by Cylinsier
Time Magazine polled 1000 Americans on health care reform recently. I want to run down the numbers really quick and then tell you what I think they mean.
55% This is the percentage of Americans who believe our current health care system needs major reform.
69% This is the percentage of Americans who believe it is important to get a major reform bill passed in the coming months.
86% The percentage of Americans currently happy with their coverage, offset by...
33% The percentage of Americans who fear they will lose their insurance in the next 12 months.
33% The percentage of Americans who rate our current system as "only fair." That's followed by 31% who rate it as "good," 22% who rate it as "poor," and 11% who rate it as "excellent."
47% The percentage of Americans who trust Obama more than Congress to develop health care legislation. The percentage that trust congress more than Obama is 32.
56% Obama's overall approval rating. 58% is his foreign affairs rating, 51 his economy rating, and 46 his health care rating.
51% The percentage of Americans who believe the country is headed in the right direction.
And three more numbers: 62, 56, 65. These are the percentages of Americans who believe, respective to the numbers, that health care reform will raise costs, give them less freedom, and make everything more complicated.
So what do these numbers tell us? Well, for one, they tell us that Americans still generally like Obama. They also tell us they like Congress a lot less. But what they really tell us is this: Americans for the most part believe our health care system needs to be changed. They just don't trust the government to do it.
Therefore, the debate on health case shouldn't be about whether or not we need it, it should be about why we don't trust the same elected officials that we ourselves vote for. Its as though Americans would rather put more trust in a group that exists solely to find ways to take your money and that you have no control over than to give even a little benefit of the doubt to a group of people who you hire and fire as often as every two years. Perhaps Americans realize that they are too stupid to elect proper officials and thus they don't trust themselves to make the right decisions. Or perhaps we are just lazy and when the group entrusted with our health inevitably screws it up, we don't want to face the fact that we are to blame for electing that group in the first place; we'd rather be able to blame powers beyond our control. Sphere: Related Content
18 comments:
“Or perhaps we are just lazy and when the group entrusted with our health inevitably screws it up, we don't want to face the fact that we are to blame for electing that group in the first place; we'd rather be able to blame powers beyond our control.”
Where the hell did you ever get the notion that elected officials are “entrusted with your health???” Elected officials have nothing to do with your health. Your health is none of their fucking business.
And you are lazy. This is your problem Cyputz. You think the world owes you a living. Health insurance is not a right. If you get sick and require treatment but have no insurance and cannot find someone willing to treat you for free through charity you have to do what the rest of us do. You have to work hard to pay off that debt. Some of us pay it off in advance by purchasing insurance while others do not and chose to pay after the fact. If you are part of the later group, you should not receive any sort of special treatment under the laws of this nation and be able to coerce others to pay your way.
I'd rather have elected officials in charge of my health than the CEOs of health insurance companies. At least I am in charge of elected officials.
The world doesn't owe me a living. I work very hard for my living and I work very hard to afford my health insurance. However, that hasn't made me greedy and jaded like its made you. I still recognize that in a civilized nation, health care IS a right. It is, however, a right that carries with it the responsibility of doing your part in keeping yourself healthy, which is the hardest part to fix. However, the people that would have you belief health is a privilege for the rich only are the ones who stand to lose the most money if the status quo is changed. The fact of the matter is there are hard working Americans out there every day who become debilitated through illness and couldn't work off the debt of their health care if they tried. And they ARE insured. That's why we need change.
Cylencensor: In this country you have a right to health care if you can earn it through your own labor. You don’t have the right to the services of any professional individual or group simply because you desire them or desperately need them. You have a right to work, not to rob others of the fruits of their work, not to turn others into sacrificial, animals busting their asses to fulfill your needs.
Where do you think the money comes from right now to pay for health care? The government does not produce anything and it has no source of wealth other than seizing citizens' wealth, through taxation or deficit financing, etc.
Some people can't afford medical care but they are necessarily a small minority in a free country. If they were the majority, the country would be fucking bankrupt and could not even think of national health care. This small minority has to rely solely on the kindness of doctors or other benefactors for charity.
