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The reason it sucks so bad is both parties have tried their hands at adopting the dumbest, market-interfering policies to make the insuring and purchase of medical care a trial in and of itself. Would that the private market could function as such, without government telling the consumer what constitutes minimum essential coverage, how policies may not be sold over state lines, hospitals lobbying their politicians for bigger Medicare disbursements, and medicine and care overregulated to hell.
Go research a little about the VA and the scandals in that system within the last couple decades to tell me if patients dying in government-run hospitals is a preferable alternative to expensive employer-focused barely-a-private-market health insurance. You're only offering false choices.
Your presumptions about the outcomes of a universal healthcare systems are the false dichotomy that we're dealing with.
As someone that regularly works within the military healthcare system, I can confidently tell you that the problem with it isn't simply that it's government-run. The problem is how the system is designed.
Conservatives like you have such a shallow understanding of public and private enterprise that you simply look at it and say "government = bad". The problem with this argument is that it is an utterly inescapable fact that every other peer country has developed a better and more affordable healthcare system that is also universal.
For you "government = bad" argument to hold water, you need to explain
1) How is it possible that other government-run healthcare systems are better than ours if "government = bad", and
2) Why is the U.S. incapable of doing the same thing as other countries when it is the richest, most powerful country in the world.
The idea that our current healthcare system is a failure because of inefficacious government regulation is a sad joke. It's the same pathetic line that libertarians throw out to justify their economic beliefs, which is, in essence, the same argument that Communists use to justify their belief in Communism despite the history of the 20th century. Our healthcare system is such a nightmare precisely because it had so much market freedom in the first place. The incredible lack of regulation allowed it to grow into the monstrosity that it is today. The easiest example is pre-existing conditions. There is no incentive for the free market to cover pre-existing conditions, so leaving the healthcare industry to the free market would doom millions of Americans to effectively zero affordable healthcare.
This doesn't even touch on the entire apparatus of the health insurance industry nor the way that hospital systems are designed and run, which is disgustingly immoral and is the way it is precisely because of privatization of our healthcare system.
I guess I'm just not American enough to comprehend how can one claim there isn't enough money in the US budget for healthcare reforms despite the fact that the US already spends more money on healthcare than every other country out there. Clearly, the issue is the lack of money and not the fact that private enterprises care more about increasing profits than providing a good service; so despite the overwhelming evidence of universal healthcare systems being far superior at ensuring good health for the citizens of a state at a fraction of the cost, it simply cannot be done in the US because that would be... too expensive.
It's not an "American" thing. It's a "stupid" and/or "selfish" thing.
To be fair, "American" has a lot of overlap with both of those.
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On November 20 2020 14:45 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2020 12:12 RenSC2 wrote:On November 20 2020 11:29 KwarK wrote:On November 20 2020 10:11 RenSC2 wrote:On November 20 2020 08:03 KwarK wrote:On November 20 2020 07:46 BisuDagger wrote:On November 20 2020 07:40 Vivax wrote:
While it's mostly fantasizing, wouldn't it make sense to receive personal incomes as percentiles?
I'm not a math wizard and mostly just discussing a rough idea but something like, capping the max income at the 95th percentile or anything close to that and instead of taxing it, the excess gets redistributed at the bottom percentiles. The final argument becomes, if I earned as much as I can and the government tells me I can't earn more, why wouldn't I move to another country that doesn't limit my earning potential? Why wouldn't all of the 1% just move? Can you take that risk as a country? The fundamental issue with that is the word "earned". Consider the footrace again. The winner comes first and therefore we might rationally conclude that he earned the victory. But if the winner is given a million dollars should we therefore conclude that he earned a million dollars? What if it's a billion? What if the billion dollars were taken from raised by taking $10 out of the bank accounts of 100,000,000 working Americans? Would we still conclude that the winner of the footrace had earned a billion dollars? The key distinction I'm making here is the difference between what you get and what you earn. In our economic system you compete against others and if you win the competition you get things. And what you get is weighted in an absurdly disproportionate and top heavy way. I feel like the analogy is breaking down here. The arbitrariness of the race and how much each runner gets is different from real life. In a real market economy, people are paid based on value. You get paid well because you do a job that your employer values and your skillset is somewhat rare. If your skillset was more common, you'd be paid less. If your employer did not need your skillset, then you would not be hired. It may seem that being good at spreadsheets is not really valuable when looking at basic human needs, but society is much more complex than basic human needs. Sometimes the rewards seems absolutely ridiculous, but they are always tied to something that people want/need. In your case (from what I understand), a complex set of regulations has created a value in being good at spreadsheets in a specific way. Certainly from a government perspective on how to guide the economy, I would make some adjustments to tax brackets and welfare programs to take more from the rich and give more to the poor. However, that's still quite different from the completely arbitrariness of the amount given for winning the fictional race that everyone must participate in. Employee compensation is extremely far removed from creation of value. I can assure you that as a specialist in the area of calculating what things really cost to make. My suggestion is that in a modern society "value" is much more abstract than it once was. Before heavy mechanization, a farmer working a field had a pretty obvious and straightforward value. His labor directly addressed a human need. However, in today's world, a guy can buy a bunch of bitcoin and make a lot of money. What was his value? Well, it turns out that society values risk takers. Society values people who can pick the right values to offer up their government backed money in exchange for blockchain based money. He still provides a value, it's just far divorced from base needs and the next guy who provides those same abstract needs/wants will also reap the profits. You could say that society's values are warped, but there is a value there. I would suspect fiat currency is a big culprit in warping values. If we went back to a barter based system, I think more value would be given to direct things and less to the abstract. However, fiat currencies have a lot of benefits to society that may be worth the increased abstractness of value. Let's say me and an immigrant on a work visa do the same job. I can change jobs at will, he cannot. He is therefore forced to accept a much lower rate of pay than I would because of the difference in our bargaining power. But is the value he provides to the employer any lower? I would argue no. Even in a purely theoretical model the value you provide to your employer is only a ceiling on compensation because they would not rationally pay you more than the value you provide. There is no compensation floor, the floor is mostly influenced by factors outside of the control of individuals. But in the real world it's even less rational because there is no good way to measure the value that chat support, for example, brings to the company. My specialization is manufacturing cost accounting which, in layman's terms, means trying to trace costs back to manufactured products. With something like a wooden chair parts of it are simple, you can measure how much wood goes into a chair and assign the chair the cost of that quantity of wood. But it gets harder, take something like a sawblade that needs replacing every other week. You could perhaps work out how many chairs are made during that time and assign the cost of sawblades between them. Now assume that the same sawblade is also used on tables. We can't assign it evenly by unit because tables are bigger and take more sawing to make, we need to come up with some allocation units like machine hours there. By the time we get to assigning my own costs it's completely abstract. How do you allocate the cost of the time spent allocating the costs? And what value does properly allocated costs even bring? Once I’ve calculated that the cost of allocating costs adds a third of a cent to the overall finished product we then need to measure whether that was worth doing. Perhaps it would have been better to allocate the costs less accurately and save that money. They need someone to calculate that for them, which I can also do, though I’ll have to allocate that out eventually too. TLDR: Nobody actually has any clue at all what value 90% of employees actually bring to a company. Which honestly should make sense to anyone who has actually worked a job because all workplaces have people who bring zero or negative value to the employer and somehow still get paid. The system doesn't really work. People talk about government inefficiency and waste and insist that if only there were a profit motive all that inefficiency would clean itself up because with a rational profit incentive no company would waste all their money. Those people have never seen the kind of shit that goes on in the private sector, the kind of idiocy and waste I run into on a daily basis is beyond belief. When profit happens it's mostly by accident and nobody really knows where it came from or why.
