Citizens Should Work and Pay a Tax to Qualify for Universal Healthcare [SPLIT]

[rareboy]

Re: Anyone uninsured?

I don't know why you bother.

Benvolio is so breathtakingly ignorant about how health services are funded in other countries and is completely convinced that the only companies that do any research and development are American and that the rest of the world is being subsidized by Americans getting ripped off for their prescription drugs.

He's had all the evidence placed before him innumerable times, yet persists in this Breitbartian fantasy.

 

[Benvolio]

Re: Anyone uninsured?

Are you advocating that overseas companies overcharge US citizens?
Marketing and advertising spends are higher than R&D costs at the large pharma companies.
Their profit margins are also greater than their R&D costs.

They spend more money advertising their current drugs than developing new ones... and they choose to bank more in profit each year than they spend developing new drugs too (the development of which is often publicly funded).

Why do you suppose they pay do much for advertising? They have a short patent time during which to recover their r and d expenses and yes a profit. Liberals hare profits, but r and d is paid from profits on sales. After the patent expires, they can be sold by generic companies without contributing to r and d. Public funds sometime contribute to research, but the enormous cost of trials and approval and manufacturing set up are born by the drug company.
Advertising helps keep the costs down, by spreading the r and expense over as large a volumn of sales as possible.

 

[peeonme]

Re: Anyone uninsured?

Part of the reason for rising health care costs are advances in technology used in fighting disease. A few decades ago heart transplants were not common but rather, they were experimental.

We now have cat scans, mri and pet scans. I guess 3-d is used in these now from what I have read.

Antibiotics came on the scene in 1928, now we have designer drugs.

Surgeons can operate arthroscopically.

Limbs can be reattached, what used to kill people is now curable, we have vaccines, does anyone remember polio?

Gone are the days of blood letting and leaches (leaches and maggots are still used though).
Also gone are the days when you gave the doctor a chicken or a bushel of potatoes.

Insurance seemed like the way to go, a large pool of people paying a premium and the insurance covering the cost of anyone in that pool getting ill.
The insurance became Carte blanche to some in the medical industry, unnecessary tests and procedures became the norm, resulting in higher premiums and the advent of co pays and deductibles. All designed to keep people from seeking medical help unless they were desperate.
Add to this the fact that employees became required to pay for part if not all of this insurance premium, while at the same time their wages were stagnant or recessive and we see a dysfunctional system.

This dysfunctional system is based upon the precept that all things must be done for profit. It is not seen as a service, but rather just another way to make money.

The "for profit" aspect must be done away with, medical treatment must become a regulated service as it is in most advanced nations.
It works and works well in numerous other countries, it can work in the USA.

 

[nycguydowntown]

Re: Anyone uninsured?

Health insurance is not an issue in the UK as everyone (excluding maybe recent immigrants and foreign nationals) is covered by the NHS. Standards are patchy, but it's essentially free at the point of delivery.

Thats the way it should be here but the slimy evil scum of the gop don't think so---eventually we will catch up to the rest of the civilized world---I have great insurance but if you don't have it---it can be devastating if you get a serious illness. Obama wanted single payer--which we will someday have---but knew he had to start the ball rolling for the first time in history---as the gop would never had gone for it which is why he developed this gop plan. My favorite thing which sums it all up was the republican idiot screaming "Keep your government hands off my Medicare and Medicaid" omg what a moron--

 

[rareboy]

Re: Anyone uninsured?

Thank God for Tommy Douglas in Canada.

He is the father of universal health care here and helped us avoid the clusterfuck of the US system.

 

[Keeland]

Re: Anyone uninsured?

Thank God for Tommy Douglas in Canada.

He is the father of universal health care here and helped us avoid the clusterfuck of the US system.

I’m tired of Tommy Douglas being held up as Canada’s health-care saviour. It’s like praising Mussolini for making the trains run on time and ignoring everything else.

Douglas was a typical Baptist wingnut, genocidal, homophobic preacher, so being white and Christian, everyone who didn’t live up to his personal standards, probably ordained by his psychopathic god and delivered from on high by voices in his head, would be better off dead or locked away.

This story, about the RCMP trying for 50 years to prove he was a commie, contains a few of his “enlightened” views.

. . . In his 1933 master’s thesis, titled The Problems of the Subnormal Family, Douglas advocated the “unfit” be placed on state work-farms and be sterilized to prevent them from having children
.
Douglas also advocated anyone who wanted to marry be subject to government testing to obtain certificates of mental and physical fitness. He saw this as a way to keep “subnormal” humans from marrying.

"Because this class tend to intermarry... the second and third generations are nearly always worse than the first. The result is an ever increasing number of morons and imbeciles who continue to be a charge upon society,” Douglas wrote in defence of eugenics.

