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The $200K lesson I learned from getting shot

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Re: The $200K lesson I learned from getting shot

#81
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because we all know that then all kids would be hungry and not educated not only the poor ones. Somehow socialism always ends up making everyone equally poor and not equally rich. I read recently that in Canada waiting time for some surgeries are 6 months. For everyone. People who can afford and people who can't afford. Everybody screwed over. But of course that's what socialism is all about - making all people equal…

Of course the proper way to order surgeries is to give priority to the wealthy persons so they can quickly get on with creating jobs. Lazy poors aren't going to do anything significant anyway, so they can wait eight or nine months and it doesn't matter. I cannot imagine raising taxes any further, if a wealthy child's parents couldn't afford to send him to a private school imagine what a terrible education he will hav…

You know, your first paragraph sounds strikingly similar to the premise of an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, Critical Care (http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Critical_Care_%28episode%29)...

They also found the idea silly.

Re: The $200K lesson I learned from getting shot

#82
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, I am saying in universal healthcare, you will get poor or no healthcare if you are poor and you will get good healthcare if you are rich. You will simply shift around who gets marginalized. For example: If you have a country that aggressively hounds, say, educational debtholders - because, maybe the nation decided to socialize educational debt. How long will it be till the bureaucratic machine calculates the bott…

> no, I am saying in universal healthcare, you will get poor or no healthcare if you are poor and you will get good healthcare if you are rich. Well, there you go, you've said it yourself. What you are talking about is not universal healthcare. Debate over, closed; we aren't even talking about the same thing. You are in no way, shape or form talking about universal healthcare, don't even delude yourself that you are…

>It does this without 'death panels' that decide who gets care and who doesn't

Making the decision objective does not make it just. Let's say I invented a drug that would keep people with blue eyes alive. Forever, no matter what. Doesn't work on brown eyed folk. Should such a drug be covered by universal healthcare?

Re: The $200K lesson I learned from getting shot

#83
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no, I am saying in universal healthcare, you will get poor or no healthcare if you are poor and you will get good healthcare if you are rich. Well, there you go, you've said it yourself. What you are talking about is not universal healthcare. Debate over, closed; we aren't even talking about the same thing. You are in no way, shape or form talking about universal healthcare, don't even delude yourself that you are…

>It does this without 'death panels' that decide who gets care and who doesn't Making the decision objective does not make it just. Let's say I invented a drug that would keep people with blue eyes alive. Forever, no matter what. Doesn't work on brown eyed folk. Should such a drug be covered by universal healthcare?

Obviously this has been weighing on you to come back 8 hours later and add that. It is not the objectivity of it that makes it just, it is the availability of it.

Additionally, your thought experiment is utterly useless at illuminating any debate over the merits (or otherwise) of universal healthcare. Beyond the obvious absurdity of a drug of such potency being known about and deemed effective on such a small group of people lies the fact that were such a drug possible then the correlate for the rest of the population would doubtless follow. But I'll play. If it was possible, then the question of whether to make it available to everyone would be a matter for the government of the day. But having been tangentially involved with healthcare consulting the debate would go as such -'we have a drug that costs $x, but will make a person with blue eyes live forever (and, presumably, never need medical treatment again and be a productive tax-paying member of society). If we give everyone with condition a this, our healthcare costs to down by y, despite the one off cost'

So I'm not sure the point you're trying to make. Is it that the government shouldn't be involved in healthcare? Is it that people should be forced to suffer unless they can pay? Is it that you just want to strongly argue on the internet with a perfect stranger with lots of time to waste? You keep on shifting the goalposts on where you want this argument to head, it is clear to me that you have no concept of how a universal healthcare system works because the points you are raising seem really absurd to me; conversely I have no idea what sort of system you are trying to advocate for/against because most of your arguments seem directed against a fox-news image of universal healthcare that Has no basis in reality and that just don't understand.

Re: The $200K lesson I learned from getting shot

#84
post #81
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course the proper way to order surgeries is to give priority to the wealthy persons so they can quickly get on with creating jobs. Lazy poors aren't going to do anything significant anyway, so they can wait eight or nine months and it doesn't matter. I cannot imagine raising taxes any further, if a wealthy child's parents couldn't afford to send him to a private school imagine what a terrible education he will hav…

You know, your first paragraph sounds strikingly similar to the premise of an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, Critical Care ( http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Critical_Care_%28episode%29 )... They also found the idea silly.

(The Voyager doctor was a pretty good character)

It is absurd. Everyone complaining about the wait is asserting implicitly that they need to be allowed to get their healthcare before anyone they are able to outbid.

Personally, yes, I want everyone poorer then myself to wait until my surgery is done. But that's because I'm not so far down. Is it what's best for society? Most likely not.

Probably ideally for healthcare you would live in Canada where it is not the worst cost to health ratio of all the western countries, but you're also able to nip down to the US and cut in line in a pinch.

Re: The $200K lesson I learned from getting shot

#85
post #3

Can I be the first non-US citizen in this thread express my incredulity that anything less than universal health care is tolerated? "Barbaric" is the term that seems to strike me whenever I hear of it, hyperbolic though it may be.

And yet, our specialists are the best in the world and people fly in from all over the world to be treated by them.