Conservative belief in market efficiency is genuinely the most mind-boggling and aggravating delusion that I have ever experienced in my entire life. Not only are you 100% correct in that most companies are horribly run and notoriously inefficient, but this mythical idea that government and/or publicly run enterprises are inherently inefficient while private ones are always efficient is so contrary to reality that it makes my brain hurt. Plenty of countries run countless things efficiently (e.g. healthcare, education). Hell, America has examples of well-run public enterprises in certain communities, e.g. public safety (police/fire), education (primary, secondary, and post-secondary), and even aspects of the military, for how utterly massive and convoluted the DoD is, are well-run.
This idea that a public system is inherently inefficient and can't be changed is demonstrably false and is utterly ridiculous.
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On November 20 2020 23:42 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2020 14:45 KwarK wrote:On November 20 2020 12:12 RenSC2 wrote:On November 20 2020 11:29 KwarK wrote:On November 20 2020 10:11 RenSC2 wrote:On November 20 2020 08:03 KwarK wrote:On November 20 2020 07:46 BisuDagger wrote:On November 20 2020 07:40 Vivax wrote:
While it's mostly fantasizing, wouldn't it make sense to receive personal incomes as percentiles?
I'm not a math wizard and mostly just discussing a rough idea but something like, capping the max income at the 95th percentile or anything close to that and instead of taxing it, the excess gets redistributed at the bottom percentiles. The final argument becomes, if I earned as much as I can and the government tells me I can't earn more, why wouldn't I move to another country that doesn't limit my earning potential? Why wouldn't all of the 1% just move? Can you take that risk as a country? The fundamental issue with that is the word "earned". Consider the footrace again. The winner comes first and therefore we might rationally conclude that he earned the victory. But if the winner is given a million dollars should we therefore conclude that he earned a million dollars? What if it's a billion? What if the billion dollars were taken from raised by taking $10 out of the bank accounts of 100,000,000 working Americans? Would we still conclude that the winner of the footrace had earned a billion dollars? The key distinction I'm making here is the difference between what you get and what you earn. In our economic system you compete against others and if you win the competition you get things. And what you get is weighted in an absurdly disproportionate and top heavy way. I feel like the analogy is breaking down here. The arbitrariness of the race and how much each runner gets is different from real life. In a real market economy, people are paid based on value. You get paid well because you do a job that your employer values and your skillset is somewhat rare. If your skillset was more common, you'd be paid less. If your employer did not need your skillset, then you would not be hired. It may seem that being good at spreadsheets is not really valuable when looking at basic human needs, but society is much more complex than basic human needs. Sometimes the rewards seems absolutely ridiculous, but they are always tied to something that people want/need. In your case (from what I understand), a complex set of regulations has created a value in being good at spreadsheets in a specific way. Certainly from a government perspective on how to guide the economy, I would make some adjustments to tax brackets and welfare programs to take more from the rich and give more to the poor. However, that's still quite different from the completely arbitrariness of the amount given for winning the fictional race that everyone must participate in. Employee compensation is extremely far removed from creation of value. I can assure you that as a specialist in the area of calculating what things really cost to make. My suggestion is that in a modern society "value" is much more abstract than it once was. Before heavy mechanization, a farmer working a field had a pretty obvious and straightforward value. His labor directly addressed a human need. However, in today's world, a guy can buy a bunch of bitcoin and make a lot of money. What was his value? Well, it turns out that society values risk takers. Society values people who can pick the right values to offer up their government backed money in exchange for blockchain based money. He still provides a value, it's just far divorced from base needs and the next guy who provides those same abstract needs/wants will also reap the profits. You could say that society's values are warped, but there is a value there. I would suspect fiat currency is a big culprit in warping values. If we went back to a barter based system, I think more value would be given to direct things and less to the abstract. However, fiat currencies have a lot of benefits to society that may be worth the increased abstractness of value. Let's say me and an immigrant on a work visa do the same job. I can change jobs at will, he cannot. He is therefore forced to accept a much lower rate of pay than I would because of the difference in our bargaining power. But is the value he provides to the employer any lower? I would argue no. Even in a purely theoretical model the value you provide to your employer is only a ceiling on compensation because they would not rationally pay you more than the value you provide. There is no compensation floor, the floor is mostly influenced by factors outside of the control of individuals. But in the real world it's even less rational because there is no good way to measure the value that chat support, for example, brings to the company. My specialization is manufacturing cost accounting which, in layman's terms, means trying to trace costs back to manufactured products. With something like a wooden chair parts of it are simple, you can measure how much wood goes into a chair and assign the chair the cost of that quantity of wood. But it gets harder, take something like a sawblade that needs replacing every other week. You could perhaps work out how many chairs are made during that time and assign the cost of sawblades between them. Now assume that the same sawblade is also used on tables. We can't assign it evenly by unit because tables are bigger and take more sawing to make, we need to come up with some allocation units like machine hours there. By the time we get to assigning my own costs it's completely abstract. How do you allocate the cost of the time spent allocating the costs? And what value does properly allocated costs even bring? Once I’ve calculated that the cost of allocating costs adds a third of a cent to the overall finished product we then need to measure whether that was worth doing. Perhaps it would have been better to allocate the costs less accurately and save that money. They need someone to calculate that for them, which I can also do, though I’ll have to allocate that out eventually too. TLDR: Nobody actually has any clue at all what value 90% of employees actually bring to a company. Which honestly should make sense to anyone who has actually worked a job because all workplaces have people who bring zero or negative value to the employer and somehow still get paid. The system doesn't really work. People talk about government inefficiency and waste and insist that if only there were a profit motive all that inefficiency would clean itself up because with a rational profit incentive no company would waste all their money. Those people have never seen the kind of shit that goes on in the private sector, the kind of idiocy and waste I run into on a daily basis is beyond belief. When profit happens it's mostly by accident and nobody really knows where it came from or why. Conservative belief in market efficiency is genuinely the most mind-boggling and aggravating delusion that I have ever experienced in my entire life. Not only are you 100% correct in that most companies are horribly run and notoriously inefficient, but this mythical idea that government and/or publicly run enterprises are inherently inefficient while private ones are always efficient is so contrary to reality that it makes my brain hurt. Plenty of countries run countless things efficiently (e.g. healthcare, education). Hell, America has examples of well-run public enterprises in certain communities, e.g. public safety (police/fire), education (primary, secondary, and post-secondary), and even aspects of the military, for how utterly massive and convoluted the DoD is, are well-run. This idea that a public system is inherently inefficient and can't be changed is demonstrably false and is utterly ridiculous.