In the 1968 election, Douglas stated during the leaders debate he agreed with decriminalizing homosexuality. But he added "…we ought to recognize it for what it is: it's a mental illness, it's a psychiatric condition, which ought to be treated sympathetically by psychiatrists and social workers.”. . .

Tommy Douglas made Rob Ford look like Harvey Milk…

 

[rareboy]

Re: Anyone uninsured?

Please don't think that I idolize or admire Tommy Douglas for much other than the father of socialized medicine in Canada and I completely get the Mussolini reference. It is like being torn about Napoleon as well.

But bear in mind that he was expressing widely held beliefs openly stated by many, many social theorists, scientists, physicians and politicians. The Eugenics movement was a perfect example of the crisis in 20th century thinking as science offered a rationalized basis and 'humane' solutions for failures in human genetics.

Your comments though have spurred me to discover what his take was on a number of issues by the time he died in 1986.

 

[jbrown329]

Re: Anyone uninsured?

FDR wanted universal healthcare. But he had to make a choice at the time. Social Security or healthcare. He couldn't get both.

 

[frankfrank]

Re: Anyone uninsured?

I’m tired of Tommy Douglas being held up as Canada’s health-care saviour. It’s like praising Mussolini for making the trains run on time

In the 1968 election, Douglas stated during the leaders debate he agreed with decriminalizing homosexuality. But he added "…we ought to recognize it for what it is: it's a mental illness, it's a psychiatric condition, which ought to be treated sympathetically by psychiatrists and social workers.”. . .

Sounds to me like he may have actually been "somewhat ahead of the curve" compared to a rather sizable part of the population, in 1968. Those were the days when vice-squad police were still busting gays, even in places like San Francisco.

Nearly everybody thought it was a mental illness yet, in those days, because it was still "officially" classified that way.

 

[NotHardUp1]

Re: Anyone uninsured?

It's all well and good to judge the past by our supposedly "enlightened" standards, but it is an egocentric convenience that isn't accurate or fair in assessment.

Through such lazy evaluations, Jefferson becomes little more than an exploitative slave owner, Franklin a lecherous profligate, and Newton a lazy, closeted chaser of a sinecure.

Men are products of their times. What we term eugenics today was valid social theory at the time it was being kicked about in the 19th and 20th centuries. Gays themselves, as a population, did not necessarily reject the theories on mental illness. The modern views constantly color our depictions of past figures, including carefully selecting those that history has deemed to have been ahead of their time.

It's a bit idiotic to depict car-driving parents in the 1950's as some sort of free-wheeling thoughtless people who didn't care that their children were forced to breathe their second-hand smoke and were too often thrown from their cars because seat belts were not yet required by law.

Viewing Mr. Douglas with the same 2016 lens as a filter is little more just.

 

[kallipolis]

Re: Anyone uninsured?

It's all well and good to judge the past by our supposedly "enlightened" standards, but it is an egocentric convenience that isn't accurate or fair in assessment.

Through such lazy evaluations, Jefferson becomes little more than an exploitative slave owner, Franklin a lecherous profligate, and Newton a lazy, closeted chaser of a sinecure.

Men are products of their times. What we term eugenics today was valid social theory at the time it was being kicked about in the 19th and 20th centuries. Gays themselves, as a population, did not necessarily reject the theories on mental illness. The modern views constantly color our depictions of past figures, including carefully selecting those that history has deemed to have been ahead of their time.

It's a bit idiotic to depict car-driving parents in the 1950's as some sort of free-wheeling thoughtless people who didn't care that their children were forced to breathe their second-hand smoke and were too often thrown from their cars because seat belts were not yet required by law.

Viewing Mr. Douglas with the same 2016 lens as a filter is little more just.

Noteworthy, and accurately worded.

Demonising those whose later life reflected a much more mature, and humanitarian outlook is often driven by a perceived need to believe that people are born fully enlightened. We are all on a learning curve, and I am grateful that my understandings have evolved, from the days when my youthful excesses betrayed my appalling ignorance.

Many years ago when reading the autobiography of Gandhi's early life, I "deviated" sufficiently from the carefully tailored narrative that we have today of Gandhi's life (thanks, Richard Attenborough, and Ben Kingsley) to delve into Gandhi's early years living in South Africa, learning that Gandhi's racist views on the black indigenous population paint a different picture of the man whom today we remember as a great humanitarian.

 

[lambdaboy]

Re: Anyone uninsured?

Living in England legally for 14 years here is what I have spent on Doctors and Mediation and hospitals. Nothing its free.

 

[rareboy]

Re: Anyone uninsured?

Mediation?

