Why America should NOT have any form of government run healthcare.

So the very meaning of a basic word like stealing for you depends on the state. Very interesting, next time 51% of the people vote to kill the other 49% you don't complain (Yes, cliche, but still valid), because it is all legal and democratic.

 

It might be a basic word but it's not simple. Let me give you an example.

Under Roman Law (the law of the republic of Rome), "stealing" had a very broad application which covered many acts involving dishonest dealing with someone else's property. Under Roman Law if you dropped a coin and someone saw it, stepped on it and hid it until you'd finished looking for it that was considered to be stealing and a criminal act. The Romans also had, getting a bit off point here, a distinction between criminal acts that were by their very nature seriously injurious (mala in se) and acts which were merely breaches of regulations (mala prohibita). Pretty sophisticated.

The Romans when they occupied Britain imposed their legal system which included these sophisticated ideas. When they left Britain and it was invaded by the Germanic tribes in northern Europe Roman Law left with the Romans and the fairly unsophisticated customary law of those tribes was brought to Britain. This was the beginning of English common law and very crude it was. Stealing under the Germanic customary law required a forcible (which is to say injurious to property rights rather than violence) taking of an object (and it had to be a material object) without the consent of the person in possession of it. If A conned B into handing it over it wasn't a crime under common law (it was under Roman Law).

Legality is procedural, not moral. It might be perfectly legal for 51% of the people to murder the other 49% but it wouldn't be morally right. It wouldn't be democratic either. Remember that when Hitler took power he did so promising to destroy democracy and replace it with national socialism. He did exactly what he promised. He then proceeded to act with the laws of the national socialist state to do things such as appropriate the property of Jewish citizens. Legal but not moral.

 

Oddly the original poster is right we used to have systems for the poor in this country run by counties and states or private parties. In most cases it was a county run hospital with a local board of trustees that oversaw them hiring the doctor in charge and if they had an unusual expense say wanted a new x-ray they needed convincing to pay for it the device would need to be better enough to warrant the cost. And these were run using ward systems to lower staffing needs (my grandfather ran one in New York City they had wards with ten adults to a room unless one had a contagious condition or quiet to recover you didn't get much privacy), based on ability to pay and generally worked out well for most care. And most doctors did their version of insurance they charged patiants a bit more so when a poor one came in they could take a reduced payment and it was fine it was understood by those paying full price he or she was a good doctor and helped their poor neighbors. So the extra couple dollars was fine. And doctors I have found really want to help people in most cases if they are suffering money is not the factor in this compassion of the profession that is noble. The fact the free clinics in my area have enough medical providers proves that.

Catholic and other charity hospitals were also there and in good numbers. In fact the government hurt them by demanding brothers and nuns get paid on par with industry, not a modest stipend. That was eventually withdrwn but not until after the damage was done.

My issue is though we cannot go back there is to much private and public money to do so, and sadly that would trump older options combined with new options (nurse practitioners, sending people abroad for care etc.).

 

I'm all for some sort of government healthcare as long as I have at least as much care as I currently have and as long as I don't have any more taken out of my pocket per year than I currently do.

I'm pretty certain that no one is going to be able to provide universal healthcare without blowing one of the above conditions. That's my major problem with "fixing" the system. It has nothing to do with Constitutionality, etc. My problem is that I'm either going to be paying more in taxes than I currently do in insurance premiums or I'm going to have to give up relatively easy access to the most advanced tests, techniques, and treatments and give up what is, essentially, on demand service.

 

Why America should NOT have any form of government run healthcare.

Yea great ... a Government who don't take care of all it's people.

Good luck on the volunteering to fight those senseless wars.

yea go ask those 1% er's

 

The USA spends a higher percentage of its GDP on health care than Canada, the UK, Switzerland, Taiwan, and other countries with universal health care.

Also, what is said about the Canadian health care system in the US is lies. You don't wait a long time for life-saving treatment, and for non-life-saving treatment, you wait as long as in the US, possibly less.

(I have lived in the US and have dealt with both health care systems)

 

The US government influences the american health care system a lot, regulations has as much potential to hurt markets as do taxes and government spending. And the worst part is that no matter how bad a public health system is doing or how much better a private one would be, governments don't ever scrap out the idea and try something new, because it is very easy to say that the government is trying to "murder its citizens". All the blame is put in the lack of investments.

Good thing you understand that it is not a very moral decision, neither is 51% voting to steal from the other 49%, but I guess if it doesn't kill, it is alright (people also ignore the fact that everyone looses when this happens). And yes, I agree with you that it is not a simple thing to define, but everyone has a general idea of what stealing is, and it is at least to some degree independent to what the law says.