I find the concept of the "poison pill" borrowed from M&A law to be a helpful means of understanding how and why benefits programs were effectively sabotaged starting in the 70s. It was around that time that means testing and other eligibility focused, complexity-inducing mechanisms became popular reforms, and centrist Dems like Bill Clinton were later on all too happy to let them continuously slide through into law in exchange for competing policy proposals like the Brady Bill. Anti-welfare conservatives won a huge victory by getting centrist Dems on board with those ideas because they not only actively disqualified huge swaths of people from receiving aid, they added significant layers of programmatic complexity that now serve as content for shorthand, lazy references by people like Danglars, people who are all too content to rest on ahistoric, over-essentialist simplisms when decrying the injustices of the big bad unwieldy government.
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On November 21 2020 00:06 farvacola wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2020 23:42 Stratos_speAr wrote:On November 20 2020 14:45 KwarK wrote:On November 20 2020 12:12 RenSC2 wrote:On November 20 2020 11:29 KwarK wrote:On November 20 2020 10:11 RenSC2 wrote:On November 20 2020 08:03 KwarK wrote:On November 20 2020 07:46 BisuDagger wrote:On November 20 2020 07:40 Vivax wrote:
While it's mostly fantasizing, wouldn't it make sense to receive personal incomes as percentiles?
I'm not a math wizard and mostly just discussing a rough idea but something like, capping the max income at the 95th percentile or anything close to that and instead of taxing it, the excess gets redistributed at the bottom percentiles. The final argument becomes, if I earned as much as I can and the government tells me I can't earn more, why wouldn't I move to another country that doesn't limit my earning potential? Why wouldn't all of the 1% just move? Can you take that risk as a country? The fundamental issue with that is the word "earned". Consider the footrace again. The winner comes first and therefore we might rationally conclude that he earned the victory. But if the winner is given a million dollars should we therefore conclude that he earned a million dollars? What if it's a billion? What if the billion dollars were taken from raised by taking $10 out of the bank accounts of 100,000,000 working Americans? Would we still conclude that the winner of the footrace had earned a billion dollars? The key distinction I'm making here is the difference between what you get and what you earn. In our economic system you compete against others and if you win the competition you get things. And what you get is weighted in an absurdly disproportionate and top heavy way. I feel like the analogy is breaking down here. The arbitrariness of the race and how much each runner gets is different from real life. In a real market economy, people are paid based on value. You get paid well because you do a job that your employer values and your skillset is somewhat rare. If your skillset was more common, you'd be paid less. If your employer did not need your skillset, then you would not be hired. It may seem that being good at spreadsheets is not really valuable when looking at basic human needs, but society is much more complex than basic human needs. Sometimes the rewards seems absolutely ridiculous, but they are always tied to something that people want/need. In your case (from what I understand), a complex set of regulations has created a value in being good at spreadsheets in a specific way. Certainly from a government perspective on how to guide the economy, I would make some adjustments to tax brackets and welfare programs to take more from the rich and give more to the poor. However, that's still quite different from the completely arbitrariness of the amount given for winning the fictional race that everyone must participate in. Employee compensation is extremely far removed from creation of value. I can assure you that as a specialist in the area of calculating what things really cost to make. My suggestion is that in a modern society "value" is much more abstract than it once was. Before heavy mechanization, a farmer working a field had a pretty obvious and straightforward value. His labor directly addressed a human need. However, in today's world, a guy can buy a bunch of bitcoin and make a lot of money. What was his value? Well, it turns out that society values risk takers. Society values people who can pick the right values to offer up their government backed money in exchange for blockchain based money. He still provides a value, it's just far divorced from base needs and the next guy who provides those same abstract needs/wants will also reap the profits. You could say that society's values are warped, but there is a value there. I would suspect fiat currency is a big culprit in warping values. If we went back to a barter based system, I think more value would be given to direct things and less to the abstract. However, fiat currencies have a lot of benefits to society that may be worth the increased abstractness of value. Let's say me and an immigrant on a work visa do the same job. I can change jobs at will, he cannot. He is therefore forced to accept a much lower rate of pay than I would because of the difference in our bargaining power. But is the value he provides to the employer any lower? I would argue no. Even in a purely theoretical model the value you provide to your employer is only a ceiling on compensation because they would not rationally pay you more than the value you provide. There is no compensation floor, the floor is mostly influenced by factors outside of the control of individuals. But in the real world it's even less rational because there is no good way to measure the value that chat support, for example, brings to the company. My specialization is manufacturing cost accounting which, in layman's terms, means trying to trace costs back to manufactured products. With something like a wooden chair parts of it are simple, you can measure how much wood goes into a chair and assign the chair the cost of that quantity of wood. But it gets harder, take something like a sawblade that needs replacing every other week. You could perhaps work out how many chairs are made during that time and assign the cost of sawblades between them. Now assume that the same sawblade is also used on tables. We can't assign it evenly by unit because tables are bigger and take more sawing to make, we need to come up with some allocation units like machine hours there. By the time we get to assigning my own costs it's completely abstract. How do you allocate the cost of the time spent allocating the costs? And what value does properly allocated costs even bring? Once I’ve calculated that the cost of allocating costs adds a third of a cent to the overall finished product we then need to measure whether that was worth doing. Perhaps it would have been better to allocate the costs less accurately and save that money. They need someone to calculate that for them, which I can also do, though I’ll have to allocate that out eventually too. TLDR: Nobody actually has any clue at all what value 90% of employees actually bring to a company. Which honestly should make sense to anyone who has actually worked a job because all workplaces have people who bring zero or negative value to the employer and somehow still get paid. The system doesn't really work. People talk about government inefficiency and waste and insist that if only there were a profit motive all that inefficiency would clean itself up because with a rational profit incentive no company would waste all their money. Those people have never seen the kind of shit that goes on in the private sector, the kind of idiocy and waste I run into on a daily basis is beyond belief. When profit happens it's mostly by accident and nobody really knows where it came from or why. Conservative belief in market efficiency is genuinely the most mind-boggling and aggravating delusion that I have ever experienced in my entire life. Not only are you 100% correct in that most companies are horribly run and notoriously inefficient, but this mythical idea that government and/or publicly run enterprises are inherently inefficient while private ones are always efficient is so contrary to reality that it makes my brain hurt. Plenty of countries run countless things efficiently (e.g. healthcare, education). Hell, America has examples of well-run public enterprises in certain communities, e.g. public safety (police/fire), education (primary, secondary, and post-secondary), and even aspects of the military, for how utterly massive and convoluted the DoD is, are well-run. This idea that a public system is inherently inefficient and can't be changed is demonstrably false and is utterly ridiculous. I find the concept of the "poison pill" borrowed from M&A law to be a helpful means of understanding how and why benefits programs were effectively sabotaged starting in the 70s. It was around that time that means testing and other eligibility focused, complexity-inducing mechanisms became popular reforms, and centrist Dems like Bill Clinton were later on all too happy to let them continuously slide through into law in exchange for competing policy proposals like the Brady Bill. Anti-welfare conservatives won a huge victory by getting centrist Dems on board with those ideas because they not only actively disqualified huge swaths of people from receiving aid, they added significant layers of programmatic complexity that now serve as content for shorthand, lazy references by people like Danglars, people who are all too content to rest on ahistoric, over-essentialist simplisms when decrying the injustices of the big bad unwieldy government.
