No, you.

Come on, man. It gets funnier the more you read. I think that this might even be some of my best work.

Alright, I did. It hurts so good to read it

Now go have fun at your party, and make sure the cakes don't burn.

Sentence by sentence rebuttals are dumb.

That's what makes them so smart.

To those that complain about waiting lines for the socialized healthcare, I would point out that it is better than having to wait for your insurance company to approve the treatment, and then find out that they wont cover it (I have heard someone say that their insurance company tried to call a heart transplant elective surgery).

While many socialized healthcare systems have their problems, they are still better than nothing, or close to nothing if you have an insurance policy that doesnt care about its policyholders (except of corse, the money they get from them).

Wait a minute, isn't that what car insurance is like?

They are similar, the difference being the relative necessity of health care compared to having the privilege to drive. Cars are farkin' dangerous as hell.

I have an easier time swallowing requiring the means to buy car insurance than health insurance.

Car insurance has another difference in that it also covers the people around you. Having it is a damn good thing, as it means your *** is covered if you rear end someone and send them to the hospital.

But they still manage to piss me off. I pay them, over the course of six years, over ten thousand dollars. I have an accident that costs a total of four thousand to fix. They double my rate.

Wait... what?

Most (if not all) states have laws saying you can keep $xx amount of cash in a trust fund or other place and if you have it, you don't have to carry insurance. I haven't quite been able to save up the $50k or whatever it takes here but it would be nice.

Yeah, I think it's $50k in most places. Rich +1. Poor 0.

I wasn't aware of that. I don't have $50k just lying around but if I ever do, I know what I'll be doing with it. It does suck for those of us that never end up getting in to a wreck, but I suppose that's just the price we must pay, as Freelancer stated, for having the privilege to drive. I've been driving for 14 years & have never had a wreck. I'd hate to see just how much money they've made off of me.

Not much. They pay it out for the people who do get in wrecks. It's like free parking in monopoly.

I see the requirement of car insurance is not to protect others, but to protect you. Some goofball rams your car because he was too busy texting on the road and he has zero money. If you want to get him to pay for it, you have to lawyer up and sue him, and that's assuming that he has the money to pay any kind of settlement or compensation assigned by a judge. Maybe all he had to his name was his car, which is now totaled.

Now, with car insurance, you exchange insurance information, file a police report, and your insurance company takes care of the lawyering up and suing, if necessary. Yes, you probably won't get enough to buy a brand-spankin' new car, but, with the requirement of insurance (or the $50k, assuming that's the correct number), you have at least some guarantee that you won't be totally screwed over when you're hit.

A difference between auto insurance and health insurance is that health insurance is to cover only yourself - there's no liability insurance.

Senate health bill just got 60 votes:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/12/19/health.care/index.html

Great. Now how long before people without insurance start getting help? Not off in some fairyland; in the real world. 2014 maybe? If we're lucky..

I guess my point was that the $50K is redeemable. It's not use it or lose it like the car insurance you get through an insurance company.

Believe it or not, this simply worded post opens up many interesting points.

The first thing I would like to address is that nobody has to wait for an insurance company approves a treatment [in the US] to actually get the treatment. What they approve the payment of the treatment. Anyone is able to get the treatment and pay for it themselves. Now, someone is going to say "How the hell can someone get the treatment if they can't afford it?" That is a perfectly valid question that could be a thread by itself. I do know that if a person leads a responsible life, staying away from indebtedness, and lives in country that fosters economic prosperity it is easy to become independent from rather than dependent upon insurance companies or government agencies policies regarding your healthcare. I believe most people have the ability to be responsible and our country has the necessary foundation that it could have a prosperous future if we recognize that many of the current political trends are antithetical to that end.

Second, what is so much better about having a system where you have to wait your turn versus a system where you have to find out if somebody else will pay the bill? Once you have given the health care system to the government you have essentially surrendered your rights to control your health care. You will get the treatment the government run health care system dictates, if your lucky you will get some options dictated to you, and you will get that treatment when the government gives it to you. Of course you could choose not to receive treatment or to go someplace like the United States where you can get the treatment of your choice, if you can afford it. In the US you just have to figure out how to pay for it. If the insurance covers it, you're good. Maybe you have a copay or deductible. Maybe you pay for it yourself. Maybe one or more local, state, or federal programs will help. Maybe a charitable organization or even the hospital will help. Or maybe you bankrupt the debt (as Lord Kuat suggested earlier, what's so bad about that?). I can understand why people under a system where they don't have to worry about the financial aspects of health care don't understand our resistance to government ran health care but most of us don't want to surrender control over any aspect of our life to a government administration.

