I've been having a really long and intense debate with a bunch of people at the philosophy section of a music message board. Most of the posters are obviously liberal and no matter what I say they always retaliate with some thing like my info is wrong or the declaration of independence gives you no rights.
Here's the portion of the debate. My comments are in blue and hers are in red. I would really appreciate feed back to let me know if I'm going about this debate in the right way. If any of you care to read the entire thread I will post the link. It would be really great to see some objectivsits come over to the philosophy board and even out the liberal bullshit factor.
Tea bag parties are fail (health care debate inside)
While we have high quality of care, we have inflated costs. The high quality comes from the free market, the high costs come from pooled tax funded services.
I provided you statistics which show that in countries where the government pays for health care that the costs are far lower (sometimes half of what we spend by a ratio per person/GDP), so clearly this is just bullshit.
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Originally Posted by Dylan Thomas View Post
Why not let the same economic forces that have improved quality and lowered costs in almost every other industry from cars to computers flourish in health care?
Because people purchase those goods based on their desire to own them, and based on whether or not they can afford them. In the case of health care, it's generally far too expensive for the free market to apply.
Why don't you make the connection between government-provided health care and the Department of Motor Vehicles or the way government handled the devastation from Hurricane Katrina. As necessary as health may be, so is food and so is clothing and so is a home. Would you want to eat government made food? Live in public housing? Wear government issued clothes?
Actually, last few times I've been to the DMV, it's been a breeze. There have been times where it's been a nightmare, but I can say the same about going into Wal-Mart. Besides, the DMV is something that private businesses clearly could not cover, so the analogy doesn't apply.
The governmental reaction to Hurricane Katrina happened because we elect entirely incompetent people into office, not that government is inherently unable to handle those situations. Had it been Clinton, or even George Bush's father, I honestly think the federal government would have reacted far quicker.
Why is it that almost without exception, wherever government intervenes to solve a major social problem despite good intentions the given process becomes enormously more complicated and much more expensive for society as a whole?
Again, I gave you examples of health care coverage in every single industrialized country being cheaper than in the United States, so you don't get to claim this. Do you really think it's more complicated to get authorization for a medical procedure in the United States than in Germany? Try petitioning a turned down claim by an insurance company. It's utter hell.
You obviously don't know where health care comes from.You're talking about business coverage and the premiums are that high because they cover so many people. Company coverage doesn't even cover half of where the current coverage comes from and that is government programs like medicare.
From the Wikipedia entry on U.S. Health Care:
Around 84.7% of citizens have some form of health insurance; either through their employer or the employer of their spouse or parent (59.3%), purchased individually (8.9%), or provided by government programs (27.8%; there is some overlap in these figures)."
(I know Wikipedia isn't a great source, but it references a U.S. Census Bureau report, and I checked the numbers and found them to be accurate)
It would be nice if you stop making stuff up.
I agree that health care prices are out of control but government funded health care is not the answer. Government is the reason prices are so inflated!
See above. Plus, the reason why prices are so inflated is that health insurance companies are an unnecessary middle man who's purpose is to make a profit. Health insurance companies are the definition of waste. You pay them money to be in the business of turning down claims except where they're legally obligated to (and honestly, they've spent of lot of that profit on getting the laws changed so that they can legally turn down more claims).
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Individuals also do pay for their own health care.
Yes, I said that. But it's less than 10% of the population.
And the company health care is still coming from individual pay checks. If you have health care through your work you are paying for it with a percentage of your check.
I KNOW THAT! I'VE BEEN SAYING THAT. But the difference is that the health insurance isn't being paid for by individuals, even if the money is being taken individually. The abettors of who purchases the heath insurance is ultimately the company, not the individual.
But here's the kicker. This whole time you've been arguing that the idea of having a percentage of your paycheck being taken away from you is criminal. Now you're perfectly fine with it.
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No kidding the supply and demand doesn't work if there isn't a supply for the demand, which is why places like Somalia can't afford health care. But we in the US have the supply and the Demand.
I guarantee you that the supply would be in Somalia if people in Somalia could afford it. You're not grasping that the problem is that supply & demand functions on people being able to afford it, and even in the United States, plenty of people can't afford it.
Where does the government get the money to pay for it? Again it comes from individuals.
And isn't that where business get the money from? So ultimately you have a problem with government health care because it comes from the individual, but you think employee coverage is a-ok because it comes from the individual.
In a free market If individuals cannot afford health care there would be no health care industry. If individuals couldn't afford insurance there wouldn't be an insurance industry. The market would have to meet it's supply with its demand.
There are people who can't afford health care. There's a difference between some people able to support an industry & everyone being able to support an industry. There's an industry built around selling Fabergé eggs, doesn't mean everyone can afford them.
Why do you think tens of thousands of foreigners come to the US for medical treatment every year? They're seeking advanced and sophisticated procedures that are simply unavailable or rationed in their home countries. Socialized medicine may seem to work from an outsiders perspective but it has a price and consequence and that consequence is the quality of health care.
Tens of thousands really isn't a whole lot. Besides, I'm sure tens of thousands of people go to India for medical treatment as well. India is on par in terms of medical technology and innovation as the United States, and their health care is entirely government paid for.
