also a matter of time before word of mouth gets around and people know that Dr Clark Stanley's Snake Oil won't in fact treat cancer and so his rating on Yelp will plummet (assuming Yelp doesn't delete the bad feedback, but I'm sure if that happened Yelp would get bad reviews on Yelp and then people would stop using Yelp). We just have to wait for a good 5 or 6 people to die from not getting cancer medicine and taking his fake stuff. Also we assume in this argument that people will generally have the spare time to look around and make a list of good and bad doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and ambulance companies. JRod, do you think the work day will get shorter in a Libertarian world?
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2014 04:54
|
|
|
VitalSigns posted:Nah, without the corrupt FDA, the free market will have rating agencies whose business depends on their unimpeachable honour. Much like the financial rating agencies, in Libertopia drug manufacturers will pay them to inspect and certify their products; so just look for that shiny gold AAA sticker and you'll know you've got a greater chance of dying from a civilization-ending comet than you do of getting some toxic financial or pharmaceutical product. Fortunately, with the creation of Libertopia, civilization has already come to an end, so a comet is nothing to worry about.
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2014 04:55
|
|
|
DrProsek posted:Well to be fair, it's also a matter of time before word of mouth gets around and people know that Dr Clark Stanley's Snake Oil won't in fact treat cancer and so his rating on Yelp will plummet (assuming Yelp doesn't delete the bad feedback, but I'm sure if that happened Yelp would get bad reviews on Yelp and then people would stop using Yelp). We just have to wait for a good 5 or 6 people to die from not getting cancer medicine and taking his fake stuff. Also we assume in this argument that people will generally have the spare time to look around and make a list of good and bad doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and ambulance companies. I think the continued existence of Homeopathy and Orgone Therapy speaks against this.
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2014 05:00
|
|
|
StandardVC10 posted:Fortunately, with the creation of Libertopia, civilization has already come to an end, so a comet is nothing to worry about. The comet is sweet, sweet relief Political Whores posted:I think the continued existence of Homeopathy and Orgone Therapy speaks against this. Those scams only exist because of the state and/or you're falling for FDA anti-orgone propaganda because they don't want you to know the secret to curing all disease! VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Nov 8, 2014 |
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2014 05:11
|
|
|
SedanChair posted:In Valhalla DRO you'd be treated to the best health care plan, with integrative medicine battle-poultices crafted by Dr. Andrew Weil, Professor of Medicine and thegn of Tuscon. We also have some of the best users of Seidr magic on this or any other continent! No expense is spared (for those who can pay)!
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2014 05:40
|
|
|
DrProsek posted:(assuming Yelp doesn't delete the bad feedback, but I'm sure if that happened Yelp would get bad reviews on Yelp and then people would stop using Yelp)
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2014 05:54
|
|
|
twodot posted:This is a weird complaint. Yelp exists today and has businesses with bad feedback that don't get deleted. It's pretty clearly not government regulation that stops this. Of course, Yelp is a poor substitute for the FDA, but "Yelp might delete bad feedback, even though it doesn't appear to do that today" isn't a reason why. On the other hand, Yelp is rumored to shake businesses down for subscriptions by running more bad reviews if they don't buy enough ads. edit: and there are people who make a job of brushing up a business' Yelp reputation
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2014 05:58
|
|
|
StandardVC10 posted:On the other hand, Yelp is rumored to shake businesses down for subscriptions by running more bad reviews if they don't buy enough ads. quote:edit: and there are people who make a job of brushing up a business' Yelp reputation edit: To be clear, even if both of your points are true, that still doesn't validate the complaint I quoted.
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2014 06:00
|
|
|
The BBB is also known to dock you several letter grades for not joining.
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2014 06:02
|
|
|
twodot posted:Citation? Well it's not quite what I remember but they did get unsuccessfully sued for it. A much older opinion piece on the same issue.
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2014 06:05
|
|
|
shiranaihito posted:Congratulations, you got me to respond :P Do you win all of your arguments by declaring yourself the winner and insisting that everybody else can't seriously disagree with you? You are aware that travel can be very difficult for sick people, especially when the options are't as clear and easy as you make it sound. And here's the thing about medical treatments, it's not an easy game to play. At some point, even if you get the treatment, you could still die. And it becomes a question of how do you want to live. I can think that many of us would rather spend our time with our family and friends than in a Thai hospital surrounded by strangers. But I know this doesn't matter to you. Because you've already declared yourself the winner, and any criticism of an-cap is obviously just a sociopathic troll trying to egg you on. It's easy to win arguments when you come into them with zero faith.
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2014 06:33
|
|
|
twodot posted:This is a weird complaint. Yelp exists today and has businesses with bad feedback that don't get deleted. It's pretty clearly not government regulation that stops this. Of course, Yelp is a poor substitute for the FDA, but "Yelp might delete bad feedback, even though it doesn't appear to do that today" isn't a reason why. Sorry, that point was poorly developed and half assed. It was basically a continuation of the theme that even in today's not quite free market, people still take all the information available to them and make irrational choices. Yes, Yelp hasn't openly started banning all negative feedback or anything, but the idea was that since they've announced publicly they were interested in doing something that would allow them to censor user reviews, the rational actors of the market should all stop doing business with Yelp even if they never used the power to delete bad reviews that they fought for, just on the principle that Yelp fought for something that goes against their interest and what they want from Yelp. However it's not a particularly great point, especially since if you want to start putting on your tin foil hat the FDA could get the poo poo bribed out of it and suddenly unpasteurized milk can be sold as a cure to cancer, and if you want to talk about irrational actors and look at a far better example, see Homeopathy and Orgone Therapy.
