Where in the Constitution does it say the Fed gov should provide health care.

Treaties = US Constitution as in equal value consider any ratified treaty as an amendment the only difference once can opt out by removing ratification of a treaty but as long as its in force the treaties provisions must be given equal weight. And the UN Charter is a treaty so its obligations and language applies which covers basic universal rights its only limited in that it can't enforce these on member states in given ways. But member states are expected to abide by them and try to implement them these include freedom for wants housing, food, clothing, education and medical care etc. We do this through many programs here in the USA to meet these noble goals. In effect these basic rights are de facto obligations given to our nation through due process of Treaty signing and ratification unless you can show a treaty isn't then a Federal power to make?

 

Wow.

Isn't Rand Paul just the COMPLETE MORON?

It is a profound shame what passes for a U.S. Senator (nowadays).

I mean now that the USA has elected a COMPLETE IMBECILE to the Office of POTUS--Trump must be happy to have joined the company of an IDIOT like Rand Paul.

What Rand Paul knows about Health Care you could carve onto the head of a pin (and still have room for The Constitution).

 

The GP in the US on average earns $190K a year. And s/he does so because the market for healthcare is not a matter of Supply and Demand equivalency. In the unique situation of Health Care, Demand systematically is greater than Supply.

So, all the professions of medicine can exact remuneration higher than need be because the market is unbalanced and unfair. (Demand for HC-services systematically is larger than the ability to Supply them.)

Moreover, since Health Care is supplied by contract for medical-services to privately owned insurance companies - and since the market is not fair - said companies can charge whatever they like since there is little or no competition in the provision of HealthCare insurance..

Given both facts, it is impossible to implement competition amongst health-care services providers. Therefore a national healthcare service is automatically the better option.

What is the fundamental distinction between market-supplied and government-supplied services? The fact that government-supplied services are of unique importance to assure fair availability to all citizens.

Should we privatize our police forces? Should we privatize our firefighting services? Should we privatize the DoD?

We have privatized post-secondary education, and the result is a disaster. A university degree presently leaves a graduate with both a diploma and a $35K debt to repay. Which is the singular reason that 45% of present high-schoolers will not graduate with a tertiary-level degree. They are thus effectively consigned to a much lower pay-scale grade often below the Poverty Threshold ($24K annually for a family of four).

As shown here from the Census Bureau:

 

Nobody but nobody is going to enslave health-care practitioners.

For his "enslavement" as a GP, Rand Paul and his kind (Other Family and GPs category) were earning (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics) an average $200K per annum. Those practicing operative medicine (Surgeons) were earning on average $252K a year.

(Those figures are verifiable at the BLS web-site here: National Occupation and Wage Estimates, Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations, Major Occupational Group 29-0000)

Average annual earnings in the US were $880 per week. GPs are earning nearly 5-times as much. (Rand Paul is a first-class nutter ...)

 

Call it what your like. Socialism is dead. Social Democracies are very much alive and kicking.

Closed minds like yours do not merit debate ...

 

I don't know- I've never met the man. I wouldn't know him well enough to make such an assessment.

Do you?

That statement would apply to any US Senator, including Sanders.

I don't know their relationship nor do I know if the current President is a "complete imbecile". I do know that we haven't managered to elect an acceptable President to decades, as they all seem intent upon trabling uponm the rights of the governed.

I don't know, I did see some sort of show where he was performing free eye surgeries in Haiti, IIRC. Although a blatant publicity stunt, considering he is an M.D. would seem to me he knows more than most since that is his business. Probably not the easiest thing to do either, that is get an M.D., so it is unlikely that he is a moron. But as I said, I don't know him well enough to make that assessment.

Nonetheless, the statement he made is correct.

 

Someone took my unlike button. I'd like it back when you've finished with it, please.

 

The people screaming for a one payer system are not on Medicare. If they are they aren't using it or they're too stupid to know better. Go to med school then years more of training then retire to Medicare and see for yourself how idiotic you appear. Patients hear from the doc we can't do that....at least not today. I got to fill out some notes and send it to Medicare then we'll see if they'll let me do as we want. And forget new meds...not on the formulary or you have to not be able to take this or that before you can take this much better drug.

Why do you think patients and docs hate Medicare and Obamacare. They suck. Sell different plans for different needs across state lines and more importantly do something about billing. Billing IS too high in this country. That's a big reason insurance rates are so high. To pay for the billing!

 

I was referring to the multiple people who disagreed with the idea that the Constitution doesn't say federal government can't provide healthcare, on the basis that it has no powers not explicitly granted by the Constitution. To my mind, that would mean that many of the things government has ever done would have been illegal on the same basis given how few powers are explicitly stated in the document, especially with the literal and unnuanced interpretations implied.

It seems to me that in practice the Constitution has long been interpreted in the way that does allow for some level of federal healthcare system (and note that the OP didn’t say the current healthcare system but any healthcare provision at all) and suggesting it should be entirely prohibited on Constitutional grounds is actually recommending a much larger and more wide-ranging shift in how the USA ultimately works.

 

Of course you have to pay,

Why hasn't the Supreme Court gotten involved?

