Tea Party march on Washington / Single Payer healthcare

[Evil Hamster]

I'm looking forward to it 

[Evil Hamster]

This catches me up through page 4. If I missed anything you want my opinion about, let me know!

But about half of bankruptcies in the US are caused by medical bills. People on the whole don't save the money towards some fund to pay for hypothetical medical expenses if they don't buy insurance, they spend that money on something else instead. Young people especially have much lower rates of saving than the rest of the population - in that case people aren't making a decision based on whether it's cheaper on average to save or to pay for insurance, they're just gambling on the event occurring or not. In the case you're suggesting, they're going to be hit by large fees, and will probably have to pay massive amounts of money to get onto a high-risk plan in order to pay those fees. It doesn't make much financial sense.

Bringing bankruptcies into this debate is what you call a red-herring. Who cares? In a free society people should be free to fail as well as scuueed. If they choose to not get insurance its on them, not society.

And yes, there is a clause in at least one of the bills that imposes a several-thousand dollar extra "tax" by the IRS on people who choose to not have insurance- and possible jail time. Of course in jail they would get first class healthcare!

The biggest problem, either way, is with the cost of insurance - the other way to increase coverage is to reduce price, since that way more people will be able to afford it. Unfortunately without some sort of public option there's no incentive for the insurers to be more competitive.

That's just simply not true. A public option will not reduce costs except through limiting services. One suggestion I've heard that will truly lower costs through capitalism- allow tax free health savings accounts. People can put (for example) $50 a week into a tax free savings account and use that for their routine services. When they have to pay themselves they will seek out more economical services- forcing the market to lower prices. Then they can purchase insurance at a greatly reduced cost that would cover emergencies. Unfortunately the drug companies and other special interests that came up with this public option to increase their profits would never give campaign contributions to a candidate that supporst such a system.

On the one hand, doctors in general will do whatever helps them the most.  Which could range from unnecessary tests and treatments to accepting bribes from pharmaceutical companies to prescribe more and more drugs even when not necessary.  On the same hand, insurance companies are out to make money, not to lose money.  For that to happen more money has to go into the insurance company than goes out.  In this sense it's not at all different from a lottery or casino game.  A lottery secures this by setting the odds in their favor.  Insurance companies can't set the odds but since the 'pay outs' and 'odds' for each condition are relatively fixed they need only set the prices high enough for the game to be in their favor (and it must be in their favor or they'd go out of business).  Do we say it's wiser to play the lottery 'just in case'?  Why do we say it's better to have insurance 'just in case' if in both cases the game is, and must be, fundamentally rigged?

Those "unnecessary" tests you accuse doctors of are simply for self-defense. If they don't make a patient take a test and it turns out the patient has some rare .001% chance disease and it could have been detected with a $5000 test then the doctor will be sued for malpractice, his malpractice rates will go up, and lawyers and the malpractice insurance insurance companies will all get rich. Why do you think the insurance industry and trial lawyers want a system where all these "unnecessary" tests will be refused by a government bureaucrat? By law, health insurance can not refuse a test ordered by a doctor- but a "public option" can.

New UN HDI is out today, contains data from 2007.

I don't see what migration has to do with healthcare? And the US public school system is in need of a major overhaul when almost half the students who manage to graduate high school can only read at a 7th grade level.

[Evil Hamster]

This kind of stuff just gives me a little bit of hope for the future. Republicrats are not safe from the Tea Party movement

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/28157.html


Edit: somehow I missed this post...

I'm not a big fan of debates for the debates sake.  I like debates in which the participants are interested in what the data and ideas mean/suggest/contradict/conclude.  I don't care for them at all when the participants are interested in conclusions and then try show why their conclusion is better than the opponents' conclusion without the willingness to say 'I could be wrong'.  Very dogmatic, boring, and devoid of the honesty by definition.  I can not, will not, pretend to be participating in the former.  Have fun.

This is more of an idealogical discussion than a traditional debate. It's too bad if you don't want to continue- I actually agreed with some of your points even if I reached that conclusion from a different perspective!

[Evil Hamster]

Polls are very dependent on wording. It's best to give the exact question wording so we can interpret what the responses mean.

CBS News/New York Times Poll. Sept. 19-23, 2009:

Code: [Select]

"Would you favor or oppose the government offering everyone a
government-administered health insurance plan -- something like the Medicare
coverage that people 65 and older get -- that would compete with private health
insurance plans?"
 