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2014 07:19
|
|
|
Caros posted:You can check someone's posting history by pushing the little question mark in the bottom left hand of his post. It shows you everything he has posted in this thread. In this particular instance you'd learn that he basically came in after your last bout of posts and threw a temper tantrum of epic proportions. As others have pointed out he started by calling anyone who disagreed with him 'subhuman scum' and then decried the fact that most of the replies made in his direction were Ad Hominem attacks while at the same time declaring any replies of substance to be 'filibustering' him. No need to do that so long as people understand the exhausting nature of debating one against twenty or more and the fact that if I don't respond to every critique that is made against me that does not mean that I don't have an answer. I too have spent time on various forums practicing debating with differing political factions, some left wing and other right wing. Like yourself I give much better than I receive and I usually blow them away. A lot of that has to do with the fact that most people don't know anything. You might get a handful of people who respond with some substance or actually understand their own ideology with any depth, but the rest get really frustrated that anyone is disrupting their circle jerk of bias confirmation and reinforced prejudices. They just say "we cheerlead for this side and don't want to be bothered with having to defend anything we believe." That is why SA is unique in some ways. A lot of you actually have some familiarity with libertarian ideology. And you have a close knit community of people who are dedicated to what they believe. Posters either respond with a legitimate criticism or they are skilled at presenting a facade of intelligent critique. I also have to mention that when I post here, I usually describe a coherent philosophy of rights, of ethics, of politics. And the rest of you try and nitpick and find holes in the belief system I am defending. That is not to say that such criticisms are not valid and should not be answered, but it is far easier to sit back and pick holes in a proposal that someone else offers, especially when you are not asked to defend an alternative. Humans are fallible and there will always exist difficult problems for society to solve. It is far easier to propose difficult hypothetical scenarios as a way of criticism. The issue at hand is that you all seem to think that by pointing out potential issues with externalities, or the difficulty of proving environmental harm to a court system, or extremely unlikely lifeboat scenarios you have won the argument. Leaving aside the fact that libertarians have good, or at least coherent and consistent answers to these sorts of criticisms, the truth is that you have to go further and describe how introducing State violence into society will alleviate those difficult problems without creating new, equally or more serious problems and unintended consequences elsewhere. Some of you seem to think it is enough to say "this difficult hypothetical problem could potentially exist in a proposed society". There is no system of political organization on earth that can possibly alleviate all human problems. Utopia is a nice fantasy but it cannot exist unless the nature of man fundamentally changes. The State is like the default answer to all social ills for non-anarchist leftists. They are constantly on the lookout for supposed "market failures" with which to justify State violence. But the State itself is not subjected to similar criticism. In fact, virtually all proposed leftist solutions involve political action. If there is an identified problem in society, a left leaning social democrat type will encourage people to vote, to run for Congress, to get involved politically to use the political process to solve any and all social ills. As I have noticed on this forum, the reason so many of you are having trouble considering market solutions to social problems is that you are conditioned to favor politics as the solution to most every social ill. When you ask "how could x possibly be provided without the State?", I ask "how would YOU go about providing x to society? What would you do without the State to solve social problems, to help the poor, to protect the environment, to ensure that the food we buy is safe and that consumers have the information they need to make informed decisions about who they do business with?" I usually have a laundry list of things I would do, or am currently doing the marketplace to address problems I see in society. But I am only a single person and my abilities are limited. The point is that left social democrats have no idea, as a general statement, how to think like an entrepreneur. Despite the mythology, humans don't need coercive State violence to address social ills. Voluntary solutions to social problems are possible and occur all the time. You are just conditioned to not notice them. You have to work from first principles and apply a standard of ethics to human behavior. Like the North Star guiding a ship, we use first principles to guide humanity towards an uncertain future. Caros posted:Before I mention anything else, I just want to ask... do you know what my Avatar/Text refers to? It was purchased for me in the last thread you made before you got banned, specifically referencing this exact circumstance. You'd asked me why I stopped being a libertarian, and in nearly the same words as this you condescendingly explained to me why I was wrong to make the decision. It was the post you got banned for as I recall, though the fact that you stopped posting was the actual reason you were banned. A lot of it had to do with war and foreign policy initially, I am a younger guy so my political views were formed in the post 9/11 era. I saw what happened to America during the Bush Administration. I witnessed the Iraq War, I knew people who went over to Iraq and fought for a lie. I was in high school when 9/11 happened and for a short time I bought into the propaganda about how "everything changed" and we needed to go to war to punish "those guys". But even for a teenager the whole thing seemed to be rotten to the core and I felt like people were using this event to transform this country for the worse. My mom was a libertarian but she never really spoke about politics too much with me. The one thing I did get from her though was a comfort in being against the mainstream, for thinking for myself. Sometime after I graduated from high school, sometime in 2005 or 2006 I started looking into libertarianism more seriously. I person I started reading first is Harry Browne, who ran as the libertarian party candidate in 1996 and 2000. I was very impressed by his commentary on the Bush Administration and the so-called "war on terror". I heard him calling Bush a war criminal, denouncing the Iraq War and the trashing of our Bill of Rights. But more than anything, I heard him speak the view, as Ron Paul would later make famous, that middle east Muslims had every right to hate us, they hated being on the receiving end of imperialist war profiteering and Israeli-first kowtowing and it was only logical (if not defensible) that they would lash out against us in any way they could. This really made sense to me. I hadn't heard any Democrat speak like that, in fact I'd heard anyone even suggesting such a thing being denounced as an American hater, a friend of the terrorists and an enemy. Yet it resonated with me. And I respected the fact that the libertarians that I read were never intimidated by the post-9/11 hysteria and they stuck to these unpopular beliefs and spoke truth to power during the height of the Republicans propaganda. I also found it very appealing that Harry Browne defended the Bill of Rights consistently, both the forth amendment AND the first and that he condemned both political parties for picking and choosing which rights to defend and which to violate. I liked that you could be fiscally responsible yet socially tolerant. There was a consistency that I appreciated. Then I got involved with the Ron Paul campaign in 2007. When that was going on, I got far more interested in reading about the philosophy in more depth. I got more interested in economic theory and the Federal Reserve. I found out about the Mises Institute and I started to read everything I could. I started to listen to Antiwar Radio and then the Scott Horton Show (I highly recommend it) and I became more interested in the arguments being presented. Along the way I eventually abandoned Minarchism and discovered Anarchism and concluded that the State is indefensible and immoral no matter what size it happens to be. I continued to compare and contrast what libertarian thinkers were arguing with what various right wing and left wing commentators were saying and I found I was easily able to pick holes in their arguments. After I read Murray Rothbard, Frederic Bastiat, and other serious libertarian intellectuals, I just found it hard to take any other arguments seriously. I continue to keep an open mind but I have been converted at present and I find all arguments for the State or against property rights to be contradictory and indefeasible. Caros posted:
