Ron Paul says healthcare not a right

[spinn]

I say this on every thread but what the sheep seem unwilling to acknowledge is the fact that most of what most American DRs do.... simply does not work.

DRs must know this after practicing for a few years without curing hardly any of their patients.

But, then again, DRs get some form of kick back from big pharma, and most DRs feel like they are worth $400k a year, whether or not they cure even one patient.

 

[tman]

Quote from lrm21:

Wow its amazing to see so much ignorance.

1) Rights are not granted by the government they are inalienable.

2) You have rights whether they government acknowledges those rights or not.

3) The government cannot take away a right or grant a right.

When we speak of rights some refer in summary to the declaration of Independence, while not a legal document it lays the foundation for understanding that your basic inalienable rights transcend government or man.

Our rights are affirmed in the constitution by placing restrictions on what the Federal government can do.

The whole purpose of free liberal republican democracies. Are that individuals are protected to pursue their own interests. Irrespective of your government frame work my rights are the same whether I live in New York, Baghdad or London.

A legitimate government plays a modest role and maintains the basic social order and the safeguarding of individual rights.

Notice that goverment again does not determine your rights. Goverment can oppress your right, and can win the battle over your life but it does not make it legitimate.

"Healthcare", "clean air", "safe highways", "terror free airplanes" are not rights, these are not guaranteed because they are not inalienable.

You can not be born with "healthcare", just as you are not born with "clean water."

Your rights are there because they are God Given, in summary the right to life and liberty and property. In fact the right to property encompasses all rights because it includes the right to your body, mind, the product of your labor, and your right to defend and secure what is yours.

Government Healthcare is a service and in order to deliver a service for "free" from your perspective as the consumer it implies slavery of another. You need to steal property from another in order to provide yourself the service of healthcare.

Government mandates are in fact illegitimate because they place the interest of the collective over the right of the individual. Notice a collective can never have rights only Individual have rights.

Free people will resist such encroachment, given the United States has the largest concentration of "Free" thinking people, I believe these attempts will fail politically or worse case violently.

excellent

 

[achilles28]

Quote from trefoil:

achilles28: WTF? Free speech is all about complaining. What else would it be for?
Secondly, McCain actually had a good idea about this which Obama is thinking of using: take away, either partially or totally, the tax exemption that corporations enjoy on the money they use to pay for their employees' health care. Eliminating that would fund the transition, and you can bet your house it would lower costs, as your average spoiled corporate employee would very quickly find out just how much that benefit was worth.
Within a few years, our societal cost for healthcare would come down to Canadian levels. The economic benefit would be enormous.

I'm all for any free market solution that offers incremental benefit. Rescinding tax-breaks that prejudicial favor Big Corps, is a great start.

Getting healthcare down to Canadian levels is not a goal to be shot for ! That's 1.4 Trillion in annual expenditures, every year. Thats really insane, over-and-above what private services "the rich" have to dole out themselves! The long-term fiscal implications have to be considered. And the answer is, no dice! Notwithstanding a 60 Trillion unfunded future liability for SS and mediaid for the Boomers?! Seriously, where is the money going to come from? The "Green Revolution"?!

 

[Random.Capital]

Quote from achilles28:

Libertarian ideals built he Country, Trefoil.

"We the People" is not a Libertarian ideal.

 

[trefoil]

Quote from Angrycat:


Yes. They pay huge sums for the shittiest health service on earth. I've sampled several European countries and you wouldn't be able to recognize what passes for healthcare in most European countries and Canada. ALL European countries are moving toward privatization but when you combine both public and private expenditures, they pay more and get less. Their healtchare costs are also skyrocketing and the health services are responding by cutting service. However, they are also not as fat as Americans and that Obesity problem is a huge driver for healthcare costs. So, we can expect to be worse off.


That was actually a serious answer. Surprising.
Anyway, I'm not sure how you define "skyrocketing", but in this study, anyway, the US was by far the most expensive, AND its cost was growing at the fastest rate: Snapshots: Health Care Costs - Kaiser Family Foundation

Any economies of scale and the elimination of adverse selection (which exists in ALL forms insurance including fire, life, etc. and they somehow manage to get on) would be vastly outweighed by the over-use problem, which tends to happen when there is no incremental cost to the user. The solution? Rationing. So, the promise of single payer - access - is the first thing to go under single payer.

My wife is a doctor. This already happens. If a patient is insured, the doctor charges more, and maximizes the procedures. She works for a clinic, so she can afford to not do this, but it doesn't sit well with her employer. Unfortunately, she's too good to let go.


