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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (263087)	4/30/2008 12:20:50 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Walmart generally has competition, not matter how you measure it. Certain isolated stores may not have much competition, but that's far from universal for Walmart. Your original point about public benefits being essentially permanent was incorrect. When I pointed that out to you, you began to simply change your original point. No my initial point was correct. That doesn't mean that every single type of public benefit, will always be impossible to cancel. Many types are very hard to cancel, and broad based benefits, for things people see as important, that also destroy the existing private market for the service in question, are next to impossible to cancel. You don't have any numbers No one has solid numbers about future hypotheticals and current counterfactuals. We don't have another US, that's identical except the health care payment system, that we can use to compare numbers. What do we gain by universal preventive care Some benefit for some people, but also higher costs. That's just the direct effects, and the higher costs might be considered worthwhile if all we had to consider was the direct effects, but nationalizing the health care insurance industry goes far beyond universal preventive care, and has many other direct and indirect effects. much more stringent negotiations with drug companies A disingenuous way to describe effectively imposing price controls on drug companies. And whatever you want to call it one of the things we will "gain", is a great reduction in future drug research, development, and testing. How much do we gain by opening up jobs to foreign doctors and nurses I'm all for that idea, at least in a general sense. I haven't seen a specific plan, so I can't discuss specific details. and by providing medical education at reduced costs or for free to qualified students Probably much less than you think. One thing we would "gain", is higher costs for medical education. Sure the doctors wouldn't have to pay the costs but that's the main reason why you would be putting upward pressure on the costs.