Okay, good to know. I don't consider myself an expert at most things either. I have gone to college but I never got a degree in economics (though I took several courses) nor in history or political science (I took some courses in both as well). But I think emphasis on formal education is actually not a good guide of the knowledge a person possesses anymore. If someone has a passion for something, I think they can learn as much or much more outside of the classroom through independent study. The value of formal education for me is that I was exposed, at a basic level, to a wide scope of economics, political theory and history. Make no mistake, this is just a hobby for me. I think I touched on this briefly before, but I have some knowledge of the healthcare system because I have dealt with some health problems for the past several years. I trust that you have studied it more than I have, but being sick and navigating the healthcare system is an eye opener to say the least. I don't want to really go into great depth, but the health issues I am dealing with are thoracic outlet syndrome and Lyme disease. You can Google them if you like, but suffice to say they are no picnic. That doesn't mean I have any special knowledge of healthcare but I am not oblivious to what people have to go through if they get sick and need medical care. Caros posted:With that said, I am going to bring my argument against you in five separate points: Yes, I was referring to Canadian style single-payer healthcare. I'd like some more information about the situation with your friend. Did he (she?) have any sort of health insurance prior to getting diagnosed with cancer? What did treatment entail? Chemotherapy? Surgery? How long would the course of treatment have had to run? If he had insurance, I find it extremely hard to believe that he would be denied if a doctor diagnosed him with cancer AND the success of treatment is high. If had my share of time battling insurance companies, but that seems hard to believe. If insurance serves any purpose whatsoever it is in protecting against just this sort of scenario, where an unexpected and life threatening illness strikes and you need costly treatment to save your life. I must conclude that this was instead a situation where your friend didn't have insurance and was faced with the prospect of paying out of pocket for all the medical bills for a protracted and lengthy treatment process. Even if that were the case, it is likely that some insurance coverage could be acquired albeit with very high rates. Did your friend look to charity to help pay medical bills? There are many doctors who provide some treatment for free. There are even places like the Oklahoma Surgery Center that charge far lower prices for surgery since they don't take insurance. We are still talking about thousands and thousands of dollars, but the cost is such that most people could get a loan to pay the cost and pay it off within a few years. I understand that some people really have very few means at their disposal but a young person getting treatable cancer and not having ANY significant treatment offered seems absolutely unfathomable. I don't know the specifics but I have to wonder whether every avenue was explored? Remember I am not defending the current system but as someone who has dealt with medical issues, you have to navigate this system to get the care you need. I agree that whether your friend would have been cured is beside the point and impossible to prove. The question is whether he would have been treated. I think you are making a faulty assumption that everyone under single payer healthcare systems who suffer life threatening ailments receive the treatment they need. They may receive SOME treatment. But suppose the cost barrier was no longer there for a sick person and they could access their needed treatment through the market economy? I would guarantee that the QUALITY of the treatment offered in a market AND the prognosis for recovery would be far greater under a market system than under a single payer system. I think that proponents of single payer healthcare know this, even if they don't say it explicitly. There is a reason that advocates of single payer like Bernie Sanders say that, provided you have the ability to pay, you can get great healthcare through the market. They focus on the millions who are currently uninsured or cannot afford any healthcare at all as a rationale for adopting single payer. What they don't do is advertise these reforms to upper middle class Americans who can afford good health care through the market and say "you know, you should give up your private healthcare that you are currently paying for because the quality of care offered by a State managed bureaucracy will be far superior to that offered by the private market." They know that is not the case so they don't even bother making that argument. However making the case to a poor person that SOME healthcare offered is better than none, since you are currently priced out of the market, is a much more compelling case. And I agree wholeheartedly, that on an individual anecdotal basis, there are people who cannot afford healthcare for whatever reason who would be better off in a State-run bureaucracy where there is SOME chance they get treatment, regardless of how inefficient or substandard the quality may be. Remember when Obama made the statement that if like your current healthcare insurance you can keep it? The issue under single payer systems is that it slowly destroys the private healthcare market and so people don't really have many options outside of the State bureaucracy. Now people are subject to waiting lists and rationing of care who otherwise could have simply purchased the medical care they needed. The reason why single payer destroys the healthcare market is that people will gravitate and overuse any service that is "free". Should I use the physical therapist that charges $80 a session or should I use the one that is "free"? People who don't understand the economics of healthcare overuse services where they would think twice if they had to pay out of pocket. Without the price mechanism, market signals and competition, the quality of care suffers. Like Obama's famous lie, everyone ends up being effected when the State starts centrally planning such a huge part of the economy. Every single time the State intervenes to provide social services, they tell us that they are just targeting the very poor or uninsured and that you won't be affected. The problem is that, like I said, when government offers a free alternative many leave their current private practitioner in favor of free goods. What that means is that the private doctors are forced to take employment within the public system or leave the professional altogether. Caros posted:
In the first place I don't know why you reduce the entire healthcare economy into transactions that involve life threatening ailments. Yes if you need insulin or else you die, your bargaining power is reduced in relation to those that are providing it. But most healthcare services offered are not like that. If a general doctor charges so more for a routine physical, you can be sure that people will see their doctor less frequently. If a doctor charges less for routine check ups then people are more likely to see them more frequently just in case. The same is true of virtually every elective procedure. Lasik eye surgery is one example. It is an entirely elective surgery but it is a fact that since prices have been coming down, far more people have paid the $1000-$2000 it costs to fix their eyesight. Contrary to what you say, there is plenty of evidence that many aspects of the healthcare economy are NOT inelastic, but rather that demand fluctuates wildly based on cost. Now regarding the truly life threatening medical problems where people will pay as much as they can possibly afford and borrow to save their life, there is STILL incentive for providers to compete for your business. If I am dying unless I receive a surgery to remove a tumor and I can choose to have it removed by five different, independent and market based hospitals, I will choose only one. Each of these hospitals will want to get my business and I am more likely to get the tumor removed by the hospital that charges less. Furthermore, the reputation of healthcare providers and the ethics practiced by doctors and surgeons is something that everyone will be watching carefully. If a doctor is determined to be unethical and abusive to a desperate patient through price gouging, then people will know and his future business will suffer. Let me give an example. Let us suppose there are two surgeries offered by a hospital. They both involve removal of a tumor in your chest. Now, one tumor is benign and you can live fine without it being removed. Maybe it causes a bit of discomfort or could develop into some problem down the road. But removal of the tumor is elective. Now the second surgery involves removal of a cancerous tumor in the same spot. The surgery is essentially the same except that in one case the patient will surely die without the surgery and in the other case the patient will be just fine. Now suppose a hospital charged far more to remove the cancerous tumor than the benign tumor simply based on the desperation of the patient? This would not only be extremely unethical but the knowledge of such a thing would cause outrage and the reputation of such a hospital to suffer greatly. This would incentivize an entrepreneur to start a competing hospital that charged the same price for elective procedures vs life saving procedures, in other words they didn't artificially take advantage of desperate people but charged the price that they needed to given the difficulty of the procedure and the time it took. This doesn't even take into account the existence of charity hospitals and mutual aid societies that will provide care for people who cannot afford healthcare they need for whatever reason. The existence of charity hospitals also would incentivize hospitals against charging too much for life saving medical procedures since if they could lose potential clients to a charity hospital. Yes, under some circumstances, a person will pay as much money as they can possibly get a hold of if they are going to die without a certain treatment. But that doesn't mean that the market can't or won't work. There are still many reasons why prices will go down through competition. Caros posted:
In a free market, health insurance would play a very small role in healthcare. Insurance would be for catastrophic accidents, unexpected healthcare problems and things like that. Like car insurance only comes into play when you get into an accident but you just pay out of pocket for oil changes and other normal maintenance issues you have with your car. If the engine dies you buy a new one. You replace the battery, the tires, the brakes and everything else out of your pocket. Insurance pays for damage when you are hit by another driver, or you miss a red light and crash into another vehicle. Unexpected, unplanned for events. Don't you notice how the complaints we all have against health insurance companies are not equally applicable to car insurance providers or insurance against fires? The reason is that State intervention has distorted the very purpose of insurance and given us a third party payer system where inflated costs of healthcare cause us to rely too heavily on insurance and so we have far less control over which healthcare services we have access to. Caros posted:
I don't see this as a valid criticism of the market. There are similar situations of unbalanced information elsewhere and the market works just fine. When you take your car to the shop to get it looked at, the mechanic could charge you for all sorts of unnecessary things and/or get you to pay for unnecessary tires or services that you don't really need simply because the mechanic knows everything about cars and you don't. It is very possible for a patient to understand enough to avoid being taken advantage of by a health insurance provider. There is a reason why we seek second opinions from different doctors. There is a reason why we can view the reputation of doctors online. If you get a good doctor that you feel you can trust, then you will presumably feel confident in going off of the information they suggest. I've gone to plenty of doctors who have recommended all sorts of expensive tests, drugs and different treatments but I refused because I informed myself enough to understand that it is not worth the money. I find it so odd that you would bring up the issue of excessive testing and over treating (which IS a real problem) in the context of a market economy. The very thing that would prevent over testing and over treating would be having patients actually pay for the tests administered. The thing that is causing the over-testing and treating is that a third party is paying the bills and the patient has no incentive to question any treatment that is being offered. When the State is paying the bills, then the doctors and hospitals have every incentive to get every cent they can because the State is not an informed consumer and they will pay no matter how much you charge. Therefore they charge too much for tests and run too many tests and administer too many treatments. This is grossly inefficient but it is par for the course for central planning. Caros posted:
But it is such an event which is precisely the purpose of health insurance in a market economy. The situation of being hit by a bus, going to the emergency room and not having the luxury of shopping around for needed medical care is entirely the reason for people to buy health insurance. You could make the exact argument about many different things. Suppose I am a fireman who waits until someones house is on fire and I go up to them and say "I'll put out the fire for $10,000". You might have no choice but to pay. But if he had fire insurance, he wouldn't have been put in such a situation in the first place. Or if he lived in a neighborhood where the community financed a fire fighter service in such an event, he would have nothing to worry about. But if you say that a person might choose NOT to buy market health insurance, or not to make any plans for the event of an emergency and they desperately need help when something they should have planned for happens and then someone price gouges them, that hardly disproves the value of a market economy. How many people do you know who cannot afford ANY car insurance whatsoever? I know you have to have car insurance to drive, but isn't it true that the market provides car insurance at affordable prices to nearly everyone? And why is it so affordable? It is affordable because the insurance companies only need to pay in the event of an accident, therefore their premiums can be low. In a market economy health insurance would be very similar to car insurance. It would ONLY come into play in the event of you needing to go to the emergency room, or having a life threatening ailment. That would mean that the rates would be VERY low and within reach of most everyone, as is the case with car insurance today. People who just didn't get health insurance would be doing so by choice and not because they couldn't afford it. In a free society, mutual aid societies would be commonplace where poorer people would collectively pay doctors or healthcare providers in the event that if any member got sick they would be provided with treatment. Similarly, communities would see the need and value in emergency services and they would pay a fee voluntarily so that if something were to happen to you, an ambulance would show up and bring a sick person to the hospital. Furthermore, without the medical industrial complex wielding the power of the State, more charity hospitals would exist to treat the poorest among us. There are many ways the market can, and has in the past, dealt with this "lack of choice" that people have when dealing with a life threatening emergency. Insurance, in fact, IS a market mechanism with which to deal with emergencies. So don't continue this line of argument that because a person having a heart attack can't just go "shopping" and compare different hospitals and healthcare providers before treatment is administered, that somehow invalidates the free market. Like I said, the market has and would provide for such a potentiality through insurance, mutual aid, and voluntarily funded emergency services.