    Favor Oppose Unsure  
    % % %

9/19-23/09 65 26 9That's what I consider a good question. No mention of Democrats, Republicans, Obama, etc. Very clear about government's involvement. Gives the concrete example of Medicare, which is familiar to many people.

Sorry for bringing up this old post again, but I found out that question itself is inherently biased to support obamacare and is an EXTREMELY biased question. I know I had previously said I agreed it was fair but I learned something here!

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/pollsters_push_people_to_accep.html

[Evil Hamster]

Evil Hamster, why are you against choice and competition? Because you know that private insurance companies will lose. They are the real death panels. They have been killing people for a long time with claim denials and rescissions.

Over time, people may increasingly choose the public option, if it provides better coverage and/or cheaper premiums. Nothing wrong with that, unless you are reflexively anti-government and worship the market like a fundamentalist. On the other hand, it's possible that private insurance companies will actually improve. If that happens, fine, they will have earned the right to survive. If they continue to do what they are doing right now, they deserve to go out of business.

That clip of Robert Reich is pure sarcasm on his part. I would be curious to see a transcript of the whole speech. I have a pretty good idea of what he advocates.

Choice and competition? Because what the government proposes is- You can't choose there will be no competition allowed. You're using special interest created, poll tested buzzwords. I agree our system is not perfect. There is too much government regulation and too many mega corporations taking choice away from the people. You don't fix that by government taking over and guaranteeing even more inflated profits to the mega corporations. You fix it by minimizing government and corporations ability to distort the free market- give the power back to the people not take it away.

The fallacy that what they are proposing is "an option" is ridiculous. Even if it tried, how could an insurance company possibly compete with the government? The government sets the rules. The government has unlimited funds. The government only pays doctors 40% of what an insurance company will for the exact same service. I'm sure the cost to the taxpayer will be more due to corruption and inefficiency inherent in every government program.

It's funny how when a liberal is caught stating their exact goal it's "sarcasm".

[Evil Hamster]

Evil Hamster, you are all over the place. You claim to be against mega-corporations and want even more deregulation. Sorry, but that's contradictory. When corporations started becoming mega-corps in the 19th Century, there was very little regulation. Then Teddy Roosevelt and Progressives like the Muckrakers came after them. The result was regulation. The notion that deregulation would result in a nation dominated by small businesses is absurd.

Now, it is true that mega-corps feed at the government trough and get larger as a result. That's bad. It's true that they have private profits and socialized losses. That's bad. Both parties participate in this state of affairs, and I condemn both parties for it.

I say, if a corporation is going to fail, one of two things should happen. Either (1) let it fail. Or (2) if it is so big that its failure would bring down the whole economy, nationalize it (at least temporarily). Then in the future, corporations should not be allowed to become too big to fail. Enforce anti-trust laws.

I'm not all over the place. I believe the government's role in the economy should be limited to ensuring the free market functions like it's supposed to. That would involve anti-trust laws and enforcement of the criminal code. The problem with existing regulations is they benefit the mega-corporations- after all they were written by corporate lawyers for the politicians to put their names on while they take millions of dollars in bribes to vote for them. And BOTH parties are guilty in this. So are we voters who keep electing politicians who bring the most pork to their districts- or go vote blindly for a particular party/politicians without looking at their histories or positions.

As for companies being too big to fail- that is a fallacy. One example- If AIG had been allowed to fail- then people would have gone to other companies for their insurance. Even the bulk of their employees would have been hired by those now much busier smaller companies. The economy would have had a bump, but would recover on its own without the government borrowing billions of dollars from China that our children and grandchildren are going to be paying off in the form of higher than necessary taxes for the entirety of their lives.

[Evil Hamster]

Ayn Rand.

I agree with that. Some people are attempting to hijack the conservative movement with religion.

Most DEMOCRAT blogs, videos, and articles are all inter-related; they feed off eachother's 'articles' and relative persuasive biased arguments.  That isn't to say that the ideology isn't capable of reaching the same conclusions (no matter how ridiculous) independently or using the same fallacies to reach them independently.

Fixed.

Seriously though- are we going to debate positions or just devolve into mud-slinging?

A couple of videos from Sick for Profit:

As I've been told many times by both Daxx and yourself anecdotal evidence does not prove anything. Not even when it's packaged in a dramatic film sponsored by a political party designed to scare people into giving them power.

And Alan Grayson is obviously a moron. That smacks of the KKK tactics used in the south telling African Americans republicans want to kill them. haha more people will die without a public option than died in Iraq? There's the straw man argument. More babies are killed in this country every 2 days than died in both gulf ware comined- that doesn't prove anything. More people die from alcohol related diseases than lack of health insurance- should we bring back prohibition? And where do they get that number from anyways? How many death certificates are there that say "cause of death: didn't have health insurance"?