As with any good or service that is provided by some group, if you try to make its possession by all a right, you thereby enslave the providers of the service, wreck the service, and end up depriving the very consumers you are supposed to be helping. To call "medical care" a right will merely enslave the doctors and thus destroy the quality of medical care in this country, as socialized medicine has done around the world, wherever it has been tried.
The facts of the state of socialized medicine around the world run contrary to what you are saying. Also, the trend of social provisions by government is always on the increase, that is, we spend more on "welfare" stuff now than we ever have and that spending always increases over time. Right alongvwith that trend line is the fact that we enjoy a higher quality of life now than ever before, with more toys, more comforts, more... Well, everything.
One could look at those two trends on a graph and determine that as more burden is offloaded from the individual and spread amongst society, the better are lives are, overall. I for one would certainly rather be alive today than to be alive 200 years ago.
Elliptimarx: I vehemently disagree with you and Cylenin. The fatal flaw in your argument for socialized medicine is that it depends on everyone playing nice and acting with certain minimal standards where there is no theft or fraud, etc. If this were possible it would ensure your hypothesis that “as more burden is offloaded from the individual and spread amongst society, the better are lives are, overall.” (I just threw up a little in my mouth when I quoted you.)
I think we can all agree that self-centeredness is deplorable, but you need to wake up and smell your morning massive: self-centeredness is the reality of human nature. Any societal system which pretends otherwise, only works to create and increase misery, because it is based on fucking fantasy. Socialism is a noble ideal but its fatally flawed.
Your socialized medicine just like all socialism doesn’t just hope for, but it relies on the good of mankind for it to work. Believing in the goodness of mankind, or rather in the goodness of every individual such as to expect that he will act in the best interest of others is fucking retarded. You are naïve with this Rodney King why can’t we all get along bullshit, hold hands and sing kum-bay-yah, and share the wealth with everyone. Get your own fucking lollipop! People who sweat their balls off to earn some security for their family should not have to share it with someone who just sits back and waits to share the harvest they had nothing to do with producing.
Socialism wrecks the ability for people to appropriately measure value for themselves by robbing them of incentive. When the fruits of labor are taken from a person in order to redistribute them in aggregate to everyone else, including him, he always resents the theft of his labor but also comes to rely upon the redistribution. Once too many people realize they can game the system and do less work for more health care at the expense of their fellow man, the system fails, and no one is paying the bills for healthcare and no one gets health care.
Time and time again, socialism promotes misery, starvation, violence and murder. The worst that can be said for capitalism is that it allows for poverty due to human nature and poverty due to laziness, both of which you two poor little rich kids are familiar with and both of which decrease over time in a free market.
The alternative is that we can simply allow for each person to freely transact for themselves. Liberty is the hallmark of a workable economic system. Capitalism is some sick shit for relying on man’s self-centered nature, but at the same time, that paradox makes capitalism rationally perfect.
Wrong. The trend of social provisions by government is not always on the increase. And even if I stipulate that argument, look what we have to show for it. Our government is on the verge of fucking bankruptcy.
Lastly, our high standard of living is the fruit of a free market economy, the likes of which the world has never seen. It is slipping away and you can legislate all the health care your scrotum desires but when the money is gone, and the incentive for productivity is raped from Americans, then we will all enjoy absolutely fucking nothing together. I suspect that’s what you bottom feeders really want. You don’t want to improve your own lot. You just want to drag everyone else down into your steaming pile.
Wesley, I agree with you that communism (which you continue to confuse with socialism) cannot be accomplished because it relies on the good of mankind. That's basically what I was saying my blog post on communism to which you replied and continually confused the two concepts there.
However, from where I'm sitting, the current system depends on the good of mankind to work; the good of the men on the board of directors at pfizer, merc, highmark, united health care, etc. etc. And judging by their profits, which have increased 400% since 2001, they aren't very good people. A government option would work as a check and a balance against them. As far as I'm concerned, you basically just made a great argument in favor of the public option, and I applaud your progressive sensibilities in doing so.
