Posted on 09/28/2004 1:19:47 PM PDT by johnnyb325
Misleading as to food and water, not true as to gives life.
Food and water are true necessities. If you don't obtain them, you die.
Yet they are not free. Not anywhere, not here. You have to bust your ass to get them, and nobody is interested in your bitching if you can't get enough or the kind that you want.
"Health" care sometimes extends the life your parents and God gave you. It does not, by itself, give you life, and there are many, many circumstances when as much "health" care as you can buy or can pursuade others to buy for you won't extend your life by a nanosecond.
Your right to life means no one can kill you without just cause. It does not mean that if you have metastatic ovarian cancer or a brain tumor that someone else's children or elderly parents should (or even can) go without so you can buy more life.
You can't buy more. It's not available.
This is really the answer. It should be like home owners and car insurance. No payout for the small stuff, just the bug stuff.
I forgot about tort reform. That's a biggie, I am sure. When every single person who works in an industry lives with the daily threat that some judge or jury could on a whim decide they owe someone millions of dollars, and continually has to pay huge insurance bills to guard against this, that's another factor that leaves precious little room for a truly free market to function.
Oops. that's the "big stuff"
I don't care that your "average joe" likes stealing.
It's still wrong.
No rights are established in the U.S. Constitution. Some (but not all) are enumerated.
Another point: Doesn't this just mean that hospitals are the ones administering the socialism?
-Government mandates that hospital ERs treat everyone, regardless of ability to pay.
-This gives all hospitals a budget item they can't avoid.
-Other hospital bills (for regular patients) are, inevitably, raised accordingly. (Or the hospital eventually must shut its doors.)
In other words the government gives hospitals an unfunded mandate (you MUST treat these people) and then sits back and lets the hospitals go ahead and collect the "ER socialism tax" by themselves. And of course there are a web of regulations all hospitals must navigate in doing so.
So while the government is not in charge of the tax collection and distribution directly, it really is just a way of "farming out" the socialism, like I said.
I agree, but that doesn't work as an argument in favor of the status quo.
The status quo already involves a large amount of what you and I both agree is morally equivalent to stealing. A lefty's going to say "we're *already* doing socialism, just not *well*". Which is true on both counts.
Social Health has all the accuracy, skill, professionalism, and privacy of your basic military pre-induction physical.
Put your toes on the line, bend over and smile.
Show me a model, anywhere in the world, where socialized medicine is working well. You can't; which is why we need reform rather than jumping in with both feet.
Right. And what the lefties will say (I've heard this approximately a zillion times :) is that under our current system, poor people mostly have a big incentive to wait until problems become bad, then use the ER for their medical care, because that's free. Lefties will say that this is the most costly way to deal with that poor person's medical problem, and given that we're already covering that poor person one way or another (which I would rephrase: given that we already have socialism to some extent), why not revamp the system so that it covers that poor person in a more efficient way, at a lower cost?
I don't think this argument is incorrect. If it is, I don't know the counter argument.
A response like "we shouldn't move to socialism" seems to miss the point that we're already halfway there. That horse has left the barn.
My preferred response would involve more free market in whatever way feasible. At the very least, this position would allow conservatives to at least look more like they acknowledge there are problems.
I agree with you.
And no I can't show you anywhere that socialism is working "well". I think what reasonable lefties would say, with some justification, is that ours is working (in some aspects - not all) especially poorly. In particular lefties can point to specific inefficiencies in our current (half-assed socialist) system, which arguably could be locally improved (even if the end result still wouldn't be all that great).
The "poor people relying on emergency rooms" phenomenon is an example.
Maybe this article should be forwarded to Bill Frist and Denny Hastert, prime movers of the multi-billion dollar Medipill bill backed by Pres. Bush. Both major parties are to blame for the insidious slide toward socialized medicine. Don't enable either of them.
No man should be forced to work for less than their due fee. In that vein perhaps there is room for government licensure of another level of care that would provide relief for those with less resources. The medical profession is against this idea, also for noted reasons.
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When they socialize it,and you try to get it.
Then your education begins.
Medicaid people in most states have primary care coverage, they are for the most part too irresponsible to take care of themselves or their "dependents" until it reaches an "emergency" status at least in their eyes. As a group they are the most demanding and ungrateful bunch of patients.
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