Of course conservatives are loathe to take any responsibility for actively sabotaging the functioning of government, which is pretty much their only political accomplishment of note for the past two generations.
That said, it's a bit over-simplifying to just say, "Republicans made government worse and that's the problem with all of our systems", since Democrats, as you acknowledged, also contributed to the design of many poor systems, but regardless, the point stands; you can't actively attempt to make government systems worse and then say, "See! Government doesn't work!"
Pretty sure there's a meme for that.
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For healthcare, we pay more for worse outcomes because we dont have price controls. Having medicare for all or a universal healthcare system works not just because everyone is covered, but because you eliminate a layer of beurocracy with insurance/billing companies in addition to being able to negotiate as the largest possible block to reduce cost.
We need to control cost and thats the best way possible. Healthcare is not something capitalism solves. Youll literally take on debt and pay anything to save your child or prevent your death on an operating table. That is not the type of system that capitalism works in. Theres a reason gouging during emergencies/disasters is frowned upon or illegal. Healthcare is just a personal emergency.
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The biggest problem I've always had with the idea that markets are a good idea in healthcare is that accepting a healthcare market is saying rich people deserve to live longer than poor people at its core. Even without market healthcare capitalist systems always say that-better food, better houses, less stress, better mobility, more options, all make people live longer-but reducing access to medications, procedures, and office visits based on ability to pay takes that and shouts it from the rooftops with no pretension.
This is perhaps why the modern GOP balks so hard at the idea of the public option when the Nixon era Republicans were perfectly happy with it-a repudiation of the core tenet of capitalism in this manner terrifies them far more than it used to because their love for it and hatred of safeguards has grown precipitously as the wealthy donor class took complete control over the party's reality, and nobody loves the idea of rich people deserving to live longer more than the rich.
Most systems retain shades of this even with a public option in place-banning supplemental private insurance or supplemental care is pretty uncommon-but at least they ameliorate the discrepancy, and generally are geared to function on the basis that the "last straws" of access are equally provided to all.
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United States43960 Posts
Insurance is also not something that works for healthcare. You can do a blind implementation of insurance or one where they can take your factors into consideration.
In a blind implementation the insurance company charges a 80 year old woman with a history of cancer the same as a 25 year old man because they don't know that the risks they're insuring against are different. That leads to the woman being massively undercharged and the man being massively overcharged. The man should rationally opt out of insurance unless mandated to carry it by law. If he's mandated to carry it by law then congratulations, you've reinvented socialized healthcare.
In one where the insurance company is assessing your personal risk factors they're not helping you pay for anything, they're protecting you from black swan events by converting your expected costs based on your risks into a known payment. You're still paying for yourself. If you're a sick person then you pay sick people costs, if you're healthy then you pay healthy person costs. The problem with this is that sick people can't afford to pay for sick people and so they have to die. If you're a retired individual with cancer then you're unlikely to be able to pay $200k/year for treatment which is what the insurance company would rationally charge you in premiums.
The goal of the healthcare system is to treat the sick which can only be done if the healthy pay for the sick. There's no way around it, the sick can't afford to pay for the sick. Insurance, a system built to facilitate people paying for their own risks, cannot work.
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On November 21 2020 00:42 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2020 00:16 Stratos_speAr wrote:On November 21 2020 00:06 farvacola wrote:On November 20 2020 23:42 Stratos_speAr wrote:On November 20 2020 14:45 KwarK wrote:On November 20 2020 12:12 RenSC2 wrote:On November 20 2020 11:29 KwarK wrote:On November 20 2020 10:11 RenSC2 wrote:On November 20 2020 08:03 KwarK wrote:On November 20 2020 07:46 BisuDagger wrote:
[quote]
The final argument becomes, if I earned as much as I can and the government tells me I can't earn more, why wouldn't I move to another country that doesn't limit my earning potential? Why wouldn't all of the 1% just move? Can you take that risk as a country? The fundamental issue with that is the word "earned". Consider the footrace again. The winner comes first and therefore we might rationally conclude that he earned the victory. But if the winner is given a million dollars should we therefore conclude that he earned a million dollars? What if it's a billion? What if the billion dollars were taken from raised by taking $10 out of the bank accounts of 100,000,000 working Americans? Would we still conclude that the winner of the footrace had earned a billion dollars? The key distinction I'm making here is the difference between what you get and what you earn. In our economic system you compete against others and if you win the competition you get things. And what you get is weighted in an absurdly disproportionate and top heavy way. I feel like the analogy is breaking down here. The arbitrariness of the race and how much each runner gets is different from real life. In a real market economy, people are paid based on value. You get paid well because you do a job that your employer values and your skillset is somewhat rare. If your skillset was more common, you'd be paid less. If your employer did not need your skillset, then you would not be hired. It may seem that being good at spreadsheets is not really valuable when looking at basic human needs, but society is much more complex than basic human needs. Sometimes the rewards seems absolutely ridiculous, but they are always tied to something that people want/need. In your case (from what I understand), a complex set of regulations has created a value in being good at spreadsheets in a specific way. Certainly from a government perspective on how to guide the economy, I would make some adjustments to tax brackets and welfare programs to take more from the rich and give more to the poor. However, that's still quite different from the completely arbitrariness of the amount given for winning the fictional race that everyone must participate in. Employee compensation is extremely far removed from creation of value. I can assure you that as a specialist in the area of calculating what things really cost to make. My suggestion is that in a modern society "value" is much more abstract than it once was. Before heavy mechanization, a farmer working a field had a pretty obvious and straightforward value. His labor directly addressed a human need. However, in today's world, a guy can buy a bunch of bitcoin and make a lot of money. What was his value? Well, it turns out that society values risk takers. Society values people who can pick the right values to offer up their government backed money in exchange for blockchain based money. He still provides a value, it's just far divorced from base needs and the next guy who provides those same abstract needs/wants will also reap the profits. You could say that society's values are warped, but there is a value there. I would suspect fiat currency is a big culprit in warping values. If we went back to a barter based system, I think more value would be given to direct things and less to the abstract. However, fiat currencies have a lot of benefits to society that may be worth the increased abstractness of value. Let's say me and an immigrant on a work visa do the same job. I can change jobs at will, he cannot. He is therefore forced to accept a much lower rate of pay than I would because of the difference in our bargaining power. But is the value he provides to the employer any lower? I would argue no. Even in a purely theoretical model the value you provide to your employer is only a ceiling on compensation because they would not rationally pay you more than the value you provide. There is no compensation floor, the floor is mostly influenced by factors outside of the control of individuals. But in the real world it's even less rational because there is no good way to