21–30 of 39 posts
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone always has to pay, and socialized healthcare just means that your neighbor has to pay for your poor lifestyle decisions. Employer 'provided' healthcare is a voluntary, demand-driven benefit. To re-purpose an earlier comment - socialism "sounds like slavery".
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone always has to pay, and socialized healthcare just means that your neighbor has to pay for your poor lifestyle decisions. Employer 'provided' healthcare is a voluntary, demand-driven benefit. To re-purpose an earlier comment - socialism "sounds like slavery".
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone always has to pay, and socialized healthcare just means that your neighbor has to pay for your poor lifestyle decisions. Employer 'provided' healthcare is a voluntary, demand-driven benefit. To re-purpose an earlier comment - socialism "sounds like slavery".
As I understand it, healthcare in the US isn't voluntary, thanks to the ACA, where the onus is on citizens to have a third-party product covering them at all times. If you choose not to, but could afford it, you are fined for not doing so.
Socialized medicine just amalgamates the disjoint pools of policy holders, and allows the state to manage aspects of care (i.e. avoid the hyper-inflated per-person costs in the US).
I really don't understand your argument, you are never paying for solely your own healthcare in the US system, unless you forego cover completely and accept fines from the govt for doing so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't it messier than that? I'm pretty sure you could decline your employer provided coverage and buy a plan from an ACA marketplace. It's just that it wouldn't make sense to do that at an additional cost of thousands of dollars.
Correct. You could decline the benefits if you really wanted (e.g. if you were Christian Scientist), but you lose thousands of dollars of your compensation. The ideal would be for your employer to deliver the same value in the form of salary, and then you have the choice free and clear.
[Edit] Corrected "new age" to "new religious movement".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct. You could decline the benefits if you really wanted (e.g. if you were Christian Scientist), but you lose thousands of dollars of your compensation. The ideal would be for your employer to deliver the same value in the form of salary, and then you have the choice free and clear.
TIL: "Christian Scientist" does not refer to someone who is both a Christian and a scientist. It's some quacky, new religious movement, anti-science cult. [Edit] Corrected "new age" to "new religious movement".
New Age is a later 20th century thing that is not strongly tied to any historical religion.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone always has to pay, and socialized healthcare just means that your neighbor has to pay for your poor lifestyle decisions. Employer 'provided' healthcare is a voluntary, demand-driven benefit. To re-purpose an earlier comment - socialism "sounds like slavery".
The existing US system has the taxpayer paying as much as a share of GDP, and more per capita, than many developed countries that have fully socialized systems. It also has more than that in private costs, on top.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct. You could decline the benefits if you really wanted (e.g. if you were Christian Scientist), but you lose thousands of dollars of your compensation. The ideal would be for your employer to deliver the same value in the form of salary, and then you have the choice free and clear.
TIL: "Christian Scientist" does not refer to someone who is both a Christian and a scientist. It's some quacky, new religious movement, anti-science cult. [Edit] Corrected "new age" to "new religious movement".
1870s
> anti-science
Though popular medicine was only a little sciency when they were founded.
> quacky
They use to have lots of celebrity adherents: Joan Crawford, Mickey Rooney, George Hamilton. Kind of like Scientology nowadays.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone always has to pay, and socialized healthcare just means that your neighbor has to pay for your poor lifestyle decisions. Employer 'provided' healthcare is a voluntary, demand-driven benefit. To re-purpose an earlier comment - socialism "sounds like slavery".
Why frame the issue in this way, except to make yourself feel better about being complicit in denying your fellow citizens access to basic healthcare?
The alternative explanation is that you genuinely believe all issues requiring healthcare are the result of "poor lifestyle decisions", which is plainly ludicrous.
I think you should give some serious consideration as to why your brain forces you to frame the problem in this way. I suspect it's because at some level you do feel morally culpable for whether your neighbor lives or dies, but that inevitably leads to a position where some social programs are morally just, and a belief in orthodox anti-statism is more important to you.
The only way to square that circle is to frame all healthcare issues as "poor lifestyle decisions" and social programs as "like slavery". Much easier to feel better about a child dying because they can't get access to basic healthcare if you can just hand-wave it away as "poor lifestyle decisions."
Your attitude is sickening to me. Why not just go full-on black hat and say "fuck the sick" instead of pretending all healthcare is due to "poor lifestyle decisions"? At least that would be intellectually honest, and no less evil.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone always has to pay, and socialized healthcare just means that your neighbor has to pay for your poor lifestyle decisions. Employer 'provided' healthcare is a voluntary, demand-driven benefit. To re-purpose an earlier comment - socialism "sounds like slavery".
More fundamentally, why does it matter whose fault it is? This is 2017 and the US is an extremely prosperous nation. Everyone should have access to health care without being financially ruined, regardless of their "lifestyle choices."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/i-dont-know-how-to-expla...
Explaining away US healthcare as an artifact of WWII by claiming European countries turned to nation health schemes because of economic ruins ignores one very important counterpoint: Canadian healthcare. Canada had no wartime ruin, and indeed, excelled after the war by advances in industrialization from the demands of WWII-- much like the US. Actually, Canada got it's universal healthcare because of the efforts of To…
This article describes how employer-sponsored healthcare started, but it avoids the reasons why it continued. And the reason Truman didn't get support for his universal healthcare plan was the "S" word: "socialism". From http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/november-19-1945-harry-t... (first link I found, it's documented numerous places): "Almost as soon as the reinvigorated bill was announced, the once-powerful Ameri…
See http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/06/christy_ford_ch.htm...