 

Sure there is. The general welfare clause and the commerce clause could both be justifications.

Or just use the general welfare clause that already gives the necessary power to Congress. We could provide coverage to every American by expanding Medicare, which is already established as being constitutional. It's very obvious that a single-payer system would be constitutional in the US, in the same way that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are.

If so, they're general problems with providing insurance that the private market cannot solve any better than the public sector. That's the basic principle behind insurance--aggregate risk, then spread it evenly across payees. Universal insurance is the least expensive sort of insurance because it creates the largest possible pool of risk.

It is not at all evident that these other countries are facing debt problems because of their health care systems, which cost far less than our own. There are many, many countries with universal health care systems that are not facing massive debt. I'm having a hard time figuring out why you would think that paying far less for health care would cause a country greater financial stress.

That's how insurance (is supposed to) works. You aren't paying for your individual risk, you're paying for an even share of the total aggregate risk of the entire pool. Granted, in the US our insanely broken private employer-provided health insurance works more like a health benefit than health insurance, but that's just indicative of how much work it needs.

It doesn't really matter, statistically speaking. That sort of individual risk management only really makes financial sense when you're paying out of pocket for your own care. Given that we're talking about choosing between a private health insurance system and a public health insurance system this is largely irrelevant, because you're not paying for your own risk under either system.

Health insurance is mostly about old people, not working people. Something like three quarters of your total lifetime medical expenses will be incurred in the last five years of life. A history of not going to the doctor is fairly meaningless, because one wouldn't expect you to incur most of your expenses until you're about to die.

Note; yes, this does mean the US government already picks up the tab for most of the medical expenses in the US. We could cover everyone else for far, far less than the people the government already covers.

Because health care as an industry doesn't work unless the healthy people pay for the risk of the unhealthy people. Your own care (when you do eventually need it) will be reduced if we provide coverage any other way.

Your conclusion does not follow from the evidence at hand. In fact, the only way your argument would make sense is if the government was trying to turn a profit and was charging people based on their own individual risks. If everyone picks up an even share of the risk, the government would have no real incentive to regulate anything about a person's lifestyle. Do keep in mind that lifestyle choices on the whole turn out to be fairly irrelevant--the actual statistical impact of living a healthy live versus an unhealthy life are minimal. About the only condition for which that isn't true is diabetes.

I don't see that happening. It's not happening anywhere else where universal health care exists, why should we expect it to happen here, especially if Americans as a whole find the idea distasteful? Society can and does say "thus far, and no further" all the time, based on largely arbitrary boundaries. What would make you think the government would push for healthy living if it came at the cost of a voter backlash in the next electoral cycle? The government doesn't care about turning a profit. It's not like they get to pocket the difference when they get you to eat your veggies.

If anything, a private insurance system is far, far more likely to be intrusive enough to force you to eat your veggies and exercise X amount per day. Hell, they're already trying to do that by offering you carrots for doing so, and it won't be long until the stick comes out too.

Socialized medicine is already established as being constitutional. Obamacare is not socialized medicine. The constitutional question there is not whether the government has the power to tax you in order to provide health coverage (medicare already establishes that it does); it's whether the government has the power to force you to buy a private product. If "obamacare" was really an attempt to get socialized medicine in the US, it would have just been an expansion of medicare to cover everyone.

 

Actually, neither the general welfare clause nor the commere clause are conceivable mechanisms to justify Obamacare's mandate.

Regarding the "general welfare clause", hospitals are ALREADY mandated to treat everyone who comes into the emergency department, no matter how much money they have (or how stupid their initial complaint is). Thus, a mandate forcing people to buy insurance will not change anything regarding the general well-being of the public. Hence, the general welfare clause does not apply here.

Additionally, the general welfare clause's purpose was for justification of taxation that benefited society in general, not for forcing individuals to buy specific goods/services.

The commerce clause also does not apply here because it merely involves allowing the government to impose regulations on interstate commerece. It does not give the government the immense power to force individuals to buy a good/service.

 

The current worldwide debt crisis has very little to do with healthcare budgets and a whole lot to do with the economic meltdown WE caused. Do you think Iceland is hanging on by a thread because of their health costs? Of course not - they along with everyone else bought the BS we were slinging and they invested in stuff which turned out to be toxic.

Virtually unequivocally everyone who lives in a country with UHC loves it. I can only speak to the three countries I've lived in but nobody is clamoring for the kind of half assed system we have here.

And why so stingy all of a sudden? Do you complain that you should pay less for policing or for maintenance of the interestates because you live next to a golf course and ride a moped? Everybody else, including everybody in the countries filled with healthier, longer-lived people than here, pays less than we do.