measure the value that chat support, for example, brings to the company. My specialization is manufacturing cost accounting which, in layman's terms, means trying to trace costs back to manufactured products. With something like a wooden chair parts of it are simple, you can measure how much wood goes into a chair and assign the chair the cost of that quantity of wood. But it gets harder, take something like a sawblade that needs replacing every other week. You could perhaps work out how many chairs are made during that time and assign the cost of sawblades between them. Now assume that the same sawblade is also used on tables. We can't assign it evenly by unit because tables are bigger and take more sawing to make, we need to come up with some allocation units like machine hours there. By the time we get to assigning my own costs it's completely abstract. How do you allocate the cost of the time spent allocating the costs? And what value does properly allocated costs even bring? Once I’ve calculated that the cost of allocating costs adds a third of a cent to the overall finished product we then need to measure whether that was worth doing. Perhaps it would have been better to allocate the costs less accurately and save that money. They need someone to calculate that for them, which I can also do, though I’ll have to allocate that out eventually too. TLDR: Nobody actually has any clue at all what value 90% of employees actually bring to a company. Which honestly should make sense to anyone who has actually worked a job because all workplaces have people who bring zero or negative value to the employer and somehow still get paid. The system doesn't really work. People talk about government inefficiency and waste and insist that if only there were a profit motive all that inefficiency would clean itself up because with a rational profit incentive no company would waste all their money. Those people have never seen the kind of shit that goes on in the private sector, the kind of idiocy and waste I run into on a daily basis is beyond belief. When profit happens it's mostly by accident and nobody really knows where it came from or why. Conservative belief in market efficiency is genuinely the most mind-boggling and aggravating delusion that I have ever experienced in my entire life. Not only are you 100% correct in that most companies are horribly run and notoriously inefficient, but this mythical idea that government and/or publicly run enterprises are inherently inefficient while private ones are always efficient is so contrary to reality that it makes my brain hurt. Plenty of countries run countless things efficiently (e.g. healthcare, education). Hell, America has examples of well-run public enterprises in certain communities, e.g. public safety (police/fire), education (primary, secondary, and post-secondary), and even aspects of the military, for how utterly massive and convoluted the DoD is, are well-run. This idea that a public system is inherently inefficient and can't be changed is demonstrably false and is utterly ridiculous. I find the concept of the "poison pill" borrowed from M&A law to be a helpful means of understanding how and why benefits programs were effectively sabotaged starting in the 70s. It was around that time that means testing and other eligibility focused, complexity-inducing mechanisms became popular reforms, and centrist Dems like Bill Clinton were later on all too happy to let them continuously slide through into law in exchange for competing policy proposals like the Brady Bill. Anti-welfare conservatives won a huge victory by getting centrist Dems on board with those ideas because they not only actively disqualified huge swaths of people from receiving aid, they added significant layers of programmatic complexity that now serve as content for shorthand, lazy references by people like Danglars, people who are all too content to rest on ahistoric, over-essentialist simplisms when decrying the injustices of the big bad unwieldy government. Of course conservatives are loathe to take any responsibility for actively sabotaging the functioning of government, which is pretty much their only political accomplishment of note for the past two generations. That said, it's a bit over-simplifying to just say, "Republicans made government worse and that's the problem with all of our systems", since Democrats, as you acknowledged, also contributed to the design of many poor systems, but regardless, the point stands; you can't actively attempt to make government systems worse and then say, "See! Government doesn't work!" Pretty sure there's a meme for that. Sounds like all the anti maskers right now, wearing it under there nose, not washing and so on. Then damn "these masks don't work worth shit". Here is a great example of a well run public company. In the province of Saskatchewan they kept cell phones and mobility public. They now have BY FAR the best rates in the country. As you both mentioned it is not only public companies that get bloat, so do private and well run Public has some advantages of , not needing profit for shareholders, the money staying in the community rather than heading to head office, tend to pay higher which also helps local economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SaskTelIf private was always the answer you guys would have the cheapest best health care not the opposite. And the prisons situation is even worse! There is both theoretical and practical examples of why some things run better publicly. They just need good oversight and accountability.
I'd say the provinces with government-run car insurance are also a reasonable example, although places like Ontario with private insurance do alright as well.
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On November 20 2020 19:17 maybenexttime wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2020 11:14 Danglars wrote:On November 20 2020 09:46 Wegandi wrote:
Do people not understand wealth/assets =/= money. What are you going to do, expropriate assets and stocks? Now tell me how thats going to end up differently than every time thats been done.
There's also not enough assets that the "rich" have to temporarily subsidize the masses. The fact is you'd have to expropriate from the middle class as well. Then there is the other moral issue that you yourself are a 1%er. Why shouldn't you be expropriated to give to the poor in Nigeria, Cambodia, or Uzbezkistan? You're on the argument behind the argument. It will have to hit the middle class to fund all the health care and subsidized college that leftists are wanting the Biden administration to get done. The problem is the historical value for money the middle class has gotten back from this arrangement. With all the waste, fraud, and incompetence of federally administered programs (the easy example here is the VA system of healthcare), the middle class has rejected increased taxes to pay for them. Ah, yes, America's so exceptional. Somehow most other developed countries made it work for far less money than the US is already spending. Show nested quote +The trouble with all the prescriptions for increased government intervention is convincing Americans that this time, they'll really do a good job instead of mucking it up like all the past times. That's where America, being full of Americans, decides to default to the freedom to make as much money as you possibly can, and give the middle finger to the government and leechers of society that say you aren't allowed to make that much. (And there'd be a lot less strife in politics if Republicans didn't have cause to worry that their wallets aren't safe stemming from the promises of free this and that. The millionaires and billionaires rhetoric always obscures the real victims of tax and spend policy. Leave us alone. Nobody should have to pay close attention to politics except a couple months every 2-4 years) Could that have something to do with the Republicans actively sabotaging the state's institutions, I wonder? Show nested quote +On November 20 2020 11:55 Danglars wrote:
The reason it sucks so bad is both parties have tried their hands at adopting the dumbest, market-interfering policies to make the insuring and purchase of medical care a trial in and of itself. Would that the private market could function as such, without government telling the consumer what constitutes minimum essential coverage, how policies may not be sold over state lines, hospitals lobbying their politicians for bigger Medicare disbursements, and medicine and care overregulated to hell. Can you name a single country where that actually works?
You have it there yourself: when it fails, blame Republicans. When the rest of the world chooses otherwise, imply through fallacy that it invalidates the worst-of-both-system criticism of the strictures. It’s a neat ideological framework.
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You know what the American healthcare debate reminds me of?
VAR in the English Premier League.