The problem is that there IS no market for health care. States mandates raise the cost of insurance by limiting choice. This means that if in NY you want just catastrophic coverage, you can't get it. State by state regulation means that moving from one state to another constitutes a break in coverage and a circumstance to deny further insurance for that arbitrary reason. The system is so screwed up because it already operates VERY much like socialized medicine and every single one of these screwed up, cost raising, coverage denying measures is made possible by the very government that you want to entrust to provide you and your family with better healthcare. I can only laugh - but that's only because I can afford to buy my medical care privately and the majority of you guys screaming for socialized medicine can't.

Thank you for agreeing with me. You are like the guy who commutes by private limo. At the same time, you acknowledge that it's not so much a system as a mess that's already a stupid version of a crazy half-assed socialism, and it only works for a subset of healthy people who can either afford to opt out of it, as you can, or who are covered by corporations or the government.
Your anti-gov argument is a fallacy of the excluded middle. As are all libertarian arguments in this vein, actually.

 

[Random.Capital]

Quote from lrm21:

Rights are not granted by the government they are inalienable.

This is clearly not true, or they would not have to be written into a Constitution or subsequent ammendments. Especially in a Constitution that starts with one of the greatest Socialist lines ever: "We the People".

You have rights whether they government acknowledges those rights or not.

This is also clearly not true in any meaningful sense of the word "rights". Those rights do not exist at all unless the government allows them to exist, or unless you take them for yourself by force.

The government cannot take away a right or grant a right.

That's a rather bizarre statement. It would be rather difficult to run a civil society if it couldn't. All "inalienable" rights in the US were, in fact, granted by the government of the time, and preserved (to the extent they have been preserved) by successive governments.

The only truly inalienable right you have - the one that cannot be taken from you - is the right to struggle or fight. Everything else is given to by society and you get to enjoy it only as long as society decides you can, or the extent you are willing to fight against a society that has decided you can't.

 

[trefoil]

Quote from achilles28:

I'm all for any free market solution that offers incremental benefit. Rescinding tax-breaks that prejudicial favor Big Corps, is a great start.

Getting healthcare down to Canadian levels is not a goal to be shot for ! That's 1.4 Trillion in annual expenditures, every year. Thats really insane, over-and-above what private services "the rich" have to dole out themselves! The long-term fiscal implications have to be considered. And the answer is, no dice! Notwithstanding a 60 Trillion unfunded future liability for SS and mediaid for the Boomers?! Seriously, where is the money going to come from? The "Green Revolution"?!

Same cite as for angrycat: Snapshots: Health Care - Kaiser Family Foundation

As far as I can see, the cost cited for Canada is all-in, and a lot lower than for the US. Am I mistaken?

 

[achilles28]

Quote from Mom0/pH0x:

hey there achillies, i think when he says "here" he means the usa, whereas YOU would mean canada...

also your assertion is false based on the fact that it assumes that the usa currently has zero expenditures for health care, which is comically inaccurate... the truth is the usa already spends more than any other nation on earth on health care....

Hey Corky. I missed ya. Heard you couldn't hack it and moved to Canada??

Yea, you're right about factoring current expenditures.

Half of all American spending on healthcare is paid for by Government. Total spending on health care is 2.2 Trillion. So the Gov' pays 1.1 Trillion and the shortfall of 300 Billion - using the Canadian benchmark of 10% of GDP - would cover the remaining....... XX million Americans???

Good 'ol wikipedia says 81 Million Americans are covered by Government spending.

So the US Goverment spends 1.1 Trillion per 81 Million Americans.

THEREFORE, the US Government would have to cover an additional 219 MILLION citizens, at an additional cost of 2.9 TRILLION dollars (219/81 x 1.1 Trillion), at current expenditure levels.

So the question becomes, how many additional people EXACTLY does the Bill purpose to Cover, over-and-above those who are covered already by Government? Everyone? Most?

Thanks for proving my point, btw. Its much worse than I thought.

 

[trefoil]

achilles28: That number would be derived from insurance programs that cover the old (Medicare) or the poor (Medicaid) or soldiers and veterans. That's three groups that would use health care in a very expensive way, the old and the military for pretty obvious reasons, and the poor because they don't get regular checkups that would stop stuff from turning into expensive conditions later.
Extrapolating from that to the general population wouldn't really be valid. It also wouldn't take in cost savings from things like the one I highlighted earlier.

 

[Random.Capital]

Medicare approach extended to all Americans would be an incredible disaster. This should be avoided at all costs, unless the intent is to "make it break ASAP".

That said, Medicare expenses are heavily biased towards the most expensive segment of the population. Extrapolating that expense to the population at large is not a valid argument. The rough breakdown is that the over-65 crowd costs on average 4x what an under-65 adult costs.

In addition, your argument further falls apart as the Medicare model is not the Canadian model.