What so you're just going to ignore all the hospitals that make massive exorbitant profit margins, not to mention the pharmaceutical corporations? Or just disregard the fact that health care costs more in the USA than anywhere else on the planet?
What's your point? You think the steeply progressive Eisenhower code actually leveled US society in the 1950s? It didn't. Most with high incomes and a good accountant could find ways to avoid the rates on high earned income. Those high rates on earned income were largely for show. Let's take an objective look. Economists use something called the Gini Index to compare the degree of equality in national income distributions. Here's how the Index is described at the CIA World Factbook - "This index measures the degree of inequality in the distribution of family income in a country. The index is calculated from the Lorenz curve, in which cumulative family income is plotted against the number of families arranged from the poorest to the richest. The index is the ratio of (a) the area between a country's Lorenz curve and the 45 degree helping line to (b) the entire triangular area under the 45 degree line. The more nearly equal a country's income distribution, the closer its Lorenz curve to the 45 degree line and the lower its Gini index, e.g., a Scandinavian country with an index of 25. The more unequal a country's income distribution, the farther its Lorenz curve from the 45 degree line and the higher its Gini index, e.g., a Sub-Saharan country with an index of 50. If income were distributed with perfect equality, the Lorenz curve would coincide with the 45 degree line and the index would be zero; if income were distributed with perfect inequality, the Lorenz curve would coincide with the horizontal axis and the right vertical axis and the index would be 100." See here. If the Gini Index is low, a country has a relatively flat income distribution; if the Index is high, a country has a relatively steep income distribution. The World Factbook ranks all the countries in the world by the Gini Index on this page. Now how does distribution relate to per capita GDP, the best measure of national wealth? Here are some countries with very flat distributions - Sweden 23.0, Germany 27.0, Canada 32.1. Here are their per capita GDPs from the World Factbook - Sweden $41,900, Germany $39,700, Canada $43,400. Here are some countries with relatively steep distributions - the United States 45.0, Hong Kong 53.7, Singapore 47.8. And their per capita GDPs - the United States $50,700, Hong Kong $52,300, Singapore $61,400. I admittedly picked these countries to make my point that prosperity is possible with both flat and steep income distributions. Picked though they are, the point is still made. If a country has achieved prosperity with either model, then it would be disruptive in the extreme to try to transform it to the other, probably wrecking the economy in the process. That's what's happening now in the US: the moral visionaries of the left want to force the US to be like Sweden, but an entire economy and culture can't just be uprooted without devastation. The left doesn't care about such mundane things.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I disagree with your statement about conservatives. Many of them clearly don't prize equality of opportunity by fighting public education funding or socialized medicine. If you want to see what equal opportunity actually looks like, look at the Scandinavian countries. They have highly socialized public amenities while having highly competitive markets. That's the ideal.
I have never in my life heard of anyone - conservative or liberal - fighting public education funding. Public education is an unalloyed public good, which is obvious to all. I do know of many cases where teachers' unions, administrators, and school maintenance staffs have fought for big raises and benefits for themselves, plus tenure, beyond the ability of their communities to afford. This has nothing to do with education. That's union PR. It has only to do with people trying to get as much as they can for themselves. Public school teachers have no need of "tenure" - something done at universities to protect professors who might violate established thought. For school teachers, this is just a guarantee of lifetime employment, something no one else enjoys. Such a guarantee would only encourage poor performance. A myth persists that teachers are poorly paid. But here's what the National Education Association has to say (see here) - "The U.S. average public school teacher salary for 201112 was $55,418. State average public school teacher salaries ranged from those in New York ($73,39, Massachusetts ($71,721), and Connecticut ($69,465) at the high end to South Dakota ($38,804), Mississippi ($41,646), and Oklahoma ($44,391) at the low end." Teachers are not rich, but they make middle class incomes. Bitter strikes (often in the most highly paid areas) in which the union insists teachers are being abused are resented by conservatives with justice, and should be resented by liberals unwilling to have their generosity exploited. Re socialized medicine, the financial burden is heaviest on the healthy, who must pay far more than their benefits are worth. This usually means the young, who may be least able to pay. "Socialized medicine" is an insurance policy everyone must buy. That spreads the cost as broadly as possible, but the question is the quality of care everyone will receive. US liberals love to tell stories about healthy, happy, well cared for people in other countries, but read the press in those countries and it sounds very different. The stories in the foreign press are all about insufficient funding, of health care harmed by being in budget contention with all other government expenditures, of people taking "medical vacations" to other countries where they can get better care, of long delays for anything less than emergency care, of shortages of diagnostic equipment, of doctors leaving the profession forcing "imports" of foreign doctors, and of many people dying prematurely because of inadequate care. The level of care is far below what Americans take for granted. But these foreign systems have one supreme virtue in liberals' eyes - equality of results. Everyone gets the same care (except for government bosses). That the quality of care may be poor, that it may literally kill many people, seems to liberals a secondary question. If everyone is equally hurt, they're happy. And it's true that the US system offers poor care to the poor. That's wrong and should be addressed, perhaps by a program specifically addressing the needs of the poor. But why pull down the majority, which gets good care now? Equality of results. Here are a few discussions of British healthcare - http://rt.com/news/uk-nhs-health-crisis-049/ http://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/2013/jul/25/nhs-bodies-solve-current-problems http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7071660.stm Not quit the utopia promised by US liberals.