 

Medicare hardly sucks. Doctor reimbursement is what sucks, and that is why they hate Medicare. The cost of billing may also
be too high. The system will never be perfect. If your needs change and you develop a serious illness, I don't think that you would cheerfully be able to go to a different plan. I am sure that the red tape would be huge.

 

If you have a right to something, is it legitimate for someone to charge you money to give you that thing?

For example. If you have a right to healthcare, can a medical professional charge you money for that healthcare, or must she provide it to you for free. It would stand to reason that if you have a right to something, then nobody may deny you that thing.

But that then would imply that your "right" to healthcare requires that other people are essentially your slaves. The medical profession MUST give you healthcare because you have a right to it.

This is where you end up when you fail to understand the nature of rights.

 

THE UNDEMOCRATIC WINNER-TAKE-VOTING SYSTEM

Sez you. Look, the constitution was a good fundamental document. It is NOT, however, the ten commandments written in stone and brought down from the mountain by Moses;

Far worse, at the time, was the fright that the Original Thinkers had in the early 19th century when they realized that most Americans could neither read nor write. Did they thus determine that "schooling" was a fundamental right of all individuals?

No, they didn't. They decided that only "intelligent people" should run the country and created the notion of an electoral college (later revised in the 12th Amendment and named as such). Well, they got that wrong, didn't they.

The Electoral College is NOT a democratic popular vote. It was intended to assure that the lesser populated and agricultural southern states would not be bullied by the northern states (where industry was beginning to proliferate in preference to agriculture).

Even from the beginning, some people thought it undemocratic because the popular vote was the only truly democratic mechanism to chose the political leadership of the nation (the Executive and the Legislature). The notion of majority vote was already employed generally in the colonies when it came to local (town) management.

The employment of winner-takes-all voting in the Electoral College was a sop to the southern states that warned Congress at the time that they "might secede". Which they finally did over slavery.

Today, that same boorishly backward mentality is back in power in Washington, because we, the sheeple, were screwed by the Electoral College vote that is undemocratic. From the LA Times (July, 2017): Winner-take-all electoral system is a loser for democracy - excerpt:

*The US is the only developed country on earth to employ such a mechanism. All others vote a national leadership in terms of a pluralistic popular vote where peoples' values are respected!

**Due to vote gerrymandering!

 

A soldier standing his post defends us all at the same time. It is *general* welfare.
A post road carries the mail for all of us at the same time. It is *general* welfare.
A doctor treats one individual patient at a time, not the general public. It is *individual* welfare.

 

Actually, it hasn't. Those rulings entail rights enumerated in the Constitution, not the operation of the federal government in Article 1, Section 8.

 

Someday you should actually read the minutes of the Constitutional Convention. On Sept 6 they discussed this issue. At that time the tyranny of the majority was brought up. States like Delaware and New Hampshire did not want to be dominated by the most populous states of Virginia and Pennsylvania. The Electoral College was their solution.

Since the number of electors for each state are determined by how many Senators and Representatives they have the more populous states get a heavily weighted proportion of the vote in the Electoral College. But the result is not a foregone conclusion. The total of the smaller states can, when a candidate is seen to be dangerous enough, group together and affect the outcome, thus preventing the tyranny of the majority.

Remember, the Founding Fathers were mostly highly educated people. They knew what the fate of unbridled democracy always became - MOB RULE. They wanted to avoid that like the plague. Thus the Electoral College.

In addition, you need to consider the absolute mess your "popular" vote would cause to happen in a close election. Bush vs Gore went on for weeks and that was just one county and a few precincts. In a close popular election the ENTIRE COUNTRY WOULD HAVE TO BE RECOUNTED since every single vote nationwide would count toward the vote total. Lawsuits would grow without bound across the nation. Delay after delay would be encountered. We might not even have a President by Jan 20 able to be sworn in. Who becomes the President in that case? The sitting Speaker of the House? How does the Speaker form a government? What would be the process for the Speaker to relinquish power?

You simply have not thought this through. You are still in the anger phase of grief. Get over it!

 

I didn't say the federal government can't make treaties. I said the federal government has no power granted by the Constitution to implement national health care. That is a true statement. The UN cannot specify how an individual nation meets its obligations. That would be a violation of the national sovereignty of such nation.

 

You are still caught up in the anger phase of grief over Hillary losing. It's called Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Get over it.

 

1. The law of supply and demand works to most efficiently allocate resources. There simply isn't any method any better.
2. Equal outcomes for all requires the system to minimize resources for each individual. It results in shared misery, not shared prosperity.
3. Maybe you don't know it but private police and fire units exist all over the US. There are many subscription based firefighting operations. If you don't subscribe then they don't come.
4. That 45% of high school students you speak of typically graduate with no skills. That's a result of the "equal outcome for all" meme of the Marxist Democrats over the years which has removed the teaching of trade skills in high school because it was thought to hurt some students self-esteem. It's how the meme of "equal outcomes for all" results in shared misery, not in shared prosperity.

 

When you use government force to require someone to utilize or provide a government product then you *have* made a government slave of them. It really is just that simple!

 

It's not me calling it what I like. It's a matter of what it *IS*.

Orwellian doublespeak doesn't change anything. A rose is still a rose by any other name.

 

You are done with *MY* inanity? And you are here preaching against the Electoral College?