|
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2014 00:38
|
|
|
Caros posted:
These two statements are contradictory. You concede that healthcare costs have gone up massively over the last several decades but somehow you discount that State intervention and money printing had anything to do with it. Isn't price competition one of the main factors that drives down costs in a market economy? So how on earth can you say that State intervention and a third party payment system where both doctors and patients don't know the cost of the treatment that is being provided doesn't artificially raise costs? When the State pays medical costs, the providers of medical technology, drugs and surgeries have every incentive to charge as much as possible. Do you honestly think that an MRI would cost $6000 if people had to pay out of pocket? No chance. You know your argument could be made against computers and technology. By your logic, all computers should be VASTLY more expensive than they were twenty or thirty years ago given how much more powerful and capable they are today. Yet the opposite has occurred. Why should the fact that hospitals and doctors have better technology available to them today make them have to charge vastly more than forty years ago? Especially when the exact opposite has occurred in the far more free market of technology and consumer electronics? Better technology should be able to lower costs and make things more efficient. But we can compare apples to apples. A week long hospital stay in 1960 would be affordable for most families. If you don't have insurance a hospital stay that long could run over the $10,000 mark. And I'm not speaking about any surgery or medical prodecures. I am just talking about the cost to keep you in a hospital bed, hooked up to an IV drip for monitoring purposes. Or you can look at the situation where medical lobbying manufacturers get away with charges $300 for a hospital toothbrush. They are just taking advantage of the State money that they can get their hands on. When the State starts subsidizing a certain sector of the economy, it distorts prices immediately. When the central bank expands the money supply and injects it into the economy, rising prices are not uniform everywhere. They rise much faster in the areas where that new money is spent first AND where price competition is not able to counteract the effects of inflation. It goes without saying that price competition doesn't exist for the things that the State purchases. If the State is directly involved in funding say 40% of the healthcare market, what incentive would a healthcare company have to provide a low cost to you, the consumer who would prefer to purchase healthcare out of pocket when they can charge these ridiculous prices to the government? Sure, they'll sell you a product or service. You CAN pay for an MRI or X-Rays out of pocket, but they sure won't offer you any discount. They'll charge you the same inflated price they charge the government. Remember that the more businesses focus on lobbying the State, which is inevitable when the government gets heavily involved in the economy, the less businesses focus or need to try and "lobby" for the patronage of consumers. Caros posted:IV - That a Libertarian healthcare system would be more available or moral than a Socialist one. The moral argument is that it is wrong to use violence to fund your idea of social welfare. Even putting aside who has the better argument between the two of us, the fact remains that I think that State central planning of medical care is immoral and I don't want any part of such a scheme. If YOU want to develop any sort of social experiment in voluntary socialism or finance any sort of healthcare delivery scheme you can dream up, I support your decision one hundred percent. I would never dream of using force to stop you from implementing it. However, you should NOT have the right to use violence against me to expropriate me and finance a healthcare system that I find entirely immoral. You are seriously downplaying the inefficiencies inherent in national healthcare schemes in comparison to any market or quasi market based healthcare systems. Who determines that a healthcare ailment is "life threatening" and deserves prompt treatment instead of making a person wait months for treatment? What about an elderly person who needs life saving surgery? Is it worth it for the central planners to expend resources on treating an elderly person who might only live five or ten more years anyway? These decisions are always arbitrary. You cannot pretend that people don't die on waiting lists or suffer healthcare problems due to the inability to access quality private healthcare providers in a nationalized healthcare system. If the issue is the cost barrier, then you should focus on steps to reduce healthcare costs, rather than seeking to overhaul the entire healthcare system, which will affect everyone who will end up being caught up in a State managed bureaucracy whether they want to or not. As I have explained, introducing price competition into the healthcare market would reduce costs as it does for every other part of the economy. Caros posted:JRodefeld will make arguments that the US healthcare system is not a true free market healthcare system, but the onus is on him to tell us what will be different about it, how the costs will be reduced and access will be increased. I have read the same thinkers he has on the matter, and I have personally found their arguments very wanting in favor of real, hard evidence on the matter. The libertarian idea of a free market in medical care would be dramatically different than what we have today. For a short example of what sorts of drastic reforms we would propose, see this short article by Hans Hoppe: quote:A Four Step Healthcare Solution All of us have the ability to understand how the market works. We see how the price system works to deliver so many vitally important goods and services to us every day in abundance and at low prices. It is only confusion and propaganda that has persuaded people that healthcare cannot be delivered efficiently through the market. You even concede that healthcare was far cheaper in the 1950s and 60s and more available, but somehow that "doesn't count" because it was a long time ago and our technology is now different (as if that means anything). I mentioned earlier the Oklahoma Surgery Center which lists their prices for many different surgical procedures and people pay out of pocket. This is an anomaly, a free market provider amid an anti free market, third party payer, price signal distorting healthcare system. The prices charged are frequently one tenth of what insurance companies charge doctors for similar procedures. Caros posted:V - That I was somehow 'not a true libertarian' when I converted away from the doctrine. Okay, I take back the insinuation. I absolutely DON'T underestimate the effect a personal tragedy can have on a persons viewpoint. Not at all. It sounds like a horrible thing to go through. I do fear that when a personal tragedy occurs it can be so affecting that it distorts your critical thinking and you are unable to look at the issue in a logical way, which is understandable. Maybe your friend would have been treated and cured if he lived in Canada. It is all speculative. That would have been great for him and great for you. But that personal anecdote doesn't prove the validity of nationalized healthcare. There are many alternate scenarios we could contemplate where your friend could have been treated and made it. I could suggest that, had price competition not been distorted and suppressed through State central planning and a third party payer, your friend could have afforded the treatment necessary and he would have survived because of the market. I was just confused as to