I'm not saying our system is perfect or can't be improved, but "Barbaric"? You win the prize for the most ridiculously hyperbolic statement I've read all today.

Re: The $200K lesson I learned from getting shot

#86
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I be the first non-US citizen to say that universal health care is, by definition barbaric? Adjective Savagely cruel; exceedingly brutal. Primitive; unsophisticated. I fail to see how, when a group decide to take from the minority, it could be seen as anything else than barbaric. It saddens me to see one of the last first world country coming closer to the universal health care trap. Sure, the US medical fees are…

> It saddens me to see one of the last first world country coming closer to the universal health care trap. We're still quite a ways off and there's been quite a bit of pushback on the small steps Obama took. It's entirely possible the whole thing will be scrapped during the next presidency.

I hope so. It puts an unusual amount of financial pressure on small companies who are trying to make that step into big companies. I know of quite a few companies who are artificially keeping their employment count below 50 to avoid the costs of obamacare.

Re: The $200K lesson I learned from getting shot

#87
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, like bribes to doctors so they actually perform this cancer tumor surgery to my dad instead of asking him to wait in line for months more. Seen a doctor? Has a belly and a family. Needs money. Simple. But some idiots believe in "free". There is no free. You pay a ton of money for healthcare in any system.

> There is no free. You pay a ton of money for healthcare in any system. I'm confused. Is your argument that universal health care is more expensive than the current US system? Most studies have shown that to be false.[1] I don't think anyone believes that universal health care is free. [1] http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/21/4/88.long

go outside US and you will see that societies are concerned about people with deadly diseases like cancer having to wait months for surgeries. Because there arent enough doctors. Because there arent enough beds in hospitals. Because there just aeent enough medications. People have much more serious problems with socialized medicine than cost. ie waiting line of 6 months for prostate cancer surgery when every day counts. There are many much more important aspects of healthcare than affordability. Wouldnt you trade this 6 months waiting line for bankruptcy? Really?

Re: The $200K lesson I learned from getting shot

#88
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I be the first non-US citizen to say that universal health care is, by definition barbaric? Adjective Savagely cruel; exceedingly brutal. Primitive; unsophisticated. I fail to see how, when a group decide to take from the minority, it could be seen as anything else than barbaric. It saddens me to see one of the last first world country coming closer to the universal health care trap. Sure, the US medical fees are…

Is it really any different from traditional insurance? Don't most insurance companies take money from all their clients, and use it on a fairly small number of those clients? I personally don't see the "trap" you reference. I'd really like to understand your position there...

Traditional insurance will/can reject some individuals. For example, you don't take an insurance against theft AFTER you've been stolen hoping that they will reimburse you.

In addition, insurance companies can target a certain demographic to offer lower prices: An insurance for office workers will not be the same as an insurance for football players.

This is a really key point. Market forces push insurance to offer specialised coverages that match your risks. Start smoking? Hey, we're going to bump you in the next bracket...

And in case the only insurance offered are a clear rip off (extended warranty kind of thing), you can always walk off and say "no thanks".

Now, imagine a new government program that decides to accept everyone because capitalisms is obviously flawed and full of greedy people.

The cost of such an insurance will be, for certain individuals, higher than what they would be with a targeted coverage. (The office workers for example.) Those individuals have now every incentives to leave this insurance and either take a private one, or even take none at all.

This causes the remaining few in the government insurance to have higher premiums, causing even more people to leave and check for alternatives.

The only way to prevent this exodus is to force everyone to stay with a single, monolithic insurance coverage. Even (especially!) those who are healthy.

Let's assume that you are OK with the concept, because without the government, the sick, single moms and children are facing certain death...

Because this super insurance is working outside of the market, you can't evaluate the value it provides. (If you force someone to buy an ice cream cone $36 at gunpoint, is it really worth $36? Maybe, maybe not...) This in itself is a huge problem, because you never know when you are wasting too much resource to try to solve a problem. Would this money better spent financing schools? Perhaps it would be better to distribute better food to poor families? Again, it's outside the market so you'll probably never know. While there's an infinity of bad/suboptimal ideas, there's only one or a handful good. Now pick one and 'hope'. Throw in a little political games in it, and you'll probably never end up with what you were expecting to begin it.

But there's yet another, more 'local' problem. Now that you have your too-big-to-fail insurance, how can you keep it in check? Should it cost $1k to process a claim, or $10k? When is your administration too big? You can compare yourself to some other insurance companies, but that's assuming you didn't wipe out the entire market (which you have to, eventually, to prevent the exodus). Even with comparison, you never have a decisive proof that it's too big. How do workers react, when you try to resize an industry, without the proof that it needs to be done? If, in addition, it's a government subsidized industry, good luck ever making it smaller.

The end result is a "service" that not a single soul knows how much it should cost, but with a constant pressure to increase the funding.

Also, this is without taking into consideration some pharmaceutical firms' lobbying. Imagine how happy they would be, if none of their consumers were the payers! (It's already a problem in the U.S. IMO; people use drugs but just forward the bill to their insurance.)

These problems only grow with time. While a government insurance might be "not so bad" in the beginning, every structures and forces around will deteriorate it. And before you know it, you won't ever be able to talk against any of its part, because then you'll be a greedy capitalist that wants to leave the poor and sick die a painful death.

This is the trap I'm talking about. When you're in it, there's no way out.

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