How come most Americans are poor?

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: exdeath

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: exdeath
Yeah its a moral issue, but it's one that needs to be addressed. You can't help everyone, no matter how hard you think you can try. Resources are limited. Want a real life moral choice? What if you have one liver, and you have two patients who need it.

That's a VERY different situation.

No, fundamentally, it is the SAME situation. Thats what people fail to understand.

You are arbitrarily deciding what to take from whom and who to give it to at the most fundamental level: life itself.

Choosing not to help someone because of abstract financial concerns is very much NOT the same as choosing not to help someone because trying to help them will immediately hurt someone else even more. (I'm assuming here that there are enough financial resources in the US to provide care to everyone that actually needs it without reducing mass portions of the population to poverty. If this is not the case we are totally screwed.)

In the first case you're greedy. In the second you were forced to make a really hard choice.

If you can't decide who should live and who should die, then how can you decide who gets to keep their money, and who gets to take it?

I'm not posing this dilemma to be mean and cruel, as I said already, this is the ultimate problem of human society that has plagued all societies since the beginning of time.

Deciding who lives and who dies is just not on the same level as who gets to keep their money. Most modern societies seem to come to the conclusion that, within reason, you can't really take a sick person and say "You know, you're just not worth keeping around." Starting down that road is a very slippery slope... if it's okay to choose to effectively kill the sick people to save a few bucks, how about the homeless? Or the mentally ill? Or the poor? After all, they're just draining your resources unnecessarily.

Like I said -- if you feel comfortable making those calls, you can be the one to tell people that their treatments are just too expensive, or that they haven't done enough to earn the right to keep living.

 

[exdeath]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: exdeath

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: exdeath
Yeah its a moral issue, but it's one that needs to be addressed. You can't help everyone, no matter how hard you think you can try. Resources are limited. Want a real life moral choice? What if you have one liver, and you have two patients who need it.

That's a VERY different situation.

No, fundamentally, it is the SAME situation. Thats what people fail to understand.

You are arbitrarily deciding what to take from whom and who to give it to at the most fundamental level: life itself.

Choosing not to help someone because of abstract financial concerns is very much NOT the same as choosing not to help someone because trying to help them will immediately hurt someone else even more. (I'm assuming here that there are enough financial resources in the US to provide care to everyone that actually needs it without reducing mass portions of the population to poverty.)

In the first case you're greedy. In the second you were forced to make a really hard choice.

Thats a mighty big assumption, considering that many people will NOT really need it, and we will have people jumping on who weren't there before, even people from other countries, just like we have illegal aliens from Mexico straining healthcare facilities in the Southwest who don't pay a dime for the services they take. Our trauma centers are vanishing one after another because they are going out of business. And we are only talking one state.

Assuming that there are virtually infinite resources as you said, is a serious flaw in your view.

As long as we are assuming, lets assume, albiet extreme, that it takes 99% of the wealth and resources of a country to keep one billion people healthy and alive at all costs. That means no more cars, no more entertainment, no more sports games, no more dining out, no technology, etc. because all our wealth is tied up in healthcare.

Are you going to be the first to turn in your clothing for a strip of fur and walk around barefoot so those other 999,999,999 people can be 'happy' and healthy? And would everybody really be happy anyway in those living conditions?

 

[exdeath]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: exdeath

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: exdeath
Yeah its a moral issue, but it's one that needs to be addressed. You can't help everyone, no matter how hard you think you can try. Resources are limited. Want a real life moral choice? What if you have one liver, and you have two patients who need it.

That's a VERY different situation.

No, fundamentally, it is the SAME situation. Thats what people fail to understand.

You are arbitrarily deciding what to take from whom and who to give it to at the most fundamental level: life itself.

Choosing not to help someone because of abstract financial concerns is very much NOT the same as choosing not to help someone because trying to help them will immediately hurt someone else even more. (I'm assuming here that there are enough financial resources in the US to provide care to everyone that actually needs it without reducing mass portions of the population to poverty. If this is not the case we are totally screwed.)

In the first case you're greedy. In the second you were forced to make a really hard choice.

If you can't decide who should live and who should die, then how can you decide who gets to keep their money, and who gets to take it?

I'm not posing this dilemma to be mean and cruel, as I said already, this is the ultimate problem of human society that has plagued all societies since the beginning of time.