I was going to go on to a third point but I'll use the next quote as a segue.



If you are talking about one's personal requirement, sure, but the legal requirement to have insurance is purely to protect the other motorist hence the requirement to have liability insurance. Lien holders will require full coverage to protect themselves. Now, let's talk about the purpose of insurance. Risk mitigation. That works relatively well with car insurance but increasingly worse with health insurance. Governments enact regulations as to what insurance must cover. Some of the most recent rhetoric I have heard coming out of Washington includes requiring insurance to cover things such as routine medical expenses and pre-existing conditions. That's not insurance. It is a shift from risk to certainty. Requiring coverage of events that are certain or likely to occur is not the purpose of insurance. Now instead of a large group of people pooling their money to protect against events unlikely to occur to them personally, they're going to pool their money to cover events likely and unlikely to occur to them all? That is asinine as far as insurance goes. The current plan championed by the president is an incremental process designed to destroy the private insurance system and get to a single payer system. A government option being included would have helped this occur faster but that would be another lengthy post.

I'm personally tired of paying for police and court systems with my hard earned money when it's not my *** getting shot up. I'm not paying for that when I'm perfectly safe at the moment. No, it's a ****ty socialist system and needs to be done away with. I routinely hear about how much police investigations cost and it boggles my mind, that's my money being wasted for something that doesn't concern me in the least! There needs to be insurances against various kinds of crime. If some poor ******* gets killed who doesn't have valid murder insurance, I wouldn't feel pity at all, if he had lead a more responsible life he would have been able to afford it and have been able to pay a Free Market Police Company to investigate the crime and have the murderer prosecuted in a court of law that accepts the insurance.

Sure, they could get a loan to pay for their medical bills, assuming that they have good credit but then they're in debt. That doesn't sound fair to me. In 2003/2004, over 50% of all bankruptcies in the U.S. were reported to have been related to medical debt (these were all people that had medical insurance). If people with insurance can't even pay their medical bills, how in the hell do you expect someone without medical insurance to do it?


There's an endless amount of circumstances that "responsible" people could find themselves in that would prevent them from being able to pay their medical bills. Do you have any idea how much private insurance costs? I'm currently unemployed, through no fault of my own I might add & am paying $500+/month for medical insurance through COBRA. If I were to get a similar plan through a private insurance company, I'd be paying $1000+/month. Do you have any idea how much money that I would have to pay if I wasn't fortunate enough to have been able to cash out my 401K plan to pay for this insurance if after I was fired I discovered that I had cancer? I wonder how much it would cost me after an insurance company discovers that I have a pre-exisiting illness (my brother's girlfriend can't even get insurance through her university because she has asthma). However, I suppose that you would just say that I didn't lead a responsible life & that I should've had $50k in the bank for just such an emergency. I suppose that we can just throw out genetic-predispositions, socio-economic factors & an entire world full of other reasons. After all, those are just excuses that people like me use because we're irresponsible.


You're already in a system where you have to wait your turn. That's a reality of every healthcare system that I've ever heard of. Otherwise there would have to be more doctor's than patients.


You never really had any "control" over your healthcare to begin with.


If you replace "government" with "healthcare industry" in the above quote, it sounds much scarier.



If 50%+ of all bankruptcies being filed are related to medical debt, for people that have insurance, I would argue that those people are less than "good". You seem to be alright with local, state & federal programs helping people with their medical bills but you're not alright with the government paying for the medical bills of everyone. I don't get this. These local, state & federal funds would be coming from taxpayer money. If you receive money from a charitable organization, it's coming from people that could've just paid slightly higher taxes & achieved better results. Bankruptcy isn't a bad thing? If it wasn't a bad thing, everyone would cancel their medical insurance tomorrow & we'd all be filing bankruptcy. It's a ****ing horrible thing to have to go through. Were you born with a silver spoon in your mouth? My parents had to file bankruptcy when I was a boy. We almost lost our house, our electricity was off almost as often as it was on & many of my father's co-workers that also lost their jobs when the military bases were shut down blew their ****ing brains out over financial stress. I suppose that if I was there to tell them how bankruptcy isn't really all that bad maybe I could've saved their lives. You're delusional. It takes 7 ****ing years for this to come off of your record. Every time that you apply for a loan in the future, you'll be asked if you've ever applied for bankruptcy. If you're lucky, you'll be able to eventually repair your credit, but only after several years & if you're approved for any loans before then, your interest rates will be outrageously high & this is all after your ****ing marriage has been destroyed because you & your spouse buckled under the pressure.


