Both parties not serious about deficit; $750 billion wasted per year in health care
- Thread starter tmarket
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Justice Sotamayor (sp) just refused to give the hobby lobby a temporary injunction to stop the birth controll mandate and told them to work it through the lower courts. Why they went to her to ask for an injunction, I don't know unless she was the Justice for that region or something like that.
Well isn't that what governments do? They take your money and or productivity and use it to buy things that you don't necessarily want to buy. Isn't this exactly the same thing as "telling you what to buy?" And you can't say no except, at the ballot box, and you're probably going to get out voted. Yes, they are making you, i.e. "telling" you to, buy health insurance, but unlike all the other things they make you buy without consulting with you first, at least in this case they asked nicely.
Maybe you'd rather they just buy your health insurance for you, like those 2500 unneeded Lockheed F22 fighters they bought for you.
Seems to me that if you're going to take that position that "THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD NOT TELL YOU WHAT TO BUY" that you should logically be an anarchist, not a libertarian, which is one step away from anarchy.
I also don't think the government should tell you what to buy, so I guess I should also be an anarchist. But I'm not. But at least I am every bit as inconsistent.
So the difference, you say, is in the case of the jet fighters we all owned them collectively, as in the Soviet Union, but that insurance policy the government is making me buy, i'm going to own it, not the rest of you. Well OK then, I guess to get around this small distinction the government will have to buy one giant insurance policy that covers all of us, so we can own our policy collectively. We will call it "single payer." Then we will be almost, but not quite, consistent with our collective ownership of jet fighters bought from private sector companies. To be entirely consistent we can not let the insurance company we purchased our giant collective policy from tell us what is in the policy, we will have to draw up specifications. Instead of the pentagon doing this we will ask Health and Human Services to do it. Then, to get our private sector insurance contractor to do what we ask it to do, we will make the contract cost plus.
The Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of the Sciences, has compiled a report detailing developments in health care spending. Among other findings, the IOM found that an enormous quantity of cash is down to healthcare waste, or on anything but helping patients. Healthcare waste, including unneeded treatments and administrative overhead, makes up about $750 billion each year.