Deciding who lives and who dies is just not on the same level as who gets to keep their money. Most modern societies seem to come to the conclusion that, within reason, you can't really take a sick person and say "You know, you're just not worth keeping around."

Like I said -- if you feel comfortable making those calls, you can be the one to tell people that their treatments are just too expensive, or that they haven't done enough to earn the right to keep living.

I don't pretend to know how to make those calls. I'm not the one proposing that we have the government make those kinds of calls for us. Many people here are doing just that without actually understanding the problem by acting on emotions alone.

Are you going to be the one to come to my house at 3am and kick me out and tell me its too expensive and that I should get a cheap apartment because some guy I don't even know 10 states away needs emergency surgery and needs the money more than I do? Would you be ok with the government taking everything you own to pay my expenses if my family and I all get cancer?

And how long before you are knocking on my apartment door demanding that I give up a kidney because I have two and only *need* one?

You can't save them all. Sh1t happens, people die, life goes on. Pretending nobody has to suffer and everyone is equal and lives forever is part of the leftist utopian fantasy. Sounds hard core and cold hearted? Life is cold hearted. Take it up with your maker. The best we can do is live our own lives as best we can without being a burden on someone else, and help out others in unfortuneate circumstances when and where we can. Government enforcement of such things however is flat out wrong and unrealistic, not to mention that it has been proven time and time again that it just does not work.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: exdeath

Originally posted by: Matthias99(I'm assuming here that there are enough financial resources in the US to provide care to everyone that actually needs it without reducing mass portions of the population to poverty.)

Thats a mighty big assumption, considering that many people will NOT really need it,

Explain to me how you can "not really need" a liver transplant, or cancer treatment, or trauma care and rehab when you're in an accident. I'm not talking about liposuction and botox here.

and we will have people jumping on who weren't there before, even people from other countries, just like we have illegal aliens from Mexico straining healthcare facilities in the Southwest who don't pay a dime for the services they take. Our trauma centers are vanishing one after another because they are going out of business. And we are only talking one state.

Illegal immigration is a whole other can of worms -- but I still think that universal availability of insurance would be a vast improvement.

Assuming that there are virtually infinite resources as you said, is a serious flaw in your view.

If we don't have enough resources to provide basic healthcare and emergency services for our population, we are in big, big trouble no matter what.

As long as we are assuming, lets assume, albiet extreme, that it takes 99% of the wealth and resources of a country to keep one billion people healthy and alive at all costs. That means no more cars, no more entertainment, no more sports games, no more dining out, no technology, etc. because all our wealth is tied up in healthcare.

Are you going to be the first to turn in your clothing for a strip of fur and walk around barefoot so those other 999,999,999 people can be 'happy' and healthy? And would everybody really be happy anyway in those living conditions?

I'll try answering the real question -- is there a point beyond which sinking financial resources into healthcare is probably not worth it societally? Yes. Are we at that point? No.

 

[exdeath]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: exdeath

Originally posted by: Matthias99(I'm assuming here that there are enough financial resources in the US to provide care to everyone that actually needs it without reducing mass portions of the population to poverty.)

Thats a mighty big assumption, considering that many people will NOT really need it,

Explain to me how you can "not really need" a liver transplant, or cancer treatment, or trauma care and rehab when you're in an accident. I'm not talking about liposuction and botox here.

and we will have people jumping on who weren't there before, even people from other countries, just like we have illegal aliens from Mexico straining healthcare facilities in the Southwest who don't pay a dime for the services they take. Our trauma centers are vanishing one after another because they are going out of business. And we are only talking one state.

Illegal immigration is a whole other can of worms -- but I still think that universal availability of insurance would be a vast improvement.

Assuming that there are virtually infinite resources as you said, is a serious flaw in your view.

If we don't have enough resources to provide basic healthcare and emergency services for our population, we are in big, big trouble no matter what.

As long as we are assuming, lets assume, albiet extreme, that it takes 99% of the wealth and resources of a country to keep one billion people healthy and alive at all costs. That means no more cars, no more entertainment, no more sports games, no more dining out, no technology, etc. because all our wealth is tied up in healthcare.

