Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gg cox who wrote (4971)	2/26/2008 4:56:13 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 42652

"Used by the commons"?? Now you seem to be defining the commons as "the people". These definitions just keep shifting. Something that is just out there available for everyone and not broken down to discrete bits is "the commons". Health care (except containing epidemics and such) doesn't work that way. But its not worth arguing forever over this. If you really want to call it commons your going to call it commons. Than so what? How does that advance your argument? If you change the meaning of a word, than anything that word would have added to the argument is limited to the new meaning. If the argument doesn't hold with other words containing the same meaning you want to give "the commons" then it won't hold if you just substitute "the commons" for those words.

To: gg cox who wrote (4971)	2/26/2008 6:05:46 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42652

You continue to focus on who pays. The reason that highways are commons because they are not divisible. You can't have each person in the country owning a square inch of highway. They are, instead, open space that we all share. Health care is totally divisible. Each patient gets treatment on his own. His records are guarded for privacy. He is alone in the room with the medical practitioner save for possibly a friend or relative. Nothing shared about that except, in Canada, the cost. We taxpayers all share the cost of wars, but the battlefields are not the commons. We don't all go to the battlefield and fight. We share the cost of printing money, but money most definitely is not the commons. We each earn our own. Who pays doesn't count. The commons are shared space that each of us may wander in and out of at will.