It Is Time For Basic Income

> What are the definite benefits of Basic Income?

> It is the most efficient possible form of wealth redistribution

So it is just another deceptive label for outright communism, directly out of Marx/Mao/Stalin's playbook. Nice.

> Everyone will do the least amount possible because everyone else is just going to take their profits so why bother

Perhaps you're describing yourself? I know I'd be a lot more actively working on business ventures with a GBI.

> Communism didn't work so why are you proposing it now?

How is this communism? It's still promoting free market, but making it easier to start competing businesses and contribute to society. Yes some people will sit around collecting their check. That happens already. Most others will take the money and do something with it other than working at McDonalds.

> Unless you are physically handicapped or retarded, in which case there is charity and family

Yes, the free market has no use for these people. Let them rot.

> I find it offensive and an attack on my personal liberty that you would demand that I sacrifice my livelihood so that another doesn't have to work hard and make wise decisions.

I'm getting kind of sick of people throwing "liberty" around whenever GBI is brought up. You know what? You pay GBI taxes already. It's just that most of it goes into government overhead instead of the hands of the needy.

What's more, there's a difference between your personal liberty (ie, the ability to buy a stupidly large car, the ability to go for a walk in the park, the ability to speak your mind without fear of government persecution) and your debt to society. We all have to pay into society, because society provides for us. It provides opportunities and protects those who are in need.

You owe society. Not because it's stealing from you, but because it gave you everything you have. Everything in your life that you think you've built with your own blood and sweat? Maybe 10% of it was actually your doing if that. The other 90% of it was provided by society: the roads you drive on, the computer you type on, the phones you talk over, the doctor you go to when you're sick, the police keeping bullets from flying through your windows at night, ETC ETC. None of what any of us do would be possible without the infrastructure set up for us by others.

The distinction between producers and non-producers is not your distinction to make. You owe society as a whole. Not just the producers.

So let's stop pretending that everything we accomplish in life was completely our doing, because it's not. Let's also stop pretending that everything can have a price tag put on it and the free market will solve all our problems and make lazy, handicapped, insane, elderly people vanish (somewhere?).

Part of your job as a citizen is to help provide for others because the same is done for you. So quit your whining and pony up.

Interesting, how she did not have numbers, when asked, for Canadian fatalaties owing to protracted wait times and instead slyly diverted the discussion to the wait times at the security line to enter the Senate building. She seemed a tad petulant and more than a tad eager to please Sen. Sanders and offer a markedly animated and rosy account of her country's system than the rest of the representatives from Taiwan, Denmark and France.

Anyway here are some unvarnished facts about the share of things that plague the Canadian system.

  "In 2011, a significant number of Canadians—an estimated 
  46,159—received treatment outside of the country."
  ...
  "At the same time, the national median wait time for 
  treatment after consultation with a specialist increased from 
  9.3 weeks in 2010 to 9.5 weeks in 2011. Among the provinces, 
  wait times from consultation with a specialist to treatment 
  decreased in six provinces, rising only in Manitoba, Ontario, 
  New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia." 
  ...
  "In some cases, these patients needed to leave Canada due to 
  a lack of available resources or a lack of appropriate 
  procedure/technology. In others, their departure will have 
  been driven by a desire to return more quickly to their lives,
  to seek out superior quality care, or perhaps to save their 
  own lives or avoid the risk of disability. Clearly, the 
  number of Canadians who ultimately receive their
  medical care in other countries is not insignificant."[1]

  "Wait times for health care in Canada have stalled at historically
  high levels, in spite of current government strategies aimed at 
  improved timeliness. Canadians wait longer than citizens of many 
  other OECD countries with universal access health care systems, 
  from emergency room visits to physician consultations to elective
   surgeries, despite Canada’s relatively large health expenditures."
   ...
  "Failing to fix wait times has affected the economic well-being of 
   Canadians in a number of important ways. One estimate, from the  
   Centre for Spatial Economics assessing just four procedures – 
   total joint replacement surgery, cataract surgery, coronary 
   artery bypass graft surgery, and MRI scans – found that excessive
   waits were costing Canadians $14.8 billion, plus another $4.4 billion
  ($19.2 billion,together) in lost government revenues from reduced 
   economic activity."[2]

I dislike offering anecdotal evidence because it appeals to emotion and not reason.

All I can say is I'm acutely familiar with the Canadian system on more than one level.

All of this is not to put too fine a point on how single payer systems are terrible in their own way.

It is to indicate that no matter which system we side with we are confronted with a more or less equally (depending on who you ask) dreadful trade-off of horrors.

I'm not going to dump links here to the scores of Daily Mail reports, to offer as proof of how "efficiently", the British system under the auspices of the NHS, works. You can Google it yourself "NHS site:dailymail.co.uk" )

The point is that vested interests on either side always make the other option look barbaric.

Some prefer a system where every manner of medical malady can be treated skillfully and expediently, right here within our shores without extended wait times, by distinguished medical experts with a tremendous case experience in a given line of treatment, be it Hodgkin lymphoma or Parkinson's or Multiple Sclerosis.

Some prefer that everyone last person in the country has an "on-paper" access to free and need-based healthcare.

Some like David Goldhill want to entirely scrap the insurance model in favor of a radical direct pay model - where everyone pays out of pocket for most common procedures and office visits and thereby largely expunging the role of insurance companies. In 2007, David Goldhill's father was admitted to a New York City hospital with pneumonia, and five weeks later he died there from multiple hospital-acquired infections. [3]

Your outlook is shaped by how healthy you are or how diseased you are. How your family coped with various medical hardships in the past or how everyone you know has always been blessed with bountiful health. How a certain system excludes things that you think should be offered by any self-respecting medical system, for the well-being of its public.

At the end of the day, most sensible people anywhere in the world would want to pay for a system that they see some utility out of, without adverse consequences.

A sick person's utility is different from a hale one's.

A salaryman's utility (with his cautious life choices and lifestyle) is structurally different from a freewheeling thrill seeker's.

After all how is it fair that you are admitted into a ward for a routine fracture and contract some deadly MRSA bacterium from a guy who just returned from a safari in Belize? (This is quite a charitable example and is intentional. There are much worse examples that I could use, that will immediately invite censure and rebuke. Funny how just earlier today I was reading one of the comments to PG's "What You Can't Say" piece - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7443715 and how it strikes a resemblance to what I'm saying here.)

These are some - JUST A TINY TINY FRACTION - of the vast number of things that go UNSAID during a national debate concerning healthcare systems.

Because no politician, policy expert, insurance company executive, medical professional or even an electorate would want to be seen holding borderline prejudicial views, in this context.

Hence they find other ways to verbalize their opposition to a single-payer system, using societally acceptable narratives and scenarios.

[1] http://www.fraserinstitute.org/uploadedFiles/fraser-ca/Conte...

[2] http://www.fraserinstitute.org/research-news/news/display.as...

[3] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-amer...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphyloc...

They won't need to raise their wages though. BI takes care of the minimum amount to survive, and McDonalds wages provides "extra" money. BI essentially takes over as the "minimum" part of the minimum wage, and low wage jobs become a lot more attractive (than they are currently).

I wonder why none of the calls for basic income considers how inflation and prices would be affected.