No. No person who can decide anything without reasonable evidence (or with the best they can get, depending on circumstances) could ever be described as intelligent. Smart maybe, but not intelligent. There is a subtle difference there. Smart people can spell, do maths or memorise ect (to give the most obvious examples), Intelligent people can collate data, see all sides of an argument and can go into any debate from any side without prejudice to come to a decision that appears to be correct from what they know after all the evidence is presented. Also most importantly can UNDERSTAND. A lot of smart people just know, they dont understand what they know.

I dont believe in perfection, Noone can always be right. All we can hope for is to get as close as we can to picking people who will choose the path they think is best not for them, but for all.

What i have wrote doesnt do what i think justice really but it conveys the point, i hope reasonably well. There is a lot missing, but i think we would need a full forum to debate such political ideas well, with all the small points to pull over Tongue

Maybe you should start a thread for this- could be an interesting debate

After all- an intelligent person could decide that children should be taken away from parents and raised by the state. I can think of a dozen arguments in favor of that. An intelligent person could decide every human should only be allowed to live 30 years- as long as it applies to everybody then it would be good for society. An intelligent person could set up a scheme based on genetics to determine who gets to mate with who for the benefit of the species.

(Logans Run anybody!)

To recap and expand: a lot of people consider a mixed government run under socialist principles to be synonymous with socialism, which is why they are claiming that they are. You appear to be using the stricter definition. However, you have used the word to refer to things which by your own definition are far from socialist. Does that make sense?

So you're saying that I can't use the definition of socialism to explain the difference between governemnt services which are and are not socialist? But others can just claim police and post office and other examples are socialist with no basis for that claim and it's OK? If you disagree explain the difference instead of attacking the argument. I don't recall anybody explaining how the examples given are socialist- if I missed it, I apologize please repeat and we can discuss from here.

You should probably look into it rather than just dismissing it out of hand. It is probably the most reliable poll aggregator in the US. The guy who runs it cut his teeth on baseball analysis and then went on to become quite famous as someone who is very very good at prediction based on poll results. It's also a useful site for finding poll results and analysis - remember, statistical analysis done right is independent of political affiliation, regardless of the political conclusions drawn.

You're right. I don't know the history of that site, I've never even heard of it before. However if he always reaches a conclusion that supports a particular agenda it would seem to me to indicate a bias.

The 9/12 movement was started and promoted by Glenn Beck.

That's such a blatant lie I don't even know where to start.

It was heavily promoted by Fox News. The Tea Party movement was heavily promoted by Fox to the point where they started to promote their own events.

I have heard it was covered more by them than the other networks. That doesn't prove anything. It's a free country if they choose to cover it good for them.

Fox repeatedly over-reported the number of attendees based on picking and choosing eyewitness estimates.

And the other networks all severely under-reported the number of people who attended. I guess it depends on who you trust.

There have been Fox producers caught on tape getting the crowds going. The movement primarily consists of easily-led people who watch Fox, listen to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and read the Drudge Report, all of whom have been heavily promoting the events with no regard for journalistic detachment.

As opposed to the easily led people who watch CNN, ABC, NBS and CBS who all under-reported the event with no regard for journalistic integrity? There's a reason their ratings are plumeting. The purpose of the media in this country is to criticize and watchdog over the government not promote and support it.

Fox are creating news, not reporting it. I'm not surprised that Fox get more viewers than anyone else - taking the stance that news is entertainment, journalistic integrity and the truth be damned, they're going to appeal more to viewers who don't really care about the minutae of any given situation but are going to pay attention when they are being told things they want to hear. It's a business decision, pure and simple, and it's the reason MSNBC chose to head more sharply leftwards - after seeing how successful Fox was being by aligning itself with a political ideology rather than at least pretending to be objective. Whether or not you watch Fox, they are a major vehicle for the neoconservative agenda, from creating talking points, to distortions, to untruths, and even "grassroots" political movements whole cloth.

Where the hell do you get all this? I canceled my cable 18 months ago because there wasn't anything worth watching. I didn't even have Fox- they were in the $100 a month cable plan, while CNN was in the $50 a month plan I did have. I was so disgusted by CNN's blatant not even attempting to be balanced coverage I stopped watching. When I was unemployed I watched Good morning America occasionally- I remember specifically two days- one day they interviewed a republican I don't remember, but they asked the most vicious questions imaginable. The next day they interviewed Nancy Pelosi and it was all "Youre a grandmother" video of her shopping for groceries and questions like "some people are calling you an extremist how do you respond". It was BS and I stopped watching there. But I suppose to you that would be fair.