For anyone that watches soccer/football, you'll know that there are an absurd amount of VAR controversies in England, and the English love to use it as a reason to say that VAR is a bad idea.
The problem with this is that VAR is a stunning success in almost ever top-tier league as well as major international tournaments.
VAR isn't the problem. How the English execute VAR is the problem.
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On November 21 2020 03:02 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2020 19:17 maybenexttime wrote:On November 20 2020 11:14 Danglars wrote:On November 20 2020 09:46 Wegandi wrote:
Do people not understand wealth/assets =/= money. What are you going to do, expropriate assets and stocks? Now tell me how thats going to end up differently than every time thats been done.
There's also not enough assets that the "rich" have to temporarily subsidize the masses. The fact is you'd have to expropriate from the middle class as well. Then there is the other moral issue that you yourself are a 1%er. Why shouldn't you be expropriated to give to the poor in Nigeria, Cambodia, or Uzbezkistan? You're on the argument behind the argument. It will have to hit the middle class to fund all the health care and subsidized college that leftists are wanting the Biden administration to get done. The problem is the historical value for money the middle class has gotten back from this arrangement. With all the waste, fraud, and incompetence of federally administered programs (the easy example here is the VA system of healthcare), the middle class has rejected increased taxes to pay for them. Ah, yes, America's so exceptional. Somehow most other developed countries made it work for far less money than the US is already spending. The trouble with all the prescriptions for increased government intervention is convincing Americans that this time, they'll really do a good job instead of mucking it up like all the past times. That's where America, being full of Americans, decides to default to the freedom to make as much money as you possibly can, and give the middle finger to the government and leechers of society that say you aren't allowed to make that much. (And there'd be a lot less strife in politics if Republicans didn't have cause to worry that their wallets aren't safe stemming from the promises of free this and that. The millionaires and billionaires rhetoric always obscures the real victims of tax and spend policy. Leave us alone. Nobody should have to pay close attention to politics except a couple months every 2-4 years) Could that have something to do with the Republicans actively sabotaging the state's institutions, I wonder? On November 20 2020 11:55 Danglars wrote:
The reason it sucks so bad is both parties have tried their hands at adopting the dumbest, market-interfering policies to make the insuring and purchase of medical care a trial in and of itself. Would that the private market could function as such, without government telling the consumer what constitutes minimum essential coverage, how policies may not be sold over state lines, hospitals lobbying their politicians for bigger Medicare disbursements, and medicine and care overregulated to hell. Can you name a single country where that actually works? You have it there yourself: when it fails, blame Republicans. When the rest of the world chooses otherwise, imply through fallacy that it invalidates the worst-of-both-system criticism of the strictures. It’s a neat ideological framework.
I'm not interested in your bad faith arguments.
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On November 21 2020 03:02 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2020 19:17 maybenexttime wrote:On November 20 2020 11:14 Danglars wrote:On November 20 2020 09:46 Wegandi wrote:
Do people not understand wealth/assets =/= money. What are you going to do, expropriate assets and stocks? Now tell me how thats going to end up differently than every time thats been done.
There's also not enough assets that the "rich" have to temporarily subsidize the masses. The fact is you'd have to expropriate from the middle class as well. Then there is the other moral issue that you yourself are a 1%er. Why shouldn't you be expropriated to give to the poor in Nigeria, Cambodia, or Uzbezkistan? You're on the argument behind the argument. It will have to hit the middle class to fund all the health care and subsidized college that leftists are wanting the Biden administration to get done. The problem is the historical value for money the middle class has gotten back from this arrangement. With all the waste, fraud, and incompetence of federally administered programs (the easy example here is the VA system of healthcare), the middle class has rejected increased taxes to pay for them. Ah, yes, America's so exceptional. Somehow most other developed countries made it work for far less money than the US is already spending. The trouble with all the prescriptions for increased government intervention is convincing Americans that this time, they'll really do a good job instead of mucking it up like all the past times. That's where America, being full of Americans, decides to default to the freedom to make as much money as you possibly can, and give the middle finger to the government and leechers of society that say you aren't allowed to make that much. (And there'd be a lot less strife in politics if Republicans didn't have cause to worry that their wallets aren't safe stemming from the promises of free this and that. The millionaires and billionaires rhetoric always obscures the real victims of tax and spend policy. Leave us alone. Nobody should have to pay close attention to politics except a couple months every 2-4 years) Could that have something to do with the Republicans actively sabotaging the state's institutions, I wonder? On November 20 2020 11:55 Danglars wrote:
The reason it sucks so bad is both parties have tried their hands at adopting the dumbest, market-interfering policies to make the insuring and purchase of medical care a trial in and of itself. Would that the private market could function as such, without government telling the consumer what constitutes minimum essential coverage, how policies may not be sold over state lines, hospitals lobbying their politicians for bigger Medicare disbursements, and medicine and care overregulated to hell. Can you name a single country where that actually works? You have it there yourself: when it fails, blame Republicans. When the rest of the world chooses otherwise, imply through fallacy that it invalidates the worst-of-both-system criticism of the strictures. It’s a neat ideological framework.
If you have a substantial rebuttal to his, or anyone else's, points, you're free to offer them. You're only the victim of not making a compelling argument.
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On November 21 2020 04:00 maybenexttime wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2020 03:02 Danglars wrote:On November 20 2020 19:17 maybenexttime wrote:On November 20 2020 11:14 Danglars wrote:On November 20 2020 09:46 Wegandi wrote:
Do people not understand wealth/assets =/= money. What are you going to do, expropriate assets and stocks? Now tell me how thats going to end up differently than every time thats been done.
There's also not enough assets that the "rich" have to temporarily subsidize the masses. The fact is you'd have to expropriate from the middle class as well. Then there is the other moral issue that you yourself are a 1%er. Why shouldn't you be expropriated to give to the poor in Nigeria, Cambodia, or Uzbezkistan? You're on the argument behind the argument. It will have to hit the middle class to fund all the health care and subsidized college that leftists are wanting the Biden administration to get done. The problem is the historical value for money the middle class has gotten back from this arrangement. With all the waste, fraud, and incompetence of federally administered programs (the easy example here is the VA system of healthcare), the middle class has rejected increased taxes to pay for them. Ah, yes, America's so exceptional. Somehow most other developed countries made it work for far less money than the US is already spending. The trouble with all the prescriptions for increased government intervention is convincing Americans that this time, they'll really do a good job instead of mucking it up like all the past times. That's where America, being full of Americans, decides to default to the freedom to make as much money as you possibly can, and give the middle finger to the government and leechers of society that say you aren't allowed to make that much. (And there'd be a lot less strife in politics if Republicans didn't have cause to worry that their wallets aren't safe stemming from the promises of free this and that. The millionaires and billionaires rhetoric always obscures the real victims of tax and spend policy. Leave us alone. Nobody should have to pay close attention to politics except a couple months every 2-4 years) Could that have something to do with the Republicans actively sabotaging the state's institutions, I wonder? On November 20 2020 11:55 Danglars wrote:
The reason it sucks so bad is both parties have tried their hands at adopting the dumbest, market-interfering policies to make the insuring and purchase of medical care a trial in and of itself. Would that the private market could function as such, without government telling the consumer what constitutes minimum essential coverage, how policies may not be sold over state lines, hospitals lobbying their politicians for bigger Medicare disbursements, and medicine and care overregulated to hell. Can you name a single country where that actually works? You have it there yourself: when it fails, blame Republicans. When the rest of the world chooses otherwise, imply through fallacy that it invalidates the worst-of-both-system criticism of the strictures. It’s a neat ideological framework. I'm not interested in your bad faith arguments.