why you chose to blame libertarianism for your friends death. That doesn't seam coherent to me. Caros posted:For the record, I did not decide to simply quit being a libertarian cold turkey. I did not wake up one day, hear the bad news and go 'whelp, now I'm a socialist'. Instead it came as a series of slow realizations about how utterly wrong my belief system had been up to that point. The argument is not that the government cannot do anything "right". The State is, by nature, inefficient and bureaucratic and it is unable to economically plan without the price signal in the market. But all of these are side issues. The real objection to the State is, as I've said a thousand times, that the initiation of force is immoral. It violates the principle of universability of ethics. Depending on your definition of "good", government funding on occasion produces things of value. No one is denying that. We don't oppose the scientific research that is done on Universities that are publicly funded. We don't oppose roads and bridges and airports. The results of government spending can be useful in their own right. The problem is that the money to fund such projects was confiscated through violence. If I stole $100,000 from you and developed a cure for cancer with it, the result that was achieved would have been fantastic and incredible. But the means used to achieve it would have been criminal and reprehensible. It is the means of State action that we oppose, not necessarily the results attained. I'm not sure what metric you are using to determine that the US healthcare system is universally "worse" than every UHC system in the world. I would suggest that you are judging them ONLY based on access to healthcare for those that currently are priced out of the market in the United States, which means that you are stacking the deck from the outset. I'll ask a counter question. If you have the means to pay, is the quality of healthcare received at the best hospitals in the United States worse than the healthcare offered in nationalized healthcare systems in other countries? Because even the biggest defenders of single payer concede that, for those that can afford it, you can get great healthcare in a quasi market economy. For you to discount the step backward you would be forcing upon people by subjecting them to waiting lists and bureaucracy who currently are both happy with their health insurance and their private healthcare provider is a big mistake. Caros posted:
No you didn't. You didn't see the effects of libertarianism. You saw the effects of someone who was priced out the market due to price fixing and central planning. Had the market been subject to price competition and free entry, then your friend would likely have been able to afford treatment and would have probably survived. Caros posted:To be clear, I blame my friends death on free market healthcare. Despite your assertions to the contrary I have never seen any substantive proof that a libertarian healthcare 'solution' would in any way improve conditions in the US system for the many, many reasons I have enumerated above. Since I have no belief that a Libertarian healthcare system would solve the problems that lead to unnecessary deaths I was forced to look elsewhere for a way to correct what I believe to be a very significant problem. Let me again apologize if I seemed glib or condescending about what surely was a very traumatic and affecting episode in your life. I don't mean to come across that way. I don't know the details of your friends death, I don't know what you have read or what it took for you to abandon libertarianism. And I don't pretend to be an expert in healthcare but let me reiterate that I have seen this system up close and personal given the health problems I have had to deal with for most of my twenties. So I am absolutely NOT some detached observer speaking about a system that doesn't affect me. Quite the opposite actually. I understand why healthcare is and will continue to be touchy subject for you but I can only say that I believe that you have made some errors by rejecting the market in favor of central planning. If you are up for it though you could share some more details of why your friend was unable to pay. Did he have insurance of any kind? Did he try to get any charity? What did the proposed treatment entail? I believe that it is monstrously evil that a young person should have to succumb to a treatable disease or else mortgage their families future through a debt total that would burden them for maybe their entire lives. It is not right and it outrages me as much as it does to you.
|
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2014 00:38
|
|
|
So if a person has had insurance for all of his life, but the insurance company denies coverage for a life-threatening illness like cancer (as has happened many times), then how would that make you feel, jrod? Is it okay for that person to die if he can't afford to pay out of pocket? Would you even say that it's moral?
|
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2014 01:04
|
|
|
SedanChair posted:Well seeing as how we have drastically reduced taxes on the wealthy at the expense of public infrastructure, I think we can pretty safely say that the money would be spent on gigantic yachts, underage sex workers and suites at the Burj al-Arab. This is the dumbest poo poo I've ever heard. So if I give you $100, you don't have the right to keep it? A voluntary transfer of property title is not valid? If a person is wealthy because people voluntarily exchanged money for goods or services, you are transferring your property title in the money to the business. A business is formed through voluntary contract. Do you understand how making a generalization like "wealthy people are mostly decadent and stupid" is not categorically different from me saying that "black people are usually lazy and ignorant". Both statements are bigoted against different groups of people. One is a gross collectivism stereotyping people based on the amount of money they happen to have and the other is a gross collectivism stereotyping people based on the color of their skin. To you, only one of these statements is bigoted. Both are bigoted. If you can't understand that, there may not be much help for you.
|
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2014 01:13
|
|
|
Caros posted:Just to harp on this one more time, I have a question for you JRodefeld: If you think that any possible system can guarantee that everyone will receive lifesaving medical care who needs it, you are delusional. It is not possible to make such a claim in either a socialist or free market system. The truth is we will ALL die at some point and for many of us, some level of medical treatment could have prolonged our lives to some degree or another. You can sink an infinite amount of resources into medical care. In a world of scarce resources, delivery through an economy that can economically calculate based on the price system would indeed allow more healthcare resources to be produced and more efficiently allocated to meet the needs of more people than any nationalized healthcare system. The Soviet System produced bread lines due to a lack of market delivery of food, while the market permits grocery stores full of food. There are still some hungry people, but far fewer due to the market. No one wants to see anyone die of a preventable illness. Through the market economy and voluntarism, we should expect that fewer and fewer people die of preventable illnesses over time and more and better technology extends our lives further and further. More and better medical procedures and treatments will become available at lower costs over time. Given the constraints of reality and the human condition, a free society will permit the best outcomes possible for the most people.