If you can understand it, why don't you join the club? Your statement almost sounds as if you can relate to their point of view.

jesus christ! do you have the "uber never pay a dime for any visit even brain surgery" plan? i just got a quote for me and my wife 480$ a month 5000$ out of pocket maximum per year. or if i wanted to just cover myself it is just under 250$ or spouse + 1 child, just over 600$



the shriners childrens hospital would beg to differ.

I pay $25 co-payments for regular doctor's & $35 co-payments for specialists. One of my prescriptions is about $250 if I didn't have insurance & is about $40 if I do. I have the best plan that my employer offered which was fine when I had a job but now that I'm unemployed I would prefer a different plan but I can't change it at this time (you have to do it during open-enrollment). I would've just opted out of medical insurance if my wife didn't have 2 surgeries coming up. I also may eventually need knee & toe surgery myself. My wife & I were planning to have a child as well but we're not so sure about that now, given our current circumstance (we'll need insurance if we decide to go for it).


I think it's great that we have hospitals like that. However, we're a long way off from charities covering the healthcare of everyone that can't afford it. In the end, if everyone paid a fraction more in taxes in comparison to what they currently pay for medical insurance, we could have universal healthcare in this country (the wealthy would obviously pay more).

Mentat, no disrespect intended but there is no point in counter-pointing your counter-points. You have made your opinion so clear and it is obvious that it is firmly grounded in values you hold that are diametrically opposed to mine and a few others' here. About the only legitimate point I think I can come back with out of your post is that some of the things you point out allude to the fact that we could come up with a solution that helps out the minority of people that truly can't get any care. Other than that I would have to go back and virtually do a line by line retort. I used to do that but 1) I don't anymore for a number of reasons and 2) it is boring for the reader (or at least I think it is).

...There is insurance called "COBRA"?
That's badass.

I'm with Mentat. I couldn't even begin to imagine having to pay for my healthcare, and how annoyed I'd be over paying over 400$ a month.

Thankfully, I live in Canada, so I don't have to worry about that.

I've said this before in previous debates, but I'm going to do it again.

There IS a middle ground, you know.

The problem with this debate is that a lot of you people are thinking in black and white too much.

In The Netherlands we have a system where healthcare itself is privatized, so government doesn't get involved with healthcare. However, government IS responsible for accessibility and affordability of healthcare.

Therefore, health insurance is obligatory for every resident and tax payer. Insurance companies have to offer a basic package (Which covers most treatments) and cannot exclude anyone for whatever reason. You can take a more expensive package if you think you need it, but most people don't because the basic package is very good. People who don't have enough income to pay for health insurance get a substantial tax cut, so everyone's *** is covered.

I don't have to wait any longer for an operation than in other countries. I can go to any doctor I want, get a second, third, fourth whatever opinion, can pick any hospital/clinic I want and pick up prescriptive medicine from the apothecary on the same day it was prescribed, without having to call anyone or having to pay for anything. The only thing that is not included is simple things like painkillers or very common kinds of medicine for which there is an 'own risk'. This means you'll have to pay a percentage of the cost out of your own pocket, but it's absolutely trivial because it usually boils down to like one or two €.

In short, our healthcare is high quality, doesn't cost as much as it does in certain other countries, and is accessible and affordable for everyone.

http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2009/12/21/10-reasons-to-kill-the-senate-bill/

Saw this passed around a few times already. Figured I'd throw this into the fire here.

I obviously haven't read the entire bill but I think it's a step in the right direction. I don't like the idea of forcing employers to provide healthcare (I'm not sure if this is for all employers or just employers with a lot of employees). I really hate hearing the Republicans *****ing & moaning about the price-tag after these cluster-**** wars we've been paying for. There are far less important things that we're funding.



This is from The Economist.

