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

To: John Koligman who wrote (6115)	2/13/2009 1:52:37 PM
From: Lane3	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Is healthcare as important as a safety net for the old? So, I think you're saying that health care is important ergo it should be provided by the feds. I need more than that. Lots of things are important. Why this is more important than they are, so important that we must communally provide it, eludes me. If it's so important, then why are there so many uninsured who could pay for insurance. It's because they think some other use of their money is more important. They buy housing, cable TV, vacations in Cancun, gym memberships, drinks with the boys/girls, education, or whatever with the money. Which means the "whatever" is more important to them. The current system sucks... Once again, I agree. The question is whether what you want will fix it. I say it won't. It will fix some things, not fix others, and will inevitably introduce a whole new set of anticipated and unanticipated problems, unintended consequences. If you just focus on the things it will fix, you risk escaping the frying pan for the fire. You have to think it all the way through.

To: John Koligman who wrote (6115)	2/13/2009 2:27:34 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Because I think healthcare should be a 'public good' provided or guaranteed by government That is in a sense restating your already expressed opinion in a different way rather than giving the reason for it. Why shouldn't other vital things be considered a public good? Food isn't treated as a public good in the normal sense of that term (but perhaps we are using public good in a different way, I would use it as an economic term of art, you may have a different meaning) It is to an extent guaranteed by government with food stamps, but not as a public good. And the subsidy goes to the poor, like Medicaid does for health care, not like nationalizing all health insurance or trying to subsidize the specific good or service in question for everyone.

To: John Koligman who wrote (6115)	2/14/2009 12:19:25 PM
From: i-node	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Because I think healthcare should be a 'public good' provided or guaranteed by government, like protecting us via the military. If you look back at history, I believe there was the same kind of outcry by the opposition during the FDR era to the concept of social security. You should realize that SS as FDR envisioned it was a totally different animal. In his own words, he insisted that SS was and must remain "actuarily sound". He said, "It is almost dishonest to build up an accumulated deficit for the Congress of the United States to meet in 1980. We can't do that. We can't sell the United States short in 1980 any more than in 1935." That is to say that FDR's SS was a failure by his own metric in less than 50 years. And it is far worse today that it was in 1980. The point here is that however well-intentioned these programs are, they cannot escape the chronic failings of government and the political process. SS is NOT a success, it is an absolute failure by its own creator's measure. So, please don't suggest it as a model for government health care. The cold, hard reality is that government intervention in health care (via Medicare and state Medicaids) is largely what's wrong with our health care system today. Piling more government bureaucracy on top of what's there today is not going to make it better.