And if MSNBC shifted to the left as a business decision their shareholders should be up in arms because their ratings have plumeted. But- since they are owned by GE, which recieved a billion dollars in the "stimulus" package I don't expect them to become unbiased anytime soon.

That Post article has some good ideas. And neither am I defending the current bill as being the solution to every problem. In fact, I think it is deeply flawed as a method of reform solely because it does not make any actual progress beyond a private insurance system. But it is my belief that a properly constructed bill which would create a public option would be beneficial for the US, and a good start down the road to rejoining the rest of the industrialised world. I'm still not sure why you're opposed to that concept.

Rejoin in what? Our system is far better. Your system benefits from the advances that can only be made in a free market so you shouldn't want us to change.

I've asked you at least 3 times in this thread if public school is a socialist program.  I've also asked you for a definition of a legitimate government program that doesn't include looking at history or referencing anything i.e some rule that would let us know what's legitimate and what is not without asking for each and every single one (A program is socialist if it has the properties A, B, and/or C, where A,B and C are not referencing a list of programs).  Please don't tell me where you stand on school.  Instead give me the rule so that I would know for all possible programs (including school).  Thank you.

I have answered that. I gave the definition of socialism and explained using the examples you and others gave are or are not socialist programs. Government exists to tax everybody and provide certain services- explain to me how any of those services are socialist, don't just claim they are without any support then criticize me for providing examples that contradict you.

Edit: fixed formatting error.

[Uzra]

Wow, this is going to demand quite a response. I'll give it a go tomorrow, hopefully.

I'm not a big fan of debates for the debates sake.  I like debates in which the participants are interested in what the data and ideas mean/suggest/contradict/conclude.  I don't care for them at all when the participants are interested in conclusions and then try show why their conclusion is better than the opponents' conclusion without the willingness to say 'I could be wrong'.  Very dogmatic, boring, and devoid of the honesty by definition.  I can not, will not, pretend to be participating in the former.  Have fun.

[Belthus]

As far as my understanding of the plan runs, it is the government actually getting involved in the free market by purchasing insurance on the free market and selling it to people.

Do you have a source? Your description does not fit my understanding of the public option.

[Daxx]

This is going to be a mess of a response. I'm going to try to group quotes as best I can, but the problem with this discussion is that at its heart it is entirely schizophrenic. It is not at all clear what the focus is, since you continually mix your arguments between partisan politics, the actual bill, and some hypothetical system you are afraid is going to be implemented (though these three are only barely interrelated). It would be far more helpful if the discussion could focus on one thread of argument at a time (or alternatively be split into different threads so the discussions won't overlap).

I have also hit the character limit, so I'm going to split this into two posts directly following each other.

I think that unemployment is probably the biggest factor right now. But unemployment is not fixed by massive government programs that are going to tax the companies that provide jobs.

This is an extreme tangent. I think this should be split off into a new thread if it needs further discussion.

Increased government spending decreases unemployment because government spending is a component of aggregate demand. Provided we're not in the extreme monetarist case where any expansion of demand is purely inflationary (which is probably not the case, even in the long term), expansions of aggregate demand have the effect of increasing employment. Furthermore, due to the circular flow of income, that spending increases through the multiplier effect and causes even bigger growth. Government stimulus programs are therefore one method which can be used to stimulate the economy.
Where the government gets that money is another question. Some can be raised by internal methods such as decreasing spending in other areas, but let's assume for the moment that they are implementing the programs ex nihilo. If they borrow the money, then it is likely to be in part inflationary because the money supply is being increased, and it might potentially have a depressive effect on future government spending due to increased government debt. If the government increases tax revenue, this has an ambiguous effect. Since the government does not save the money, the multiplier effect is more increasing in demand than the taxation decreases demand. On the other hand, one would presume the government would already be at the optimal point on the laffer curve, and so therefore tax increases would be suboptimal. The effect also depends on who is being taxed.

Relating this theory back to the real world, the stimulus programs instituted by the Bush administration and the Obama administration (I assume you're referring to these, because this discussion actually has nothing to do with the healthcare bill) have lessened the impact of the recession at the cost of running a larger budget deficit. The problem faced by governments whose economies are running into recession is that it is more acceptable to lessen the impact rather than take into account future problems that may cause. Of course, it is also more reasonable from an economic perspective to mitigate the excesses of the business cycle, because it is more efficient to run at a modest rate of growth than it is to go through constant cycles of boom/bust.

