They vote against Medicare as being Socialism.

How many Republicans send back there Social Security checks each month and turn down Medicare?

You fired off a series of comments which were offensive in their tone. Now, you’ve given more depth to your comments, and I notice that your rhetoric has been replaced by your life experience. Please tell me why, if your family went without health insurance, you could possibly justify continuing such a counterproductive and expensive status quo? If you ever–once–went to King-Drew, or Harbor, or any other hospital and couldn’t afford to pay, you or anybody in your family, somebody DID. Why not get rid of the accounting game and just set up a system that doesn’t play “gotcha” with individuals, businesses, doctors/nurse practicioners, or hospitals? You mention PBS and animal rescue donations. Nice, but you’ve kinda said (not directly, but by ready inference) that abandoned dogs and “Dora the Explorer” matter more than Americans with NO access to non-emergency healthcare. I’m sorry for you that you would grow up in Watts and take on an attitude more worthy of Calabasas. Re-read what I wrote. Address me on point, as I’ve done with you, and don’t shift your argument when you can’t defend it.

When we stop treating the symptoms and seriously treat the problems then we will begin to see success in the health area and the cost will go down.

You mention net income. What is net income? It does reflect payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare. It may reflect state and local income taxes. As it happens, it does not reflect property taxes paid for hospitals, local health districts, or any other services paid through general revenue funds. The tax cost of healthcare is already hidden, but like you’re fat bogeyman, you’re to intellectually lazy to acknowledge something which the majority of people here already know.

One major argument for universal coverage is that everyone pays something (unless they’re too poor to pay). Small businesses pay in Canada, France and Germany, and it’s not the immense burden it is in the US precisely because everybody pays. That removes an obstacle to free-market competition and improves the quality of the labor force. Your argument leaves American companies with higher overhead and sicker workers, which means we work ourselves harder for no objective reason.

Of course, there is the overall hubris of your posts, the clear notion that people who get sick do so through their own failure. When I was a kid, around 8 or so, my mother was a professional who’d fought university administrators just to get into programs. She never wanted a free ride from anybody. She started going blind. She continued working–that’s what she wanted, and her biggest problem wasn’t blindness, it was the nasty sabotaging behavior of co-workers who wanted her out that made her retire at the earliest age. (Kelson, I suspect you’re the kind who argues that employers should be able to get rid of people with easily-accomodated disabilities, but then doesn’t want to pay for their disability either.) I grew older, moved out, and I had a girlfriend. We stopped living together, then moved back in together after we saw how stupid that was. She loved her job in customer service at an appliance manufacturer. Then she started tripping all the time. She was having trouble working the computer at work. Her speech was a little slurred–she said her tongue felt thick. That was Nov 1994. The provisional diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis changed to ALS (Lou Gehrig’s) the following July. She was on disability in September ’95, and it sucked for her because she’d always worked. Both our families were like that. Thanks to Medicaid and Medicare, and thanks to a (then-)fantastic home-healthcare program by the state of Ohio, she stayed in the best possible health until she died–at home, in her own bed–on 4 October 2002. It was a brutal, grueling experience, but that was the emotional part, the always-impending loss. The necessary medical care was typically the easy part. Every contact with Medicare was professional and straightforward; by contrast, the disability insurer from her former employer required a fresh doctor’s statement of disability every quarter. There is no remission and no cure and no treatment for Lou Gehrig’s; you die, it’s just a matter of time. Her neurologist called their medical review panel and reamed somebody a new one–it’s a TERMINAL diagnosis, so if you agree with the diagnosis, why the hell are you generating more paperwork and more cost by demanding an utterly pointless statement from the doctor? Yes, part of the reason she lived as long as she did was because I quit my job to be an $8.50/hr home health aide. Money wasn’t really a problem, but the piss-poor quality and unreliability of the pool of aides was so much of a problem that I had to take it on.