Heh. That actually sounds like a shift to a system very much like the Dutch one.

I thought you said the Dutch had a good system.

Like you even read what I wrote.

"it obliges everyone to have health-insurance" lol, obliges as in forces you to get it and if you dont you get fined and if you dont/cant pay the fine you go to prision.

Personally, I think it's pretty ridiculous that in this modern world, I have to pay for food, a basic human need. Did you know that many Americans can't afford good food? And the food that they can buy is extremely unhealthy. Even more ridiculous is the fact that RICH people can buy all the food they want, whatever kind they want, and they can get specialty foods like organic food with ease, while poor people have limited options. Maybe the solution is to just have government-provided food (that is certified by the government to be good for you!) and this food would be very cheap. Also, if you buy government food, you only get a certain amount! That way people wouldn't eat too much! This would create competition and force the food industry to have cheaper food and healthier food.

You can call me a genius later, once it works like a charm and Americans are no longer fat and unhealthy.

(You know, saying that the rich are better off than the poor is kind or stupid. That's why they call them rich. If you want rich people to not be better off than poor people, then what you are REALLY saying is that you don't want there to be rich people or poor people because it's not "fair".)

Awesome. You retorted your own post so I didn't have to.

The government already gives poor people food stamps which they can then use to buy healthy food. Unfortunately, a lot of poor people are also uneducated on the subject of healthy eating (we, as a society should be doing something about this). Organic food hasn't been proven to be any healthier. My family used to receive food stamps when I was a boy & we ate very healthy food. There are even some farmers markets that now take food stamps & they're even cheaper than grocery stores. Some of the cheapest food out there is healthy (apples, carrots, etc.). It's also very cheap to grow your own food. A lot of cities are even popping up with community gardens. My wife & I grow herbs to save money on our windowsill & we grow vegetables with our whole family in my parents' garden (lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins, various melons, squash, zucchini, etc. & we collect nuts & persimmon). Meat can be rather expensive but there are always sales & you're not supposed to eat more than a fist-sized portion per day at the most anyways. It also helps to make things from scratch. We make just about everything from scratch (bread, crusts, etc.) & we save a lot of money that way. Food, like healthcare, is a necessity. My wife & I pay about $300/month on average for groceries. We believe in eating quality food & adjust our expenses to be able to do that (selling everything that we don't use, no cable television, lowest cellphone plan, obsessive underuse of electricity, etc.). That's still $240/month cheaper than healthcare insurance.

If there was a single source of food for humans, say soylent green, and that's ALL we could want or would need to eat, then yeah, it would make sense for the government to provide it.

The obsession with the 'free market' and the demonstrably false assumption that the free market can be everything for everyone is the central ideology that prevents society from progressing. This has been known by economists and politicians all over the world throughout the 20th century, but the last decade or so has seen an odd surge of an irrational fear of 'big government' or 'nanny state'.

There are of course many social issues where government involvement is intrusive, and civil rights groups have an understandable opposition to many policies, but economic government involvement is fundamentally necessary both for financial stability and wealth redistribution to better society. Opposing all government involvement is throwing the baby out with the bath water.

It's somewhat odd that the US and the UK seem to be moving in opposite political directions, where the US is gradually and painfully understanding Keynesian economics while the UK will almost certainly elect a toothless Conservative party in the next general election in a few months.

I think internet access should be a fundamental human right too, in terms of access to jobs and services and education, but I think it'll be a while before government provides internet access to all (outside of libraries).

Nanny state is a perfectly rational fear, look at Britain.
Everything can be taken too far.

You're welcome. The discussion was starting to taper off so I thought I'd stir the pot a bit because it IS an interesting discussion.

Mentat, I think you got a little bit caught up in the details. My only reason for posting that was to help illustrate how weird it sounds to me when I hear people say things like "I couldn't even begin to imagine having to pay for my healthcare." To me, it's like saying "I can't even imagine having to pay for my car!" or "I can't fathom how inconvenient it would be to have to purchase my own fuel!"

Mort-Hog, I think we already did that discussion to death, so I'll let someone else have it with you...hopefully someone will be willing.

Don't be so optimistic about the shift in the US. Right now you are seeing the majority of politicians acting against the will of the majority of voters. We will probably see a backlash and, hopefully, a bigger shift back in the opposite direction.