Tangent over.

But to your point- if you have a medical emergency you can go to any hospital and they are required by law to treat you regardless of your ability to pay. The same can't be said for routine doctor visits. If I sit on my but all day not working even if I am able and you go work hard every day- is it right for me to go see the doctor and make you pay for it just because you have the money?

There are two distinct issues here. The first is the effectiveness of emergency vs preventative care. The second is the moral issue surrounding healthcare.

Let's deal quickly with the first because it is simple. Preventative care reduces medical costs in the long run, in the same way that performing maintenance on a car on a regular basis reduces repair costs. A significant number of people are admitted to emergency rooms in the US for conditions which are easily treatable and preventable if caught at an earlier stage. This might be because they do not have insurance, or it might be because they cannot afford even with their insurance plans to get treatment. In this case, it is more efficient for people to have preventative care. Emergency care alone is not enough to actually improve someone's quality of life, so the provision for emergency care is not a mitigating factor when we're talking about actual solutions in healthcare reform.

The second is far more tricky. You're presumably claiming that it is not morally right for someone's medical bills to be subsidised by other people. There are a number of arguments, both philosophical and practical as to why healthcare should be subsidized or publicly funded. I'll list them briefly, otherwise we could be here all day.

• Negative externalities resulting from lack of healthcare provision impact everyone, not just the sick person. Positive externalities from healthcare provision impact everyone, not just the sick person. Together, these more than justify some redistribution of wealth on a private cost/benefit level even without getting into moral arguments.
• Increased social welfare could be considered a moral imperative. As I've demonstrated, that would naturally lead to a moral imperative for increased healthcare provision.
• The same argument, that redistribution of wealth is theft and inherently immoral, can be exactly applied to other redistributive programs like roadbuilding, policing and other emergency services, the military and so forth because they operate on exactly the same principle of redistribution of wealth in order to provide products/services on a public basis.

Where do you get that 15% number? I've heard it's only 6%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_the_United_States#Health_care_spending The graph to the right is from that article. Click to see it in a large scale, it neatly arranges countries by spending as a percentage of GDP. Note that "socialist" countries with public healthcare provision spend far less and yet according to most estimates have a better quality of life. The article references several estimates, including http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/hlthaff.w5.63/DC1 http://www.who.int/entity/whosis/whostat/EN_WHS09_Full.pdf Calculating by hand: The figure for healthcare spending were to $2,260,000,000,000 (2.26 trillion) in 2007. GDP in 2007 was $13,840,000,000,000 (13.84 trillion). Dividing GDP by healthcare spending comes out to about 6.1 (which is probably where you heard the incorrect statistic), but this is about one sixth, which is about 16%. Other estimates actually put it higher than that for more recent years (up to 17% or above in some cases), given that those statistics come from two years ago and insurance prices are rising faster than your current economic growth rate, but I decided to use the more concrete estimate where we have the hard data. I would however expect the estimates for this year to be borne out, since there is no reason to suspect that healthcare spending would not increase at previous rates.

So discussing the proper method to address healthcare- that it's a matter for individual states and people themselves to decide- is not allowed in this debate simply because you think the best solution is a massive federal plan?

No. I was suggesting that circumventing the discussion by claiming that it is unconstitutional is prohibiting the (quite reasonable) idea that a federally provided public healthcare insurance option would be a good solution, but that's not why it isn't appropriate for discussion here. If you consider the welfare of your countrymen to be less of a concern than blinding following one particular interpretation of a piece of paper, that's fine and you're entitled to that opinion, but when you initiate a discussion on this forum about a federal plan you should discuss the federal plan on its own merits. The consititutionality is a separate issue (which probably demands its own thread) - there's no reason why it cannot be discussed elsewhere, but it is disingenuous and a red herring to bring it up in the context of this discussion.

First- profit in and of itself is not evil. Greed is. Most of the problems in this country are due to greed - Wall street demands companies maximize profit at the expense of all other concerns. But that's a whole other topic for debate. However you claim insurance companies discriminate based on financial considerations while the government won't? Are you serious? Every country that has a socialized system uses cost as a factor in determining what care is given. That isn't an improvement over what we currently have.

Actually, what I said is that public plans where welfare maximisation is the target discriminate less than the free market. I didn't say the government would not discriminate, but that actual provision would be less discriminatory than in the private sector alone.