But then, Kelson, that’s what people do for each other. I haven’t heard ONE WORD from you about the tens of millions of Americans who augment Medicaid and Medicare with personal care. People who give of themselves because friends and family matter to them. All you’ve said here has been one selfish thing after another, a perspective with no identifiable humanity. Well-run companies are smart enough to keep good employees who encounter manageable levels of physical disability. Prosperous societies understand that businesses can’t thrive when human needs are unmet and ignored. Each of us can make any number of choices to fuck up our own lives, but no stable society actually endorses your Ayn Rand approach precisely because it’s too expensive.

You guys sure take this to a level that is way beyond rational discussion. What on earth does the constitution have to do with this? It is a healthcare bill for God’s sake.

And what is the deal on blaming disadvantaged people for being born in the inner city slums? Have a heart people. For those who defer to the literature, there is no shortage of studies correlating poverty with any number of social and physical ills. We don’t choose where we are born, or who are parents are. Come on!

I’m with Wayne. As a Canadian, Medicare is the best aspect of a prosperous country. 90% of Canadians are happy with our Medicare system, even though 90% feel there are improvements to make.

And if you feel like you are being lectured, you damn well are. I’m sick of all of the lies that have been perpertrated about the Canadian helathcare system by those opposing a healthcare bill in the US. It’s pathetic really.

From your POV then we should not have public schools nor police departments nor garbage men etc etc etc just because it isn’t in the Constitution? Give us a break and come down from your lofty throne and live amoungst the everyday people.

Even the Bill of Rights does not give everyone a chance to own a bazooka and not only that since it isn’t in the same document people want to carry assault rifles to airports?? Neither were in existence at that time.

A document has to be flexible to be durable. I do not know the 10 commandments but I am sure if someone shot somebody (even by mistake) that you think they should be stoned to death? You have to put everything in context and adjust for current technology and geo political reality.

The Declaration of Independence was written over 250 years ago and should be viewed as any living document as a work in progress. As we now know technology has now made things possible that 250 years ago were not even conceived yet. It is latterly impossible to write any document that can stand up 250 years without some revisions.
Religion(take your pick) has the same issue(s). What was thought of 2 or 3 (or more thousand years ago) has almost zero relevance in todays world. The church (again take your pick) has been forced to modernize it is the classic modernize or die.
View points are no longer black and white and religions (just like governments) must incorporate change or they will die.

I can’t be confused about your logic because there isn’t any logic to be confused about.

“The government has no reason to provide healthcare nor be involved in that entire arena.”

The government has every reason to be involved in a market that, due to issues of market failure cannot deliver the economically efficient result that would be expected in most markets. Adverse selection is, without question, a major market failure in the health insurance market.

There is no dispute among real-world economists about whether or not universal health care is more economically efficient than the situation in the United States. Absolutely none at all. There is essentially unanimous support for reform in strictly economic terms. All of the arguments made against it are based on the idea of personal rights, not economics. There is a *mountain* of data and academic work in this area. It’s not a new thing, and it is so well-researched that the poorly-thought out arguments from the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute can be regarded very simply as being without merit.

Obviously there are economists who will make an argument against it strictly on their beliefs regarding economic behavior, but those arguments are seldom peer-reviewed or academically published because they’re completely theoretical without being justified by data. I’ve *never* seen a data-based analysis on health care reform that can rationally conclude that reform is a bad thing. Putting things in context, I’ve read a *lot* of work in this area.

“As for anti-discrimination, and a strong military for that matter, the government does need to be involved, as the sole purpose of government is to protect its citizens, whether from violence and outside forces, a la strong army, or from discrimination.”

The government has no such Constitutional obligation and you know that. Show me ONE place in the Constitution where it says that the government *should* do these things. It certainly *can*; the Constitution very clearly gives the Congress the “authority” to raise a military, but does not *require* it to do so.

“It’s painfully obvious that many people fail to realize that there are swaths of people who honestly don’t care about your health predicaments.”

There are swaths of people who honestly don’t care whether gays should be able to marry or whether atheists should be eligible for public education too. What’s your point?