I really don't know how people like you justify these kind of posts. I obviously have a problem with people suggesting current examples of government run health care show future plans won't automatically be nordic successes, and you have one liners suggesting it's the responsibility of Republican sabotage? Maybe you'd prefer I blamed all issues in the semi-private system on Democrats? I'd like to fix the system for costs in terms of removing what I find bad about making the current system not private and not market-oriented, and all you have is showing the lack of semi-private systems elsewhere. Since when is that an argument against?
I got into this aspect riffing off a Wegandi post on why all these anti-billionaire and anti-millionaire Democratic propaganda sucks, because the (proposed) confiscated money does not generate effective systems. It doesn't redistribute into things that work. All I heard back is deflecting blame on malicious actors and the argument that nobody else has tried it. Yeah, maybe focus on fleecing a stupider class of Americans that really digs people that blame others for their own side's failings.
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On November 21 2020 04:34 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2020 04:00 maybenexttime wrote:On November 21 2020 03:02 Danglars wrote:On November 20 2020 19:17 maybenexttime wrote:On November 20 2020 11:14 Danglars wrote:On November 20 2020 09:46 Wegandi wrote:
Do people not understand wealth/assets =/= money. What are you going to do, expropriate assets and stocks? Now tell me how thats going to end up differently than every time thats been done.
There's also not enough assets that the "rich" have to temporarily subsidize the masses. The fact is you'd have to expropriate from the middle class as well. Then there is the other moral issue that you yourself are a 1%er. Why shouldn't you be expropriated to give to the poor in Nigeria, Cambodia, or Uzbezkistan? You're on the argument behind the argument. It will have to hit the middle class to fund all the health care and subsidized college that leftists are wanting the Biden administration to get done. The problem is the historical value for money the middle class has gotten back from this arrangement. With all the waste, fraud, and incompetence of federally administered programs (the easy example here is the VA system of healthcare), the middle class has rejected increased taxes to pay for them. Ah, yes, America's so exceptional. Somehow most other developed countries made it work for far less money than the US is already spending. The trouble with all the prescriptions for increased government intervention is convincing Americans that this time, they'll really do a good job instead of mucking it up like all the past times. That's where America, being full of Americans, decides to default to the freedom to make as much money as you possibly can, and give the middle finger to the government and leechers of society that say you aren't allowed to make that much. (And there'd be a lot less strife in politics if Republicans didn't have cause to worry that their wallets aren't safe stemming from the promises of free this and that. The millionaires and billionaires rhetoric always obscures the real victims of tax and spend policy. Leave us alone. Nobody should have to pay close attention to politics except a couple months every 2-4 years) Could that have something to do with the Republicans actively sabotaging the state's institutions, I wonder? On November 20 2020 11:55 Danglars wrote:
The reason it sucks so bad is both parties have tried their hands at adopting the dumbest, market-interfering policies to make the insuring and purchase of medical care a trial in and of itself. Would that the private market could function as such, without government telling the consumer what constitutes minimum essential coverage, how policies may not be sold over state lines, hospitals lobbying their politicians for bigger Medicare disbursements, and medicine and care overregulated to hell. Can you name a single country where that actually works? You have it there yourself: when it fails, blame Republicans. When the rest of the world chooses otherwise, imply through fallacy that it invalidates the worst-of-both-system criticism of the strictures. It’s a neat ideological framework. I'm not interested in your bad faith arguments. I really don't know how people like you justify these kind of posts. I obviously have a problem with people suggesting current examples of government run health care show future plans won't automatically be nordic successes, and you have one liners suggesting it's the responsibility of Republican sabotage? Maybe you'd prefer I blamed all issues in the semi-private system on Democrats? I'd like to fix the system for costs in terms of removing what I find bad about making the current system not private and not market-oriented, and all you have is showing the lack of semi-private systems elsewhere. Since when is that an argument against? I got into this aspect riffing off a Wegandi post on why all these anti-billionaire and anti-millionaire Democratic propaganda sucks, because the (proposed) confiscated money does not generate effective systems. It doesn't redistribute into things that work. All I heard back is deflecting blame on malicious actors and the argument that nobody else has tried it. Yeah, maybe focus on fleecing a stupider class of Americans that really digs people that blame others for their own side's failings.
The jaw dropping lack of self-reflection evident in this post is a perfect example of why so many people dislike engaging with self-proclaimed conservatives who interact with others like Danglars does. Rather than wrestle with the fact that one of the more conservative leaning European regulars on these boards agrees with our supposedly echo chamber choir of leftists on the notion that he argues in bad faith, Danglars doubles down, reiterates his rhetorical decision to turn his opposition into a straw filled mass of one-dimensional blamers, and then dishes out a bunch of one-dimensional blame himself.
I would think you playing a character had I not been reading your posts for a couple years shy of a decade.
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On November 21 2020 04:34 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2020 04:00 maybenexttime wrote:On November 21 2020 03:02 Danglars wrote:On November 20 2020 19:17 maybenexttime wrote:On November 20 2020 11:14 Danglars wrote:On November 20 2020 09:46 Wegandi wrote:
Do people not understand wealth/assets =/= money. What are you going to do, expropriate assets and stocks? Now tell me how thats going to end up differently than every time thats been done.