This graph (which is not perfect, but it will have to do since I don't have an image editor to hand right now) explains how economists view the problem of social vs private returns. For the moment ignore the shape of the supply line and ignore the fact that this graph isn't dynamic. It is socially optimal to be at output level Qs rather than Qp, and that is the output level that the social planner is aiming for when instituting public provision. Every unit of market quantity to the right of each of those points is a part of the market that is being discriminated against (by being priced out of the market). At Qp, more of the market is being discriminated against than at Qs and the difference between the two outcomes is the distance between the two. It is very simple mathematics that dictates this outcome. What this means is that the private sector inherently discriminates more than the public sector when the social equilibrium suggests that goods are underprovided (as is typically the case when healthcare is left to the private sector alone). When I talk about actuaries making decisions on who to provide healthcare to based on demographics and market segmentation, this is how it is represented from an economic perspective. The private sector is based on an insurance model - they can maximise profit by divesting themselves of as much risk as possible (I could explain why this is true if you like, but it's so obvious I shouldn't have to) and so therefore the highest risk customers are denied coverage either by being priced out of the market or by being flat out denied. This is a natural outcome of the way their business model works, and it's a completely reasonable thing for them to do. However, this does not mean it provides the best coverage from a social perspective.

There was a doctor interviewed on the local morning radio show here this morning. He said that the US has 3 times as many MRI machines per capita than both Canada and the UK. Those machines are tremendously expensive and a socialized systems loathe spending the money where in a for-profit system they are just capital investments- that will eventually return a profit so it makes buisiness sense to purchase them. Yes that's only ONE example of one facet of healthcare but it highlights the differences in principle and philosophy.

Actually that has nothing to do with the bill. That is a business decision made by healthcare providers, not by health insurance providers. The public insurance option would not actually change that in any way, since the healthcare providers would actually be paid the same, and in the same way. This is the fundamental disconnect I feel that you and others are having over this bill - it does not change healthcare provision, only the way it is paid for. There is absolutely no reason why this bill would lead to fewer MRI machines, to use your example.

The actual reasons behind the proliferation of MRI machines (as a singular facet of healthcare) are not actually quite so clear. You're free to put whatever interpretation you like onto there, but my personal suggestion is that it doesn't say much except that the profit motive exists. You can't actually draw any conclusions about efficiency of care. Of course, this is all rendered moot by the fact that the UK and Canada (amongst others) run private healthcare alongside their public systems, so for those who pay for the highest tier of care quality - those being the only ones for whom being on the bleeding edge of technology is actually an issue - this is not actually an issue at all.

Suppose you, as an individual, go see the doctor and just pay cash for routine visits. Suppose you pay out of pocket for any routine medications you use. You will look to save money any way you can, and you can then purchase insurance to cover actual emergencies. Calling healthcare coverage insurance is like saying your car insurance should pay for routine oil changes.

See above where I talk about preventative care.

If the market was changed to allow this- then costs would necessarily come down to what people are willing to pay. That is true free market.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that you can already do this if you want. It's a terribly stupid idea, but you could if you wanted. Prices are, of course, still rising faster than the growth rate.

[Daxx]

Calling a government "public option" free market is ridiculous- when that plan is specifically to allow drug companies, trial lawyers and other special interests to increase their profits simply because they backed a particular party in the elections.

As far as my understanding of the plan runs, it is the government actually getting involved in the free market by purchasing insurance on the free market and selling it to people. They can do this cheaply because on the free market they have purchasing power, and run into economies of scale. In what sense is this deviating from a free-market solution? There is no public funding aside from the administration of the purchasing, so where is the socialism? The rest sounds like partisan nonsense. Special interests will always fight - plenty against the bill, some for, and some trying to change the bill in order to get more out of it. Characterising the bill as being solely designed to work for the special interests is actually just plain disingenuous.

But about half of bankruptcies in the US are caused by medical bills. People on the whole don't save the money towards some fund to pay for hypothetical medical expenses if they don't buy insurance, they spend that money on something else instead. Young people especially have much lower rates of saving than the rest of the population - in that case people aren't making a decision based on whether it's cheaper on average to save or to pay for insurance, they're just gambling on the event occurring or not. In the case you're suggesting, they're going to be hit by large fees, and will probably have to pay massive amounts of money to get onto a high-risk plan in order to pay those fees. It doesn't make much financial sense.

Bringing bankruptcies into this debate is what you call a red-herring. Who cares? In a free society people should be free to fail as well as scuueed. If they choose to not get insurance its on them, not society.