|
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2014 01:24
|
|
|
jrodefeld posted:When the State pays medical costs, the providers of medical technology, drugs and surgeries have every incentive to charge as much as possible. Do you honestly think that an MRI would cost $6000 if people had to pay out of pocket? No chance. You do not understand "inelasticity." Let me give you a two-part example: I like chewing gum, but I don't really NEED to chew gum. If the price of gum went up 500%, I'd probably chew 20% as much gum. Gum is what we'd call "highly elastic" I absolutely need an MRI so that the doctor can figure out what's wrong with my brain and why I'm having these seizures. If the doctor says "3000 bucks," I'll get one MRI. If the doctor says "6000 bucks," I'm still going to get one MRI. If the doctor said "20 bucks," I would actually STILL only get one MRI. Because I need it—it's "highly inelastic"—and that's a whole different story. The only way I'm going to not get an MRI is if it's so incredibly expensive that I can't afford it. That last price point, $20, is key, by the way—inelasticity goes both ways. Not only will I still get one MRI no matter what, but I will also not get any more than one no matter the price. That means that there's extremely little incentive for medical providers to reduce their costs. The only incentive to reduce price is if you're losing customers to competitors, but in most parts of the US there are no competitors, or one or two at most. If that sounds similar to Comcast and Time Warner's price gouging and unwillingness to enter the 21st century, that's because it is. There's very little competition in medicine for many reasons, but a large part of it is similar to ISPs: a huge amount of infrastructure is required, especially if you consider the training and expertise of the hospital's employees ("human resources" after all) as infrastructure. So, just like no plucky ISPs are popping up providing better services than Comcast, it's extremely unlikely that a competitor is going to pop up offering comparable services at competitive costs. So, the capitalist hospital, like all other capitalist enterprises, has one goal when it comes to pricing: find the equilibrium point between supply and demand. Well, demand is almost infinite--it only starts to taper away when it becomes impossible for patients to afford. Doesn't it make logical sense that an enterprise in the business of maximizing its profits would do so by fixing the highest price that people are willing to pay? And if not, why not? There's little to no competition, the demand is inelastic. What is going to drive down the price of essential care?
|
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2014 01:24
|
|
|
jrodefeld posted:When you ask "how could x possibly be provided without the State?", I ask "how would YOU go about providing x to society? What would you do without the State to solve social problems, to help the poor, to protect the environment, to ensure that the food we buy is safe and that consumers have the information they need to make informed decisions about who they do business with?" I will of course let the more knowledgeable Caros respond to the rest of the post and the subsequent one, but I wanted to chime in on this one, seemingly innocuous line because I think it shows a great deal about your philosophy, your character, and your ability to make your own arguments. First and foremost is that this is an incredibly dishonest question and would get you laughed out of a formal debate setting, or any debate at all really. Let me make one thing abundantly clear to you, jrodefeld, we are not here to make your arguments for you. That is your job, not ours. And if people refuse to answer this question when you turn it back around on us it's because we see it for the decietful tactic that it really is, not because we are incapable of doing so. If you can't think of an acceptable answer in your own words then you need to own up to that fact and say so, not try and misdirect the issue or plagiarizing other people's arguments wholesale by linking to outside articles. Now I want to be perfectly clear that citing outside sources is not in and of itself deceitful or intellectually dishonest when done sparingly or at the end of your own arguments as optional (that's a super important qualifier, don't forget it) suplimental reading. But the problem is is that isn't how you use these papers in that manner, instead you use them in lieu of making your own arguments at all. And that is dishonest. You complain that you are one person fighting against a horde of Statist barbarians and it is thus unfair, but we are at the very least temporally bound to the present while you are some sort of gestalt frankenstein made of the Ghosts of Austrians Past. You pick and choose other writers to argue for you and when a particular author's arguments fail or fall upon deaf ears you shuck them from your form as a snake sheds a skin. How are we supposed to debate against you when there is no real you that has been presented to us to debate with? I will say that these most recent posts to Caros were much better than anything else I've seen from you because save for one instance it was actually you making the arguments. This made it more interesting to read. Your arguments weren't actually any better, you still rely too heavily on the informal fallacy of Proof by Assertion, but they were at least your own errors. -EDIT- jrodefeld posted:This is the dumbest poo poo I've ever heard. So if I give you $100, you don't have the right to keep it? A voluntary transfer of property title is not valid?  Ok, I take back what I said about you getting better. For gently caress's sake if you can't tell the difference between something immutable like ethnicity and something mutable like your current bank account balance then it's you who can't be helped. I mean seriously? You think saying that rich people are stupid is the exact same thing as saying black people are lazy and ignorant? Are you loving retarded?! What, do you think calling Mitt Romney "Richy Rich" is just bad as calling someone the "N-Word"? No, really, what the gently caress kind of privileged world do you live in to have your head this far up your own goddamn rear end? Go gently caress yourself. Who What Now fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Nov 9, 2014 |
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2014 01:27
|
|
|
jrodefeld posted:Do you understand how making a generalization like "wealthy people are mostly decadent and stupid" is not categorically different from me saying that "black people are usually lazy and ignorant". Both statements are bigoted against different groups of people. One is a gross collectivism stereotyping people based on the amount of money they happen to have and the other is a gross collectivism stereotyping people based on the color of their skin. You're failing to understand where the first sentiment comes from. As far as I'm concerned, hoarding opulent wealth as you live in a society (and a world) where people are dying of starvation, preventable illnesses, and treatable illnesses is a sign of mental pathology. Therefore, opulent people are detestably immoral. It's quite different from racism, which can't make connections between skin color and a pathological mind.