However, what I find deplorable is your comment about capitalism only being as bad as utterly destroying the lives of a few unfortunates, who you apparently don't care about because they aren't you. I personally don't believe in an America that just doesn't give a shit about its lower class because its such a bother to take care of them. And that attitude is dangerous. The Russian and French Revolutions are just two examples of what happens if you let the poor remain poor and continue to scoff at them from your high horse. You think paying a few extra tax dollars a month is a strain on your freedom? Try having your head in a guillotine.
The test of civilized society is in how it treats its most unfortunate members. You want to treat them like a dirty embarrassment. If history has taught us anything, its that you cannot treat an entire class of people as inferior forever. It will bite you in the ass eventually. And on top of that, its simply not the right thing to do. Your moral compass is seriously awry on this one.
As for the money, if there is no reform its gone in less than a decade. The current system is not sustainable and it will sink us. And only an elitist snob would refer to equality as bringing something "down."
It would appear that government has already legislated "kindness" into the system... if you get hit by a car, you get fixed whether you have insurance or not... whether you live in the Hamptons or a dumpster behind a Hampton Inn...
That cost is then distributed amongst citizens with insurance and an ability to pay.
Cylunatic, I am not sure why you keep making the deranged judgment that I am confusing communism with it’s handmaiden socialism, but they both fail for the same reasons. So for the purposes of this discussion; who gives a flying fuck?
I do think that big pharma bears some scrutiny but that’s not what this bill is about and that’s not what this discussion is about. And that certainly is on BO’s agenda, as we now know about Obama’s drug deal with drug makers that the administration stood by a behind-the-scenes deal to block any Congressional effort to extract cost savings from them beyond an agreed-upon $80 billion. But I digress.
You liberals always seem to want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. Your premise is diseased. Making a profit is not a sin nor does it make them evil. It is a business after all. The more they make, the more taxes they pay. That’s how you increase revenue. Not by raising taxes or with price controls. It’s basic economics that liberals insist on ignoring. And in the case of the pharmas they do research and development that has to get paid for by someone. Then someone comes along and copies the drug and can afford to sell it for cheaper overseas because they don’t have to pay for research and development or the exorbitant insurance.
I am wondering if you are reading this blog in a different dimension with an alternate reality. I said that capitalism assumes man’s weak nature and that the down side, paradoxically is that while you have the freedom to succeed, you also get the freedom to fail miserably. The point is that if you are safety-netted from everything in a nanny socialist state, you pay for that with your freedom and freedom is what made this country great. I made no statement as to how society should treat less fortunate members who are down on their luck or unable to take care of themselves. So wherever the fuck you are reading that, it’s not on this blog. Maybe I need to simplify the vocabulary so you will not get confused so much.
And your examples for revolution were embarrassing for you. Do you often quote from history you nothing about? The French Revolution was a revolution in which the liberty of the individual was proclaimed and private property was respected. It was not an uprising of a poor class to seize riches that the upper class would not share. In truth, the ideology of the Revolution amounted to extended praise of the "self-made man." It was not about equality of riches. It was about equality of opportunity.
In the beginning, the French crowds were being described as an uncontrolled mob, blood-thirsty and wild-eyed. Today scholars know the so-called "mob" was composed primarily of middle-class artisans and lawyers. Far from wishing to be part of a "spontaneous anarchy," the Parisian crowds were set upon relieving the unsatisfactory living conditions they felt had resulted from mismanaged and insensitive government. It was not poor people being scoffed at. It was the emerging middle class that was not having their individual liberty and private property respected.
I am sorry to disappoint you but scholars now say that what took place in Russia in 1917 was not a revolution. It was a political coup d’etat where Russian Bolsheviks used force to overthrow the remnants of the Tsarist Regime. It was a power vacuum and once the Bolsheviks were in power, they appointed themselves the official spokesmen for the proletariat. The reality was that the proletariat never had a fucking say in anything. The proletariat just wanted to get rid of Tsarism. So they did that but what they got in its place was no different than what they’d had before.