Aha, except it is not a red herring and it is in fact a societal problem. The US prides itself on social mobility, but unfortunately just as success helps other people, failure hurts them. Bankruptcies occuring is an indication of negative externalities; repeated failure of mortgages, for example, means a massive drop in aggregate demand (and therefore income) for everyone due to the circular flow of income. You could also characterise it as a moral imperative if you subscribed to that sort of thing.

Getting people cheaper health insurance would reduce the number of bankruptcies and would increase peoples' disposable income, and would therefore on balance increase aggregate demand, which increases national income.

Put as a very simple and stylised example in order to illustrate my point: imagine you are a hardworking metalworker at a manufacturing plant. Foreclosures massively increase because people are being mis-sold loans, or are being fiscally irresponsible, or whatever. This has the side effect that banks do not want to lend money. Demand for cars decreases because people have less disposable incomes, and cannot get loans. Your boss cannot even get a loan to support the company through the bad times. He lays you off. You no longer have an income, health insurance, or any of the other perks that come with a job - even though you worked hard and were fiscally responsible. This is what a recession is.

A public option will not reduce costs except through limiting services.

Actually a public option will do no such thing because it is not about services, it is about healthcare insurance payment not healthcare provision. See above. Perhaps you are confusing the public option with a single-payer nationalised health service?

The public option will reduce costs because the government, representing a larger number of buyers, has more market power. In economic theory this means that the government represents a major player in an oligopsony. It acts to correct market failure (oligopolistic insurance providers with more market power than the much more competitive purchasers) under the principles of the Theory of the Second Best (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_Second_Best). The demand curve is altered which alters the equilibrium outcome closer to the optimal point. This isn't particularly complicated economics, but it will take a while to explain if you're not familiar with the theory - I can if you like but I won't do it right here.

I have answered that. I gave the definition of socialism and explained using the examples you and others gave are or are not socialist programs. Government exists to tax everybody and provide certain services- explain to me how any of those services are socialist, don't just claim they are without any support then criticize me for providing examples that contradict you.

To recap and expand: a lot of people consider a mixed government run under socialist principles to be synonymous with socialism, which is why they are claiming that they are. You appear to be using the stricter definition. However, you have used the word to refer to things which by your own definition are far from socialist. Does that make sense?

So you're saying that I can't use the definition of socialism to explain the difference between governemnt services which are and are not socialist? But others can just claim police and post office and other examples are socialist with no basis for that claim and it's OK? If you disagree explain the difference instead of attacking the argument. I don't recall anybody explaining how the examples given are socialist- if I missed it, I apologize please repeat and we can discuss from here.

No, because you're not actually explaining the difference at all. I've been through this on at least five posts now, but there is no actual ideological dichotomy that is not completely arbitrary. Since you've asked me to, I'll repeat myself again - this is the third time I have posted this exact paragraph. This time I'll take it out of the quote box so it's less likely that it'll get skipped over.

We can have this one of two ways based on your preferred interpretation of "socialist". Either, you can claim that those things (fire, police, military, road-building) are not socialist, in which case you cannot continue to call the public insurance option socialist because it requires about the same level of government intervention and public ownership; alternatively, you can claim that the bill's proposal is socialist because it involves redistribution of wealth to "those who do not deserve it", but you must then accept that these things are socialist as well because they involve redistribution of wealth through taxation in order to fund public projects, the benefits of which accrue to all, even those who did not earn it, and not just the taxpayers.

You're right. I don't know the history of that site, I've never even heard of it before. However if he always reaches a conclusion that supports a particular agenda it would seem to me to indicate a bias.

"Reality has a well known liberal bias." - Stephen Colbert

Snide quotes aside, it seems that if someone is using data and reaching a conclusion relatively consistently, it's also possible that he's correct. You'd be right to suspect a bias of course, but that doesn't actually mean that bias exists. This is the problem with not doing your research.

The 9/12 movement was started and promoted by Glenn Beck.

That's such a blatant lie I don't even know where to start.

Oh, come on. At least pretend you're not just being contrary for the sake of it.

http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/23011/

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http://www.the912project.com/
http://www.breitbart.tv/put-the-country-first-glenn-becks-9-12-message/

The purpose of the media in this country is to criticize and watchdog over the government not promote and support it.

You're absolutely right that the media should be critical of the government. The key word being critical, not oppositional. Ironically, it's exactly the complaint that everyone had about Fox News during Bush's administration. Fox of course is not actually a watchdog of any meaningful kind, but simply represents a right-wing partisan perspective. None of the major American news outlets are in any way useful for news - they know their market and it is entertainment (or at best infotainment). Holding the administration accountable for mistakes and failures is laudable. Being contrary to the administration for the sake of satisfying your partisan viewership is not the same thing.