|
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2014 01:33
|
|
|
jrodefeld posted:Do you understand how making a generalization like "wealthy people are mostly decadent and stupid" is not categorically different from me saying that "black people are usually lazy and ignorant". Both statements are bigoted against different groups of people. One is a gross collectivism stereotyping people based on the amount of money they happen to have and the other is a gross collectivism stereotyping people based on the color of their skin. Wealth is a choice. Skin color is not a choice.
|
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2014 01:35
|
|
|
jrodefeld posted:The Soviet System produced bread lines due to a lack of market delivery of food, while the market permits grocery stores full of food. There are still some hungry people, but far fewer due to the market. This is the opposite of reality, you doofus. Russian food intake dropped dramatically following the Big Splat and introduction of a market economy, and even by the turn of the millennium they still lagged behind what they'd been at the formal disillusion of the USSR in 1992. Part of why things were even starting to get back to the baseline they'd been at was, in addition, because of several substantial foreign aid packages from Western governments, not natural market improvements. Shocking, I know, to hear Jrod has once again shot his mouth off about things he doesn't understand. Captain_Maclaine fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Nov 9, 2014 |
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2014 01:37
|
|
|
jrodefeld posted:No need to do that so long as people understand the exhausting nature of debating one against twenty or more and the fact that if I don't respond to every critique that is made against me that does not mean that I don't have an answer.
|
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2014 02:01
|
|
|
Captain_Maclaine posted:This is the opposite of reality, you doofus. Russian food intake dropped dramatically following the Big Splat and introduction of a market economy, and even by the turn of the millennium they still lagged behind what they'd been at the formal disillusion of the USSR in 1992. Part of why things were even starting to get back to the baseline they'd been at was, in addition, because of several substantial foreign aid packages from Western governments, not natural market improvements. Well he also seems to be under the opinion that technology improving has no effect whatsoever and that government paying for something is the reason why medical bills or so high. Even though medicare (a fully government controlled medical practice) actually pays much, much lower prices than it's free market competitors. Because the government can legislate what they have to pay, instead of it being left up to the whims of the free market you see.
|
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2014 02:08
|
|
|
jrodefeld posted:If you think that any possible system can guarantee that everyone will receive lifesaving medical care who needs it, you are delusional. It is not possible to make such a claim in either a socialist or free market system. How do you define "best"? We already know that UHC in Canada and the UK produce better outcomes for more people than the capitalist healthcare system that we have in the US. Given this, what metric are you using to claim that the US free market solution is superior?
|
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2014 02:15
|
|
|
QuarkJets posted:How do you define "best"? We already know that UHC in Canada and the UK produce better outcomes for more people than the capitalist healthcare system that we have in the US. Given this, what metric are you using to claim that the US free market solution is superior? By pure tautology. Markets are the best way to produce and allocate resources [citation needed], therefore markets would be the best way to produce and allocate healthcare "resources" [citation needed]. Conveniently, this disposition can't be disproven by the empirical evaluation of the US' healthcare outcomes, which lag somewhere behind Cuba's.
|
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2014 02:18
|
|
|
jrodefeld posted:If you think that any possible system can guarantee that everyone will receive lifesaving medical care who needs it, you are delusional. It is not possible to make such a claim in either a socialist or free market system. Okay, I'm going to be working up a big response to your big response in short order, but before I do that, I wanted to address this post specifically. To begin with, lets be clear, at best you are ignorant of my point, and at worst you're attempting to misrepresent it by reductio ad absurdum. When I say "Everyone who needs lifesaving care" it is pretty clear what I mean, especially in light of the fact that we've probably dropped close to 10,000 words on the discussion of the subject. Sixty Four thousand people die in the US annually from an inability to receive lifesaving care. That is to say, that those Sixty Four Thousand people die annually because they cannot receive ANY care. My question was not "Well will granny be able to extend her life by an extra few days", it is "Will people die of easily preventable loving tooth abscesses?" The fact of the matter is that in the Canadian medical system, we do not have sixty-four thousand people die annually from inability to recieve care. Our population is 1/10th of yours, but we don't have 6,400 or 640 either, or hell even 64. I would be willing to bet that you could not find six cases annually of Canadians dying because they have limited or no access to healthcare. Frankly I'd be willing to bet you cannot find six cases over the last decade, because it doesn't loving happen. So let me ask my question once again, this time even more plainly so I get a straight response: Do you deny the very real possibility that a pay-per-use market based healthcare system will lead to the premature (and often youthful) deaths of individuals who lack the ability to pay for service? P.S. I call Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc on your Soviet breadline bullshit. Anyone with a basic understanding of history knows that things like famine had less to do with economic calculation/socialism and more do with the whole "Ravaged by generations of war and currently undergoing a massive industrialization." thing. Comparing Soviet Russia to the USA is an apples and oranges comparison because the two started out at very different places.
|
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2014 02:18
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 14, 2024 19:32 |
|
|
Heavy neutrino posted:You're failing to understand where the first sentiment comes from. As far as I'm concerned, hoarding opulent wealth as you live in a society (and a world) where people are dying of starvation, preventable illnesses, and treatable illnesses is a sign of mental pathology. Therefore, opulent people are detestably immoral. It's quite different from racism, which can't make connections between skin color and a pathological mind. You didn't say anything about "hording wealth", being greedy or uncaring or uncharitable. You said that "wealthy people are mostly decadent and stupid" which is a ridiculous statement. And, as others have noted, your classification of what wealth is, who is wealthy and what amounts to "hording" are arbitrary. To a starving African, YOU are unbelievably wealthy. Every time you splurge on some luxury instead of donating money to feed the poor could be seen by someone poorer than you as an indication of a pathological mind, of someone who is greedy and uncaring. While your statement is not exactly the same as racism, it comes from the same collectivist thought process where some superficial characteristic is used to stereotype an entire group of individuals. It should go without saying that there are MANY wealthy people who are incredibly generous and kind and it is precisely because of their personal success that they are able to help others through charity and various philanthropic efforts.
|
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2014 02:19
|
|