Posted on 12/16/2007 9:48:47 AM PST by JRochelle
You’re no conservative.
You’re a phony and a fraud just like Willard.
The Romney Sleaze Machine likes playing fast and loose with facts.
As in so many cases, you are wrong. I’m simply a conservative who actually wants to discuss how to implement conservative philosophy, rather than someone who just likes to post on the internet about how bad everybody else is.
I imagine in real life you actually have to accomplish things, and that in real life you have figured out how to apply your conservative values in positive ways. I think if you could apply some of that real-world experience to the discussions of issues and policies here, there would be a positive impact.
But for now I have to imagine it.
After all, I haven’t seen YOUR solution to the problem of taxpayer dollars paying for the health care of uninsured people who can’t pay for themselves.
It’s easy to attack others for their solutions when you provide none of your own.
You know nothing about conservatism. You take all sides on all issues and wind up standing for nothing.
The Constitution and conservatism has all the solutions for what ails America. Otherwise Free Republic is not a place for liberal debate, which is what you engage in most of the time. If I was Jim, I would bounce your butt out of here.
And I would never presume to think for Jim, nor would I ever say “If I was Jim”. :-)
I can debate all sides of issues. It’s a tool which makes it possible to understand other points of view, which leads to a better understanding of the issues and solutions.
There’s a reason that the term “devil’s advocate” has such great standing. You can gain great strength in your own opinions and philosophy by arguing against it.
However, I rarely engage in such activities here. Most issues have many sides, and conservatism is not so clear-cut as to which precise position is the “conservative” one. So I will argue how to apply conservative principles to specific instances. And yes, if everybody is doing the “me-to” dance, I will look for an area of disagreement so as to make people think harder, which will either strengthen their resolve or correct their error.
You write enough here that I would have thought your schooling would have taught you this and other forms of learning and exploration of truth and philosophy. But you show little signs of being much more than another repeater of shallow platitudes and handy sound bites. You seem generally threatened by a serious discussion of issues.
And in fact, whenever a discussion gets much below the 30-second sound bite, to where you actually have to research facts and apply your principles in new and different ways, you pop right back to your petty namecalling instead.
It’s a shame, because for a while now I’ve felt that you could be someone who could defend their beliefs and apply them to real-life situations. I still think that, but certainly no longer believe you have any interest in doing so.
This is very sad, but I had a good “internet” friend who was quite the liberal, and in my two years of debating him on a host of issues and news stories (before his wife told me I had to stop writing to him because it was ruining his life), he showed more of an interest in actually discussing issues than you have.
But generally, conservatives are much better thinkers because we will discuss issues and explore options and will adopt the “right” and “workable” solutions, while liberals mostly just are “liberal” without regard to whether it works or not.
Fortunately, I think there is a broader base at FR who still value the debate, the exploration, the testing of our ideals against real-world problems. I’m sorry you don’t seem to want to be a part of that.
You would never presume to think, period.
>>>>I can debate all sides of issues.
And you can take all sides too. From a liberal perspective, from a moderate perspective, just not from a conservative perspective.
Just like Mitt Boy, you're a liberal.
You are wrong. Women on Medicaid will not pay the copay. This universal health care plan does not change that. What it does is expand the number of abortions from a relatively small number, about 5000 that were subsidized under medicaid to 25,000, the total number of abortions in Massachusetts on a yearly basis. If you want the links to the websites that show these stats I will send you the article I posted last month.
Regardless, Romney’s health plan is a huge step backward for the prolife movement in Massachusetts. Every taxpayer in Mssachusetts must have a hand in funding every abortion in Massachusetts. It was not that way pre-RomneyCare.
Romney could have blocked this enitire monstrosity. Government mandates are generally bad, especially iin the health care field. Governemnt cannot improve the best health care system in the world. It can only make it worse. RomneyCare proves the point.
This mandate is not about “health care”, it’s about “health care insurance”.
I’m willing to entertain and argument that having an insurance requirement is a bad thing. To start, let me ask a question — Are car insurance mandates a bad thing?
In my view, they are. They benefit mainly the lawyers and the insurance companies. They soak the policy holders. And a 10/20 policy does virutaually no good for someone who is seriously ill. Finally, they use the police power of the state to coerce the citizens into private contractual arrangements.