The advancement in treatment largely comes from Universities, which get their money from either private donors or the government. So as far as medical advancement, we get both free market & governmental solutions, so it's win-win.
We are not currently nor ever have been in a completely free market system so how can you compare the current US health care system to that of a free market system?
Because it would be impossible to have a health care industry that was free market the way buying an iPod is.
Sure free health care sounds great, it's a utopian promise but health care isn't free. A government ran health care system is an enormous mistake and like your Germany example is backed up by myths.
For example in August 2008, the British medical journal Lancet Oncology found that America is much better at treating cancer than Europe or Canada. Americans have a better survival rate for 13 of the 16 most common cancers. Among men, an American has nearly a 20-percent better chance of living for five years after being diagnosed with cancer than their European counterpart. American women stand a 7.2 percent better chance of living for five years after a cancer diagnosis than their European counterparts.
Well, I looked up this report, and it's not really as supportive of U.S. health care as you're making it out to be. Check out this article on the report
The highest survival rates were found in the U.S. for breast and prostate cancer, in Japan for colon and rectal cancers in men, and in France for colon and rectal cancers in women, Coleman's team reports.
In Canada and Australia, survival was also high for most cancers.
The kicker here is that it mentions that survival rates in the United States varies widely state by state. There was also a racial gap in survival rates.
The conclusion of the article? These variations largely have to do with when the cancer was detected. It points more to the efficacy of cancer detection programs, rather than cancer treatment levels.
And really, cancer research is heavily pushed in the United States, somewhat because some of the best medical schools in the United States. Not to take anything away from other countries, but there's a number of excellent Universities (John Hopkins, Harvard, NYU, etc...). This doesn't have to do with the free market so much as funding from both private sources (such as wealthy alumni) and the government. In this case, it's win-win.
This was in regards to a comment saying that "sometimes you have to violate freedom" locking someone up in jail might be seen as violating somebodies freedom.
Yes we have defined this issue. Nobody should be forced to violate someone's freedom. You are not free to violate another man's right to his life.
Yes, but we punish this by taking away a person's freedom. At some level, you're forced to take away freedom. Really, my only point is that you can't say that universal health care is immoral because it takes away people's freedom to pay for it how they want. Before you said, "The point being you can't immorally violate somebodies freedom and rights because it is a means to an end.", which is counter to the idea that your freedom is taken away from you if you violate another person's freedom. That is a means to an end.
The declaration of independence does not give you the right to take another's life. If you do so, there are clearly defined consequences in our justice system and you are subject to those consequences should you violate them.
Not again. Did you miss the whole part about how the Declaration of Independence doesn't give you any rights? I explained this to you and you seemed to miss it completely.
Exactly people should pay for the small portion of government that is set up to protect the rights of the people. I've said that from the beginning. I have no moral issue paying for a military, a police force and a court system. The government should not be there to collect money from its citizens and then redistribute it to somebody else so they can have what they want free of charge and without effort. When the government is taking money from one and redistributing it to others, it is playing sides and benefiting one group far more than another and that is not equal representation. You honestly think the government isn't out of fucking control with it's frivolous spending? How could you even think that the government today is anything like what the founding fathers had in mind. How can you even argue that the government is not taxing without representation?
Your argument before was that it was immoral to decide for others how their money should be spent. Ok, fine, but you're also saying that you're perfectly fine with taxes being collected to pay for the military, police, and other structures. So which is it? Either you think all money collected & spent by the government is immoral because it's deciding for people how their money will be spent, or that the government deciding how money is spent isn't immoral (obviously, if the money is spent on immoral actions like puppy kicking machines, but that has to do with the action, not the money).
Military spending quite often takes money and redistributes it to somebody else. There are plenty of private companies which manufacture planes/boats/tanks/trucks for military use. I don't grasp why you're perfectly fine with this type of redistribution, but not when it's something like health care.
Really though, the most important thing here is that you're ranting about freedom, what the founding fathers intended, and the basis of our system of government... and you have absolutely no understanding of what any of that is.
Even after I corrected you about the Declaration of Independence, you still refer to it as giving you certain rights. While there have been certain court cases which have referenced the Declaration of Independence, it's not really a legal document. You have Constitutional rights, you have rights that guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, but you don't have any Declaration of Independence rights.
It's a common mistake because the document is so revered in our society (and originally, it wasn't considered to have nearly the importance as it does to us now, there were other, similar documents more important, or just as important to the independence of the Colonies to the British government). But the difference here is that you're trying to lecture the rest of us about freedom and what our system of government allows our government to do, while not having a clue as to how our government is set up.
Seriously, the idea that the Declaration of Independence gives you certain rights is evidence that you don't understand even the basics of our government, and especially not what the founding fathers intended. It's clear that you're regurgitating lines you've heard from other people without knowing the basis for their argument. I've heard the arguments you're using before from other people, but usually they refer to our legal system correctly.
I get mistakes, I get a misunderstanding of a subject. On this forum, people have corrected me on my assumptions of issues that I didn't understand. But when a person continues to make the same mistake about a simple understanding of a subject, it shows a disregard for really wanting to understand the issue.
(Yes, I get that there is a window of arguing for the idea that the Declaration of Independence has some legal context, but that's a very small margin, and doesn't fit the context of refer to the Declaration of Independence as guaranteeing rights.)