Court Strikes down mandatory healthcare

I'd be ok with Government food. You can have different brands competing with Uncle Sam's brand bread. After all, if your bread is worse than Government bread, you don't deserve to be in business in the first place.

[Placeholder Post for after a mod eventually gives the OK to turn the thread into "Convince the world that socialized medicine is awesome" to respond to the "WHAT ABOUT GOVERNMENT FOOD?!" rebuttal in more depth]

^^ But uncle sam can sell bread for less than what it costs to make (for the purpose of killing your bread making so people will eventually be forced to eat his stale beard ) and mug people for the money to keep making beard, you can't, as both are illegal for you to do.

x4 Which are 1:privately run to my memory 2: I'm against and are merely granting funds to purchase private food, not creating the food.

edited 12th Aug '11 5:10:45 PM by deuxhero

Except that the Government doesn't really have any real incentive to actively compete and undercut market competition, unlike a corporation. That and the store brands are generally cheaper than the name brands, but people will still buy name brands. Admittedly, it's not a totally serious idea.

edited 12th Aug '11 5:16:53 PM by Alichains

Yes it does! Why do you think they are doing this? It's all a backdoor path to single miller payer health care, as you make the government the only provider once you starve out private companies.

Name brands have marketing power behind them. Marketing is right up there with "lying" in the job description for Politicians.

edited 12th Aug '11 5:22:31 PM by deuxhero

Considering what I think of Private Healthcare, Starving it out sounds like a great plan. I highly doubt the Government is going to put much effort into marketing Uncle Sam's bread.

edited 12th Aug '11 5:23:37 PM by Alichains

So the government can take over everything and has no reason to provide good care?

I think some British tropers would like to contest that.

Britain doesn't exactly seem to be suffering under the onerous hand of the NHS. And we've got private care as well, should you have the money for it.

Why can't America have the same success? You spend twice the proportion of GDP on your healthcare for half the result.

EDIT:Speak of the devil, and he shall appear.

edited 12th Aug '11 5:24:50 PM by GameChainsaw

Uh, the government's stated purpose is the serve the populace, so, yeah, they damn well have a reason to give good care.

Besides, they save money that way.

Due to this, the first half of your statement, "So the government can take over everything..." sounds about right, with relation to health care. If you think the above is a good enough reason, anyhow...

Well, doesn't someone have a high opinion of themselves.

edited 12th Aug '11 5:25:27 PM by USAF713

Hey, I'm British, and I'm a troper. I'm the devil spoken of in the prophesy clearly!

Again, if the mandatory healthcare thing is deemed unconstitutional, the only real way of controlling healthcare costs-as opposed to just shoveling those costs off onto the private consumer-on the levels we're going to require is socialized medicine. So it's a bit of a whammy: the fact that we need to expand medicare for all will become evident, but the knowledge that the attempt at health care was deemed unconstitutional will be a huge rallying cry for those who oppose the expansion of medicare.

^ Uh, no.

You could start by getting rid of the controls the government currently has the increase price.

"Uh, the government's stated purpose is the serve the populace"

Look where we are today!

"Besides, they save money that way. "

How does giving a monopoly to the most wasteful entitiy in the country that can only barely stay afloat by use of mass mugging to recoop losses "save money" over competeting private companies that will squeze every penny?

DOES NOT COMPUTE!

edited 12th Aug '11 5:40:52 PM by deuxhero

We are where we are today because of politicians telling the populace that government doesn't work, and then going out and proving it by being as ineffective as possible.

Public insurance has an administrative overhead of 3%, while private has something more to the tune of 17%.

As for your argument that the government stays afloat through "mass mugging," standard libertarian talking point.

That means that government is currently ineffectual, which says that we need new leaders.

Because insurance companies are for-profit. They cut corners in all the wrong places to make money for the executives and pay the ridiculous number of workers they have for nothing. Eliminate the overhead and run it on a break-even basis and you'll save money, as I understand it...

Look dude, the free market has failed us in regards to health insurance because they make a profit off of not providing care for people. That's a blatant conflict of interest.

I don't want to have to wait until I'm at deaths door before actually going to see the fucking doctor because I can't afford health insurance, my faith in the free market where healthcare is concerned is gone. It's failed, and it's the governments turn. Why could the government do better? Because it isn't there to make a profit off the suffering of others.

This is why the government usually is superior to private industry in how they provide services, it's about getting the job done, not maximizing your frigging profit margin. If a private medical insurance company has it in its best interest to make you pay as much as they can get away with, and deny you care whenever they can, they are not working in the best interest of the people they are providing healthcare to.

I'm so sick and fucking tired of people blindingly defending the free market in industries where it clearly is insufficient for what needs to be done. It's frustrating.

edited 12th Aug '11 5:52:26 PM by Barkey

There is no need for health insurance. There is a need for health care, and there is a need to pay for said care. A universal health care system would be less like insurance, and more like a system of transfer payments. When you realize that that's ultimately what is needed when it comes to insurance, it becomes much easier to recognize that health insurance companies do not actually produce anything of value.

If the market does not produce anything of value, it should be abolished-or, rather, the fact that having a public system will cause it to be abolished is not a valid argument against having a public system. If all we want to do is pool risk and make sure that Hospitals are getting paid, there is no reason we require a private sector for health insurance at all.

edited 12th Aug '11 5:59:09 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

I don't know, technically the entertainment industry produces nothing of actual value, either, but I'd fight you tooth and nail if you tried to destroy it...

^

That is a good point.

Tomu should re-state that sentence as "If an industry provides nothing of value and is simply a middleman standing in the way of a more efficient industry, it should be abolished."

I would argue that the entertainment industry produces thoughts, a form of product, but that is for another topic, and I will instead argue that the insurance companies are full of accounting gimmicks and lawyerism.

I am also thinking that similar thoughts could be said of many many banks, which are given little reason not to use accounting gimmicks to hide financial statuses.

Entertainment is something of value. But insurance is just risk pooling, and basically all risk pooling is is a series of transfer payments. This does not require any infrastructure at all-indeed, if it weren't for Moral Hazard, you could avoid having health care plans for citizens entirely, and just have hospitals report what care they provide to the state, whereupon they are reimbursed.

Again, the moral hazard issue does come into play at some point here, but the point is that, you're not producing anything, not even a service. You're just moving money around.

Moral hazard?

And is a mandate necessary for that? Or would the system work without a mandate?

moral hazard is something like, you know that no matter what you do, you're protected from fault, so you decide to go driving down the highway at 200 miles and hour and crash.

For another example, think the Banking Crisis.

If we're talking about a system of socialized medicine, we're talking about the government paying for your care. Moral Hazard, then, becomes the situation where, say, you don't need that medication, but it's covered by the government, so you get it anyway. Thus, you can expect to at least have some kind of co-pay.

A mandate is irrelevant if you have socialized medicine; everyone is covered by the government. You would have to be a citizen of course, and thus be paying taxes. But there wouldn't be any need to purchase a separate, expensive health insurance plan.

In the loosest sense, Moral Hazard is any circumstance where people are prevented from experiencing the full consequences of their actions. Insurance in all of its forms tends to cause this, though in most cases, it doesn't cause a big issue (for instance: most people aren't going to saw their legs off, even if their insurance plan would fully cover the cost with no co-pay).

Specifically, moral hazard talks about expectations and incentives. The bank bailouts could be considered moral hazard if and only if the banking executives knew ahead of time that they would be bailed out.

edited 12th Aug '11 6:16:16 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

And forever more shall American banks be the butt of all our jokes...

I like it.