But don't be ridiculous. It isn't free. It is something that we pay for through personal, corporate and consumption taxes. It is a social product that we have elected to cover like we use collective insurance pooling for our home and automobile and life protection.

What we have figured out though, is that introducing a huge layer of corporate bureaucracy and profit taking in the middle of the process just leads to more expensive care with poorer overall outcomes.

 

[dpnice]

Re: Anyone uninsured?

Living in England legally for 14 years here is what I have spent on Doctors and Mediation and hospitals. Nothing its free.

What you in fact mean is that you pay nothing out of your after tax income on medical fees. Which is normal seeing that you and everyone else has paid for it as part of their taxes.

I paid nothing out of my own pocket for my cancer treatment but never considered it as "free" knowing full well how much was deducted from my monthly salary to cover Social Security charges.

 

[opinterph]

Moderator Notice

The opening post of this thread introduced an off-topic discussion to another thread in Hot Topics and is now split into this separate discussion in Current Events and Politics.

There have been at least two prior discussions on the same general topic, but both date back more than 5 years.

Universal vs. Market-Based Health Care (February 2009)

Why are you against universal healthcare? (May 2009)​

 

[TX-Beau]

Well, let's just take care of the obvious shall we, if you have to qualify in some fashion, by definition it isn't universal.

So this just sounds like a rehash of the "deserving" poor argument the selfish and greedy like to toss about - they all go basically like this:

"... if I don't like your life, you get shit from society and can just fuck off and go starve in ignorance somewhere out of sight, then get sick and just fucking DIE already..."


What the selfish and greedy get out of this is a nice self-righteous hummer for their conceit. Of course it's incredibly stupid also because poor and sick people starving in emergency rooms cost the selfish and greedy far more than preventative-ly cared for, well fed mud children in public schoolrooms.

Selfish and greedy I suppose will be selfish and greedy at any cost.

 

[Benvolio]

Re: Moderator Notice

The opening post of this thread introduced an off-topic discussion to another thread in Hot Topics and is now split into this separate discussion in Current Events and Politics.

There have been at least two prior discussions on the same general topic, but both date back more than 5 years.

Universal vs. Market-Based Health Care (February 2009)

Why are you against universal healthcare? (May 2009)​

This new title does not reflect my point. Many liberals like to say that health care is a right. But those words are meaningless unless someone else has the obligation to give you free health care.

 

[rareboy]

Wrong.

You still don't get it. You refuse to get it. There is no such thing as 'free' health care for anyone.

What it means is that the public has the right to dictate that they want a system supported by sales, income and corporate taxation and to direct that their tax dollars go to health services instead of into the military industrial complex.

And as a polled insurance structure, it then means that care should not be denied to any citizen.

Here's a news alert.

It is far less costly to society as a whole to have a population that has access to health services than to have the high costs of episodic crisis intervention and long term chronic disabilities.

I know this field very well. It is apparent that you have no idea whatsoever.

 

[Benvolio]

Wrong.

You still don't get it. You refuse to get it. There is no such thing as 'free' health care for anyone.

What it means is that the public has the right to dictate that they want a system supported by sales, income and corporate taxation and to direct that their tax dollars go to health services instead of into the military industrial complex.

And as a polled insurance structure, it then means that care should not be denied to any citizen.

Here's a news alert.

It is far less costly to society as a whole to have a population that has access to health services than to have the high costs of episodic crisis intervention and long term chronic disabilities.

I know this field very well. It is apparent that you have no idea whatsoever.

There has been no serious proposal for a national sales tax, which now is a state tax. Federal sales taxes on tobacco and alcohol are minimal. So far, the democrats propose to pay for any such scheme from the income tax, precisely because so many democrats do not pay the tax. Fewer than 50% of eligible voters pay any federal income tax. Among those who file, 40% pay 106% of the tax. That is because many who file get charity back and pay no tax. The single payer/ socialist scheme is that the entire and expanding burden will fall on a dwindling number of people who pay the income tax. Those who do pay will experience a degrading of their care as the get in line behind the welfare class and care is inevitably rationed. Is there any wonder that the proposed victims of the scheme resist it?

 

[opinterph]

This new title does not reflect my point. Many liberals like to say that health care is a right. But those words are meaningless unless someone else has the obligation to give you free health care.

More importantly, the implication of your first sentence (in what is now the opening post) is that able-bodied citizens must pay income tax in order to secure “a right.”

IF a thing is a right, THEN does “that not mean that every able bodied person has an obligation to work and pay some income tax?”

If universal coverage were a right would that not mean that every able bodied person has an obligation to work and pay some income tax? It is illogical the think that a few people have the obligation while eveyone else has the right to get every thing free. Isn't free food more important than free healthcare? Free housing, free fuel?