Reponsible people would get insurance. People who are not responsible will either not get insurance or get so little that it will not benefit legitiamtely injured plaintiffs.
In Virginia, they require insurance to a minimum standard. If you don’t get the insurance, you must pay an “uninsured motor vehicle fee”, even though that doesn’t provide insurance. Instead, it puts money into an insurance pool to be used by insurance companies when there is an accident involving an uninsured vehicle.
The justification for government involvement is that government provides the license to drive, and the roads we drive on.
On a practical level, it would be little comfort to be the “responsible” one if you had to pay a lot more for your insurance because your company had to be able to cover you when you are hit by an uninsured vehicle.
Some states have solved this problem by dictating “no-fault” insurance, so that if you buy insurance, you are covered without regard to the other person. But in those states, coverage is more expensive for good drivers, since their ability to not cause accidents is of little value when the insurance company has to cover any accident that happens.
However, I would tend to agree that mandatory car insurance is an unnecessary government intrusion. In some cases, a simply provision of an expedited court proceeding for traffic accident lawsuits would provide a low-cost way for insurance companies to recover damages from an uninsured motorist. And at worst, the cost of uninsured motorists is a manageable sum of money, which can somewhat be avoided by careful defensive driving, and that still can be less costly if you are a good enough driver.
I don’t particularly mind the extra fee for uninsured motorists, in order to help defray the cost, except that it penalizes people who are very good drivers, and own crappy cars that they don’t care about. Such a driver will not CAUSE an accident, and won’t care if his car gets hit, so why should they have to pay money for the privilege of not wasting money.
And in the end, we are just talking about a car. Nobody’s going to run to the government and beg to have car crash losses covered by the state if a person doesn’t have insurance.
Now, let’s compare with medical insurance. The problem is that while a vast majority of the public has no problem with an uninsured motorist losing their car and having to buy some cheap replacement, we don’t feel the same about medical care.
In fact, there is little support for letting people die on the sidewalk in front of a hospital simply because they didn’t buy medical insurance. And in fact, we won’t even let a sick person suffer increased sickness simply because they can’t pay. Even strong conservatives are heard saying “come on now, we know that nobody in America is actually DENIED medical treatment”.
The question is, who pays for this treatment, when the patient cannot pay? If you have insurance, the insurance pays. If you go to a hospital where they treat a lot of people who can’t pay, they will try to pass the cost onto those who have insurance, driving up costs — or else they will go out of business. Unless of course they get tax dollars — which is common.
So in one case, the people who buy insurance essentially buy insurance both for themselves, AND for people who are too cheap to buy their own. In the other case, the costs are paid by all those who pay taxes.
So the next question is, can conservative philosophy provide a solution to the problem of the WRONG people paying for medical treatment, when the most obvious choice of refusing treatment is unviable? Or maybe that’s unfair — can the refusal of treatment be made into a viable alternative?
The problem is that in bad accidents, the damages far excede the assets of your typical uninsured motorist.
And at worst, the cost of uninsured motorists is a manageable sum of money, which can somewhat be avoided by careful defensive driving, and that still can be less costly if you are a good enough driver.
Medical bills and other costs associated with bodily damage from an accident (i.e. physical therapy, lost wages, etc) can be very high and far from manageable.
I don’t particularly mind the extra fee for uninsured motorists, in order to help defray the cost, except that it penalizes people who are very good drivers, and own crappy cars that they don’t care about
No state requires you to buy insurance for damage to your car or body. It's damage to other peoples' cars as well as damage to their person that must be covered, which IMHO is very sound policy.
Furthermore, if insurance companies are allowed to price their policies as they see fit, good drivers will not be penalized. The fact that you're a good driver will keep your premiums low. And like I said, you can always opt out of insurance on your own car.
I’m sympathetic to that view. I tend to support Virginia’s law, even though I am cognizant that it is not necessarily in keeping with a pure limited-government position.
BTW, most car insurance provides very little money for medical. They expect that if people have major medical problems, their own insurance will cover it, and the coverage in the car insurance is to pay for deductables and co-pays.
If you don’t have medical, or your medical insurance won’t cover the treatment you choose, then you can sue the insurance company. If you win, the medical cost turns into “liability”, and is covered by the much-larger liability.
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