There's also not enough assets that the "rich" have to temporarily subsidize the masses. The fact is you'd have to expropriate from the middle class as well. Then there is the other moral issue that you yourself are a 1%er. Why shouldn't you be expropriated to give to the poor in Nigeria, Cambodia, or Uzbezkistan? You're on the argument behind the argument. It will have to hit the middle class to fund all the health care and subsidized college that leftists are wanting the Biden administration to get done. The problem is the historical value for money the middle class has gotten back from this arrangement. With all the waste, fraud, and incompetence of federally administered programs (the easy example here is the VA system of healthcare), the middle class has rejected increased taxes to pay for them. Ah, yes, America's so exceptional. Somehow most other developed countries made it work for far less money than the US is already spending. The trouble with all the prescriptions for increased government intervention is convincing Americans that this time, they'll really do a good job instead of mucking it up like all the past times. That's where America, being full of Americans, decides to default to the freedom to make as much money as you possibly can, and give the middle finger to the government and leechers of society that say you aren't allowed to make that much. (And there'd be a lot less strife in politics if Republicans didn't have cause to worry that their wallets aren't safe stemming from the promises of free this and that. The millionaires and billionaires rhetoric always obscures the real victims of tax and spend policy. Leave us alone. Nobody should have to pay close attention to politics except a couple months every 2-4 years) Could that have something to do with the Republicans actively sabotaging the state's institutions, I wonder? On November 20 2020 11:55 Danglars wrote:
The reason it sucks so bad is both parties have tried their hands at adopting the dumbest, market-interfering policies to make the insuring and purchase of medical care a trial in and of itself. Would that the private market could function as such, without government telling the consumer what constitutes minimum essential coverage, how policies may not be sold over state lines, hospitals lobbying their politicians for bigger Medicare disbursements, and medicine and care overregulated to hell. Can you name a single country where that actually works? You have it there yourself: when it fails, blame Republicans. When the rest of the world chooses otherwise, imply through fallacy that it invalidates the worst-of-both-system criticism of the strictures. It’s a neat ideological framework. I'm not interested in your bad faith arguments. I really don't know how people like you justify these kind of posts. I obviously have a problem with people suggesting current examples of government run health care show future plans won't automatically be nordic successes, and you have one liners suggesting it's the responsibility of Republican sabotage? Maybe you'd prefer I blamed all issues in the semi-private system on Democrats? I'd like to fix the system for costs in terms of removing what I find bad about making the current system not private and not market-oriented, and all you have is showing the lack of semi-private systems elsewhere. Since when is that an argument against? I got into this aspect riffing off a Wegandi post on why all these anti-billionaire and anti-millionaire Democratic propaganda sucks, because the (proposed) confiscated money does not generate effective systems. It doesn't redistribute into things that work. All I heard back is deflecting blame on malicious actors and the argument that nobody else has tried it. Yeah, maybe focus on fleecing a stupider class of Americans that really digs people that blame others for their own side's failings. We have the last 10 years as proof as Republicans, being the cowards they are, have tried to sabotage and hack apart the ACA.
That you try and argue Republicans do not try to sabotage government programs to get them to fail is just facepalm worthy.
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I certainly hope that people aren't trying to use the ACA as some sort of proxy for "universal healthcare." The former is borne of a conservative think tank, implemented by a moderate Democrat, and includes much of the worst of what the US's insurance-based healthcare has to offer. The latter is at least in theory better for driving systematic change, but isn't really on the table per US politicians, so ACA is used as a proxy by the lazy to mean "universal healthcare."
ACA is decidedly worse on just about all fronts in implementation and effectiveness.
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United States43960 Posts
The ACA forced risk pooling which meant that uninsurable folks weren't segregated in their own group with insurance too expensive to be functional. It addressed one of the main issues with insurance.
But yeah, I wouldn't advocate for anything like the ACA insurance system in any country other than the US and in the US only as a step towards nationalization.
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On November 21 2020 04:34 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2020 04:00 maybenexttime wrote:On November 21 2020 03:02 Danglars wrote:On November 20 2020 19:17 maybenexttime wrote:On November 20 2020 11:14 Danglars wrote:On November 20 2020 09:46 Wegandi wrote:
Do people not understand wealth/assets =/= money. What are you going to do, expropriate assets and stocks? Now tell me how thats going to end up differently than every time thats been done.
There's also not enough assets that the "rich" have to temporarily subsidize the masses. The fact is you'd have to expropriate from the middle class as well. Then there is the other moral issue that you yourself are a 1%er. Why shouldn't you be expropriated to give to the poor in Nigeria, Cambodia, or Uzbezkistan? You're on the argument behind the argument. It will have to hit the middle class to fund all the health care and subsidized college that leftists are wanting the Biden administration to get done. The problem is the historical value for money the middle class has gotten back from this arrangement. With all the waste, fraud, and incompetence of federally administered programs (the easy example here is the VA system of healthcare), the middle class has rejected increased taxes to pay for them. Ah, yes, America's so exceptional. Somehow most other developed countries made it work for far less money than the US is already spending. The trouble with all the prescriptions for increased government intervention is convincing Americans that this time, they'll really do a good job instead of mucking it up like all the past times. That's where America, being full of Americans, decides to default to the freedom to make as much money as you possibly can, and give the middle finger to the government and leechers of society that say you aren't allowed to make that much. (And there'd be a lot less strife in politics if Republicans didn't have cause to worry that their wallets aren't safe stemming from the promises of free this and that. The millionaires and billionaires rhetoric always obscures the real victims of tax and spend policy. Leave us alone. Nobody should have to pay close attention to politics except a couple months every 2-4 years) Could that have something to do with the Republicans actively sabotaging the state's institutions, I wonder? On November 20 2020 11:55 Danglars wrote:
The reason it sucks so bad is both parties have tried their hands at adopting the dumbest, market-interfering policies to make the insuring and purchase of medical care a trial in and of itself. Would that the private market could function as such, without government telling the consumer what constitutes minimum essential coverage, how policies may not be sold over state lines, hospitals lobbying their politicians for bigger Medicare disbursements, and medicine and care overregulated to hell. Can you name a single country where that actually works? You have it there yourself: when it fails, blame Republicans. When the rest of the world chooses otherwise, imply through fallacy that it invalidates the worst-of-both-system criticism of the strictures. It’s a neat ideological framework. I'm not interested in your bad faith arguments. I really don't know how people like you justify these kind of posts. I obviously have a problem with people suggesting current examples of government run health care show future plans won't automatically be nordic successes, and you have one liners suggesting it's the responsibility of Republican sabotage? Maybe you'd prefer I blamed all issues in the semi-private system on Democrats? I'd like to fix the system for costs in terms of removing what I find bad about making the current system not private and not market-oriented, and all you have is showing the lack of semi-private systems elsewhere. Since when is that an argument against? I got into this aspect riffing off a Wegandi post on why all these anti-billionaire and anti-millionaire Democratic propaganda sucks, because the (proposed) confiscated money does not generate effective systems. It doesn't redistribute into things that work. All I heard back is deflecting blame on malicious actors and the argument that nobody else has tried it. Yeah, maybe focus on fleecing a stupider class of Americans that really digs people that blame others for their own side's failings.
The Republican party has a long and well-documented history of engaging in that kind of sabotage. If you want to pretend that's not the case, be my guest. I'm not going to waste my time.
That sabotage is besides the point. The burden of proof is on you to show that an unregulated free-market healthcare system is something worth striving for. There isn't a single example in the world of that working. There are countless well-regulated systems (whether private or public) that work far better than what you have in the US.
The proponents of a laissez-faire healthcare system in this thread have failed to address the numerous problems that people in this thread have raised: preexisting conditions, arbitrary prices (look up chargemasters), complete lack of transparency, doctors prescribing unnecessary tests to milk their patients, several times higher insurance premiums (this isn't just the US - there are many studies that show private insurance premiums to be much higher due to the fact that they are tailored to the clients), private providers focusing almost exclusively on luxury services (due to their high ROI), low coverage, doctors being bribed by pharmaceutical companies to prescribe their products and so on. How would free market solve any of those?
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EPT