As far as testing new drugs there's already a dumb inefficiency that could save a lot of countries a lot of money. Canada, Japan, Australia, the UK, and any number of other first world countries all duplicate the testing done here, and even if a drug was approved in Japan (whose regulations are tougher than the FDA's) it still has to go through the same clinical trials as every other drug once it hits the US. This is stupid. Just agree to accept approval from a certain group of other countries' boards and let the testing facilities compete for the business. Costs will go down both from ending redundant trials and because of proper competition. Doctors can still earn the big bucks, all the research can continue, except there won't be this dirty little secret among everyone in pharma that Americans are so stupid they'll pay 4 times what anybody else will without blinking an eye.

And do you really think that our state of the art team of doctors armed with all the latest gadgets will disappear? Or that there is any substantial difference for all but a handful of patients between care here and, say, Canada? Don't flatter yourself - hospitals are a lot shinier in Toronto than any I've visited in LA.

Cheaper, better, everyone covered, and the elimination of an entirely unnecessary industry - insurance providers. Sounds terrible.

 

I lived in Toronto until I was 34 and I couldn't agree more. I never even heard of rationing until I moved here, and even then it was mostly about Americans being denied care.

 

I would say that a cop who prevents you from getting mugged is as involved in your health and wellbeing just as much as any doctor. Would you prefer a system where you pay a police bill every six months, have to carry proof you've paid before you get any help, run into red tape if you get into trouble outside your home state, and get denied coverage if your house has been robbed more than twice?

Of course not. You're not that stupid. You see that there is a clear benefit for everyone if policing is handled by the government and and available to everyone.

I think you're just making up this moral indignation about a government's right to be involved in your healthcare. You have a blind spot that you won't acknowledge because (I'm assuming) you're fine with firefighters, cops, and all kinds of other services being run by the state. And it's not as if any government lifer would ever have any reason to come within a mile of your records or be in a position to have an interest in them. In Canada, and the UK, and France, places I've actually lived in, all the healthcare decisions are made by doctors, unlike here.

 

I think the USA should help pay for preventative health care, perhaps paying 75 percent of the cost, for example. Paying for preventive care now can greatly help reduce future costs. Preventative care only costs a small fraction of total healthcare costs. And unlike with the current Medicare system, there should be no government imposed limit placed on how much the physician can bill the patient when collecting reimbursement from the government.

 

The american propoganda to foriegn health care and any health care they don't understand or never bothered to find out the details is surreal comedy if it was not meant to be serious.

If believe it. Canadians drop dead like flies as the waiting times are longer than gods nose.

Of course all goverments are corrupt and evil and can't be trusted as they ruin health care (except when americans pay tax to thier military budget, for some reason they like that)

And the ultimate spin they use. Health corperations are not to be questioned. Instead fall to ones knees and gaze up at them in silent awe (as they take your money)

 

Oh, the right are all on their knees in front of the insurance bigwigs all right. But I wouldn't describe what they're doing as gazing. Grazing, maybe, but not gazing.

 

who are you to tell me that i can;t purchase health insurance With MY own money? The poor are getting health care at this time. THE MOST expensive form of it. They are subsidized by me and my health care thru higher prices I as an insured get charged at my doctor and hospital for those that don't carry health coverage and/or don't pay their bills. No one. NO ONE is turned away at a hospital.

 

Well know, think about that statement for a second. Thats a sure fire way to increase the costs of HC.

Here's my idea, feel free to poke holes in it if you wish. Lets think about what an insurance company does for a second. They offer a limited coverage policy based on an actuary crunching numbers all day in some obscure place. Then they sell those policies, pool premium money, pay the outstanding claims and invest the rest of the coin. They make a darn good profit on the coin invested. What say we cut out the middleman so to speak.

How about we let local hospitals, or groups of doctors, do the same thing ? For example, your local hospital will charge you x amount for a premium, and in return you get all your healthcare needs from preventative care, to surgery, for one low price. The hospital or group of doctors can then invest the coin themselves to help their own bottom lines and keep services going and still be profitable. No haggling between insurance companies and hospitals, no mountains of bills flying back and forth. No piles of paperwork for the consumer to fill out, no worrying if this or that is covered. No collection agencies hounding you for a past due bill. All your doctors are under one roof. If you move, you can join another hospital program or hospitals can have reciprocals in case you get hurt while traveling. You take that pool of money and let those who are actually in the buisness of providing care profit from it, not salesmen. In other words, instead of a bloated government offering universal healthcare, why not let your local hospital do it ? They can better manage the coin and put it where it's needed than some agency 3000 miles away and offer services better suited for a geographic location.

Ok, shoot holes in this idea.