321–330 of 353 posts
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https://www.amazon.com/Objectivism-Philosophy-Ayn-Rand-Libra...
Maybe I should have been clearer: Just because you say it's derivable "from logic" doesn't mean it is. No logic system can do anything without axioms, and the adoption of those axioms is an arbitrary choice.
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What corporate chicanery? They took a loss on exchange plans last year. They have every right to pull out of the exchanges until the government makes them stay. I'm a supporter of single payer. But the health care market is a sterling example of the "worst of all solutions" espoused by the Democrats. Instead of simply raising everyone's taxes to pay for public services, they try to get companies to do hidden cross-su…
You're a supporter of single payer? Health care is something like a fifth of the whole US economy. You're comfortable with the USG setting prices for it?
But I admit that I'm not super well educated on the issue.
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The headline is misleading. Aetna didn't threaten to pullout if their merger wasn't approved, they said that they would be forced to do so because they would be losing too much money. That isn't "attempting to thwart antitrust law," it's simply stating the facts.
Then so be it. If Aetna is unable to withstand the rigors of the post-Obamacare climate, then they should fail accordingly. Their competitors seem to be able to hold on without resorting to monopolistic tactics. Better they fail now, before they become too big to fail through mergers and acquisitions.
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The healthcare system in countries like France, Canada, Germany is much more efficient and provides better healthcare to most of it's citizens than the US healthcare system pre and post obamacare. https://www.oecd.org/eco/growth/46508904.pdf http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/press-releases/...
Yeah I'm not buying this and never have. You're going to need to cite some kind of scientific statistics or stats or studies. When people get sick they come to the US for treatment if they can. You don't see world leaders and those with money going to Canada or Europe for treatment. Not when it's dire. The US is hella expensive for many reasons one is that we have the most bleeding edge medical technology.
I live in Bangalore, India. My local private clinics are filled with American citizens. Medical tourism is all the rage here.
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I really don't agree. I've lived in three Canadian provinces, and four U.S. states, from towns of 1000 people, small cities of 10k, medium cities of 100k, to large cities of 1m+. Having lived through the Ontario cuts in health care in the 90s ("the Harris common sense revolution"), I don't really think political reps Federally or Provincially had any say on quality of care or what hospitals we got, it was all redesig…
What's the worst condition (if you don't mind saying) you've had where you had to use the Canadian system? Generally, socialized medicine works fine for routine care but badly for catastrophic (i.e. expensive) care.
- Severe pneumonia (1 day in emerg, 9 days in ICU followed by 8 in an inpatient ward)
- Total pericariectomy (2 days in postop ICU, 3 days in ward)
Among other stays/issues prior to these.
The latter surgery was the culmination of outpatient medical care over 3 years with multiple specialists (cardiologist, internist, and cardiac surgeon), along with multiple CT, MRI, cardiac catheterization, countless blood tests, many of which were sent to Winnipeg (the equivalent of the CDC) for rare disease scanning, and over a dozen echocardiograms ... none of which I had to wait for longer than a day or two ... And none of which I had to pay for (just my medication through private insurance). In fairness the surgery itself wasn't critical, so I waited 6 months. They were willing to expedite if my condition deteriorated (it didn't). And after regular cardiologist visits , after I was stable, it could take 8-10 months. If I had an issue they'd expedite me in though.
I am not saying the Canadian system is ideal. Just that it is a reasonably functioning system.
There are some cases where it is both very frustrating and inspiring. I have a dear friend who has a child with a congenital heart defect due to an extremely rare genetic connective issue disorder that is similar (but different) to Marfan syndrome. The Canadian system has been fantastic to senior levels of provincial administration in managing this case, involving international hospitals, breeding zebrafish to replicate the specific mutation, working to manage the treatment of this complex child who is close to turning 5 but likely would have died in the first few weeks after birth in another era.
Keeping this child alive (he is in and out of the hospital about 50%) has easily cost a tremendous amount of public money, but the insurance system risk pool is designed to handle these sorts of outlier cases to ensure future cases can benefit and that this child can have (mostly) a good life in between and during hospital stays. This child gets world class care and has been kept alive due to the system mostly working.
That's the good part. The bad part is that managing complex care in general is a mess as in many health systems, making it a full time job for at least one parent to juggle the various specialists, appointments, tests, medications, history, etc... Which is difficult if you're a single parent. It's almost easier to go on welfare than to work if you are a parent to a critically ill child. So you can get nursing staff to help at home but it's debatable what is covered and what is not, medical expense deductions have some arcane regs like you can't expense a trip under 40km, yet this child has on average 280 trips to the hospital or a clinic a year... Adding up to a lot of expense. Some things like specialized child formula weren't covered by health insurance either until recently (which can cost upwards of $1400 monthly, really sucks when your child can't eat anything due to esophageal issues and has a G-tube and needs this formula to stay alive..)
So, not ideal... But Is this all socialized medicine ills? Sort of I guess? I can see the same problems in a private system.
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Then so be it. If Aetna is unable to withstand the rigors of the post-Obamacare climate, then they should fail accordingly. Their competitors seem to be able to hold on without resorting to monopolistic tactics. Better they fail now, before they become too big to fail through mergers and acquisitions.
You make it seem like forcing a company to serve an unprofitable market is the same as regular market competition. It's not. It's extremely distortionary. And it hurts competition--it basically means only huge insurance companies that make big profits on group plans they can use to offset losses on exchange plans can afford to enter the market.
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"you'd never get a super majority to agree to such a stupid bigoted rule and it conflicts with other parts of the constitution" - oh really? Please open a US history book.
Please try and think for 2 seconds instead of responding to the first stupid idea that jumps into your brain; obviously I'm referring to passing such a law today, what happened historically isn't relevant. But you've shown your colors, you have no intention of actually hearing anything said to you because you're more interested in arguing utterly stupid diversions of the main topic. You ignored everything said except…
You're a longstanding user and we've bent over backwards not to ban you, despite serious abuses on your part. The situation isn't going to stay this way.
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No, you're not thinking clearly; the constitution requires a super majority, and yes, if a super majority of people want to be governed a particular way, then they deserve that right, even if it's stupid; but you'd never get a super majority to agree to such a stupid bigoted rule and it conflicts with other parts of the constitution and would be ruled unconstitutional by the courts. Without the notion that the rules…
"you'd never get a super majority to agree to such a stupid bigoted rule and it conflicts with other parts of the constitution" - oh really? Please open a US history book.
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In theory? As I understand it ... A market allows for innovators to find ways to deliver better service for less money and thus offer a more competitive product and gain market share. This competition forces all players to improve, or be forced from the market. A publicly owned and operated business has no incentive to improve its operational efficiency and little to no incentive to respond to complaints in service.…
> A publicly owned and operated business has no incentive to improve its operational efficiency and little to no incentive to respond to complaints in service. In the UK, the NHS has the incentive to improve its operational efficiency that it simply gets told regularly "we're cutting X billions of your budget. Deal". The NHS is also split up into a range of trusts that have independent management teams. While there's…
The trouble with this approach is that we've reached the point where they really can't deal and are consistently blowing through their budgets and talking about refusing non-urgent referrals for months at a time, and the government is just blaming them for overruning their budgets and punishing them with even more budget cuts.