By what measure will the current system fail in ten years. Just like a liberal. We know that Medicare and Medicaid are going bankrupt so you want to do it again with healthcare only this time faster and funnier. Socialized medicine cannot work unless we want to enslave productive people and confiscate the fruits of their labors to pay for someone else’s health care. That is not what America is about. News flash: we don’t believe in slavery.
You are leaving out the part where we ALREADY PAY FOR POOR ILLEGAL MEXICANS' HEALTH CARE...
We just do it in a backward, inefficient, dumbfuck kinda way. Rather than just spread the cost of the uninsured around in a way that those with the ability to pay actually just pay directly on the expense of the uninsured, we first pay a middle man (insurance company) and then wait for that money to work its way back down to actually paying for services rendered.
And for the record, turning health care into a business IS evil. I'm not sure how a public option would promote misery, starvation and murder either. And the current system does NOT provide equality of opportunity. You're just full of inaccuracies today.
Elliptilawless...Even if we passed the bill today, illegal aliens will show up in the ER tonight and they will be paid for in the same fucking way. This will not change witht this bill.
LMFAO!!! Cyshortbus...Let me write this slower this time...... h e a l t h c a r e i s n o t a r i g h t. You mean to tell me that the minute someone decides they want to be a doctor when they grow up that means they have to swear to a vow of never making any money at it??? What kind of dill-fuck would think that people in the health care profession have lost their right to sell their services on a free open market?
They would not be paid for in the same way... that's the point. They could (should) be enrolled in the public option coverage (which should be a "default" coverage) and their care would be paid directly to the doctors and hospitals that treat them out of public funds... as opposed to the way it is now, where the hospital writes off their charge and then jacks up the cost of an aspirin to 15 bucks for an insured person (20 bucks for someone who is paying cash)... which then leads the insurance company to increase our premiums 20% so that they can pay for 15 dollar aspirin as well as paying for millions of dollars worth of TV saying that a public option will *gasp! pay for illegal aliens!
Doctors should make money. Insurance companies should not. An insurer that exists to profit does not have the best interest of the patient at heart and is therefore EVIL. A government option that is not allowed to profit and provides comparable care has the best interest of the patient at heart. It also forces private insurers to stop price gouging to remain competitive.
What was I thinking. Let’s open the doors to anyone on the planet that wants or needs medical care. Because after all, the coffers are limitless and once we confiscate the money of the rich we can spread it all around. We can all join hands and sing. Oh joy.
Illegal aliens are not citizens and they are criminals. They should be treated for any emergent care and then arrested and sent home. What’s so hard about enforcing the law? But lets say that we cover them in a default as you say. Many will stay in the shadows. They will show up the emergency rooms and by law be treated. Who the fuck pays for that? Who the fuck should pay for that? That is a bottomless pit like the empty skull where your brain should have been.
Why can’t insurance companies make money? They were all set up by entrepreneurs. They sell peace of mind. Insurance companies did not spring up from the ground as charity operations. Who the fuck ever said that a business had to have anyone’s best interest at heart but their own. It’s show business not show friends.
Private insurers cannot compete with the government that does not pay taxes and sets the rules. So spare me the bullshit about stopping price gouging. This is about controlling behavior. It is the soft tyranny of Statism. It’s about insuring a liberal democrat control for perpetuity.
What value does an insurance company provide?
lol. He's going to be astounded by that question.
I get no peace of mind from my insurance. All I do is cross my fingers that I don't get sick and actually have to use it for an emergency because the last time that happened, my carrier dropped me and made me foot the bill.
UPS and FedEX seem to do just find competing against the USPS so I'm not worried. And I have nothing against corporations making money on consumer goods. However, putting whatever price you think you can get away with on peoples' health and well-being is immoral and disgusting.
hell, I am astounded by the question because I can't work up even a bullshitty answer to it...
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