The main difference between socialized health insurance and private health insurance is the pool of customers. In either case, the healthy subsidize the unhealthy. This is true with employer plans as well. As for why having the entire general population as your pool is better than a much smaller pool under one company, this is because it's generally assumed that the average person is relatively healthy. Granted, that assumption may be incorrect for Americans at this point. Given recent trends with obesity and diabetes, it may be that the average American is actually rather unhealthy. If that's the case, then America has a much bigger problem than healthcare to deal with. However, assuming that this isn't the case, a large healthy pool of customers is the best to have, so that money is saved for when these people get older and need more care. Preventive care is the primary focus of socialized care, in order to keep people healthy. You're much less likely to need advanced care if you see a doctor regularly and follow his/her advice. That being said, socialized medical systems vary in quality. Some systems are problematic. The Canadian one has several problems, for example. The UK one also has its flaws. However, France is known for having one of the best ones, primarily because it still allows for a sizable private sector for advanced care. This is the best of both worlds, because the socialized care focuses on low profit, high volume care with basic and preventive care, while the private sector focuses on higher profit advanced care. It plays to each market's strengths. Also, medications are much cheaper there than here due to bulk discounts negotiated by the government. A government will have vastly more buying power than any single company.
There are private hospitals that deal with a very high rate of insured patients that make a normal profit to stay in business and then there are the county hospitals that are going out of business because of dealing with customers skipping out on the bill and dealing with government "price controlled" Medicare patients. Government price control will drive care providers out of business.
Like any business, just because some don't float as well as others, this doesn't change the existence of massive profiteering and price-gouging being prevalent and raising the prices for every premium payer. This doesn't occur in all the other countries which have this. They manage to continue to provide health care just fine. How do you reckon this would happen exactly? In fact, using taxes and government revenue to pay for the services instead of relying on the service-users themselves eliminates the problem of people not paying up. Because they aren't required to. The only reason our system has providers not receiving payment is because the people who need to use them don't necessarily have that money to pay.
Plunging revenues from investments have forced median profit margins for U.S. hospitals to zero, according to a Thomson Reuters analysis of hospital finances published on Monday. And half of the more than 400 hospitals studied are losing money, the analysis found. Hmm... The article is slightly dated, being from March, but it sure doesn't seem to agree with what you're claiming.
And you think that the government controlling pricing will straighten out what you perceive as the problem?
I don't. Like hunting down anarchists, yeah I'm sure you think that the Allies in WWII would've done just fine without a military- this is why anarchist libertarianism is about as practical as Marx's Utopian vision of society - it won't work. Basic taxpayer funded services, like military defence, etc are just fine - and if the anarchists don't like it that's not anyone's problem, since no one's forcing them to live here - they can either find a job (ex. a stripper gig) where they get paid in cash and not report their taxes, or go move to Africa or some private island out in the middle of nowhere and live like Robinson Crusoe if that's their thing - but the rest of us don't want it, so it ain't ever gonna happen.
Yeah, - I'm sure a pro Call of Duty player is just as equipped as someone who'd undergone rigorous SEAL or Green Beret training. I'm sure the average person could just 'manufacture' the tanks, cruise missiles, stealth fighter jets, etc necessary for modern warfare in their own basement. What you mean is 'billions' of cannon fodder who'd easily be subverted by a stronger military, if we lived in some anarchist dystopia with no central govt or armed forces.
Our greatest strength is in having an armed populace. All that's left is training and a basic military structure, and we have a citizen army ready to handle any threat that comes knocking. And the best part is they (which is to day, WE!) couldn't so easily be used to invade other countries in an aggressive fashion. As it is now, even the so-called National Guard is being deployed overseas to support what amounts to an American invasion of a foreign country. Despicable.
What are the qualifications to be a member of this "citizen army". Um, not thanks - if you want that, go live in Somalia. Like Nazi Germany on D-Day, yeah. If your ideas had ever actually been implemented, we'd be speaking German right now. I'm sure if they just had a 'citizen army' they'd have easily kicked our ass with a few AKs. If you're just a 'patriotic enough citizen' - you can shoot down a Tomahawk cruise missile with a rusty old AK, huh? The reason your ideas fail is because they would only work if everyone and every nation in the world was willing to hold hands and cooperate - similar to Utopian Marxism, and it fails for the same reason.
Lawl. You actually think that the Germans would have managed to invade and conquer the US? Nevermind then..
Had Hitler not spontaneously embarked on his failed invasion of Russia, then he very well might have. He spontaneously changed his MO from invading England and went into Russia unprepared (despite him and Stalin having been on decent terms up until that point). Germany had the most powerful army in the world at the time, there's no doubting that - the invasion of Russia is what single-highhandedly cost him the war more than anything. And if the US had no real military (no fighter jets, tanks, carriers, etc - just a bunch of rowdy guys with 50 year out-of-date weapons) then it'd have been a no-brainer - even if hypothetically every adult male and female owned a gun and had some 'basic paramilitary training', there's not a lot a guy with a pistol or a rifle can do against a fleet of bombers, battleships, or a Panzer division - (at least not without the support of an actual military, with such weapons of their own). And for that matter what makes you think Hitler wouldn't have just used nukes? Nazi Germany had been putting research into developing nuclear weapons, but decided to stop pursuing it - another thing which didn't go in his favor. 100 Hiroshima grade nukes = 1,000,000 dead in a matter of minutes - not to mention the nukes we have to day are exponentially more powerful.
For how many years now--no, for how many decades--have I been hearing this canard? Any decent managed-care plan would have a contractual agreement with the hospital in question to whittle that down to just a few cents; or, better yet, to treat it as a redundancy--an integral part of the hospital care that is paid for by the insurance policy--and therefore disregard it entirely, as a separate entity...
The article doesn't refute any of the the three facts that you quoted. I never claimed every single hospital makes a killing.
Read my posts.. In the end, it's NOT paid for by the insurance company. The insurance company makes a profit. It is paid for by premium payers.
Just a general request please.. If you want to discuss then I like this, but please read all my posts in the thread first. Some of you guys keep talking me in circles, going back to square one or making me rehash the exact same things I've already covered in-depth.