Rejoin in what? Our system is far better. Your system benefits from the advances that can only be made in a free market so you shouldn't want us to change.

Quite aside from repeated proofs given that your system is not in fact "better", and challenges to provide proof that it is in fact your method of health insurance coverage that is responsible for medical innovation that have come up empty, innovation in medial technology has little to do with how healthcare is paid for, as I have already pointed out in this post (http://elementstheforum.smfforfree3.com/index.php/topic,567.msg6770#msg6770).

Choice and competition? Because what the government proposes is- You can't choose there will be no competition allowed. You're using special interest created, poll tested buzzwords. I agree our system is not perfect. There is too much government regulation and too many mega corporations taking choice away from the people. You don't fix that by government taking over and guaranteeing even more inflated profits to the mega corporations. You fix it by minimizing government and corporations ability to distort the free market- give the power back to the people not take it away.

The fallacy that what they are proposing is "an option" is ridiculous. Even if it tried, how could an insurance company possibly compete with the government? The government sets the rules. The government has unlimited funds. The government only pays doctors 40% of what an insurance company will for the exact same service. I'm sure the cost to the taxpayer will be more due to corruption and inefficiency inherent in every government program.[/quote]

I believe you fundamentally misunderstand how this works.

As I explained above, the proposed system of the public option allows for the government to negotiate in bulk quantities with the insurance companies, thereby reducing their profits because of increased market power and correcting pre-existing market distortion through the Theory of the Second Best.

There is no competition between the insurance companies and the government over initial provision of insurance. In fact, the government is buying insurance from the insurance companies. Where there is competition is on the open market, where the government will sell the insurance plans it has already bought (more cheaply due to bulk) on to consumers alongside the regular plans. The government in this case is reducing the market failure that has resulted from the insurance industry oligopoly, which is imperfectly competitive.

Even if there were competition over initial provision, that would be a good thing. This is the free market in action - the government is promoting all sorts of efficiencies from productive efficiency to X-efficiency (probably the biggest problem with the US healthcare industry) by providing competition to bloated and inefficient private companies. This provides a hard limit to the inefficiency that the health insurers can rack up - that is, no more than the government minus the government's corrective subsidization (which may or may not exist, but probably should if we genuinely wanted to decrease inefficiency).

Apologies that this post was so long - I really do recommend that this discussion gets split up from this point onwards into different threads if you want to respond to any of my points, since there are at least three broad topics of conversation here.

[Essence]

Health insurance isn't the solution -- it's the problem.  Witness this brilliant and insightful piece of writing:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care

The 9/12 movement was started and promoted by Glenn Beck.

That much is absolutely true.  But the march that happened on 9/12 was only composed in small part of the actual participants in Beck's 9/12 movement.  There were many, many groups, and many individuals -- my parents included -- who participated without any specific interest in the 9/12 movement.  My mother, for example, hates Glenn Beck and Fox News with an unabated passion, but she believes that, in her words "trying to spend yourself out of a recession is like standing in a bucket and trying to pull yourself up by the handle."

Don't conflate the profiteering of Glenn Beck with a corruption of the motives of the march as a whole.

In what sense is this deviating from a free-market solution?

In the sense that the government will fine your a$$ thousands of dollars for not purchasing the health care that they demand you have.  That may be a market, but it sure ain't free.

Now, I can see STATE governments doing this.  State governments already do something similar by forcing drivers to have car insurance before allowing them to drive.  But allowing this to happen on a Federal level is utterly unconstitutional.

But about half of bankruptcies in the US are caused by medical bills.

See the above article.  If health care expenses were treated like any other rational kind of expense -- paid for out of pocket, or with credit or savings for significant expenses, and with health 'insurance' only used for what every other kind of insurance -- extreme emergencies -- medical costs would drop to the reasonable levels that traditional supply-and-demand would force them to.  Only because of the occult nature of pricing and payment - created by the health insurance system - is health care noticably more expensive here than elsewhere.

That, and our national diet sucks, which makes us much, much more prone to heart attacks, cancer, diabetes, and a host of other diseases that no one will ever tell you are diet-related. 

Well, also, our doctors are taught and our medicines are made to treat symptoms rather than actualyl solving the underlying problems that cause them.  But that's just good business sense, from a strictly capitalist perspective.

But mostly it's the health insurance thing.