Are you going to be the first to turn in your clothing for a strip of fur and walk around barefoot so those other 999,999,999 people can be 'happy' and healthy? And would everybody really be happy anyway in those living conditions?

I'll try answering the real question -- is there a point beyond which sinking financial resources into healthcare is probably not worth it societally? Yes. Are we at that point? No.

You're on to one point here. Choices and tradeoffs must be made based on limited resources. We as individuals are forced with economic decisions every day.

But who forces the government to make choices? Government can just tax the people into submission instead of being forced to make a choice and never be held accountable for poor social policies. I already pay enough in taxes, why can't we divert money from something else? Say, for example, why don't we stop sending aid to other countries (which only goes to drug and war lords and not to the people who need it) and pour that money that citizens are already paying in taxes into our own healthcare system? How about about getting people off welfare who don't need it so that money can fund an alernative healthcare system? Why should I have to pay any more taxes?

You talked about sinking financial resources into things, there is more for the goverment to pay for than just healthcare. Should the government be required to make tradeoff decisions and reconcile those tradeoffs with the people who are paying for those services, or will we allow them to say things like "we are going to take yet more and more from you for the common good" until we have nothing else left to give and someone like H. Clinton raises the red flag over DC?

First we had income tax. Then social security. Then welfare. Then medicare. As of 2007 we are now talking about national health care. When do we stop? When is enough enough and when do we start working with what we have instead of taking more and more? Could we maybe eliminate social security, welfare, medicare, etc, and combine all that money into a single universal care system? The answer always seems to be 'just take more form the tax payers.'

At what point do we decide that enough is enough and we have to work with what we have to fix our problems instead of treating personal income as a infinite resource? Who decides what is a reasonable mandatory contribution? I have already decided what is reasonable for myself as far as % of taxes, etc.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: exdeathAre you going to be the one to come to my house at 3am and kick me out and tell me its too expensive and that I should get a cheap apartment because some guy I don't even know 10 states away needs emergency surgery and needs the money more than I do? Would you be ok with the government taking everything you own to pay my expenses if my family and I all get cancer?

If I was asked to give up all my possessions and all the money I would make for, say, 10 or 20 years (other than what I needed to get by) -- or else a bunch of strangers would surely die -- yes, I would do it.

Is there a price I wouldn't pay? Probably. But it's a lot higher than a bunch of "stuff".

And how long before you are knocking on my apartment door demanding that I give up a kidney because I have two and only *need* one?

An interesting question indeed. I hope we don't get to that point.

You can't save them all. Sh1t happens, people die, life goes on. Pretending nobody has to suffer and everyone is equal and lives forever is part of the leftist utopian fantasy. Sounds hard core and cold hearted? Life is cold hearted. Take it up with your maker.

Life sucks, then you die. It doesn't mean you shouldn't care.

The best we can do is live our own lives as best we can without being a burden on someone else, and help out others in unfortuneate circumstances when and where we can. Government enforcement of such things however is flat out wrong and unrealistic, not to mention that it has been proven time and time again that it just does not work.

Allowing people to selfishly choose not to help others for short-sighted gain but long-term loss is even more "wrong" IMO. Unless most of society decides they'd rather have an Escalade and cut off medical care for people who can't afford it, the current system is simply broken and is wasting huge amounts of money overall.

 

[exdeath]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: exdeathAre you going to be the one to come to my house at 3am and kick me out and tell me its too expensive and that I should get a cheap apartment because some guy I don't even know 10 states away needs emergency surgery and needs the money more than I do? Would you be ok with the government taking everything you own to pay my expenses if my family and I all get cancer?

If I was asked to give up all my possessions and all the money I would make for, say, 10 or 20 years (other than what I needed to get by) -- or else a bunch of strangers would die -- yes, I would do it.

Is there a price I wouldn't pay? Probably. But it's a lot higher than a bunch of "stuff".

And how long before you are knocking on my apartment door demanding that I give up a kidney because I have two and only *need* one?

An interesting question indeed. I hope we don't get to that point.

You can't save them all. Sh1t happens, people die, life goes on. Pretending nobody has to suffer and everyone is equal and lives forever is part of the leftist utopian fantasy. Sounds hard core and cold hearted? Life is cold hearted. Take it up with your maker.

Life sucks, then you die. It doesn't mean you shouldn't care.

The best we can do is live our own lives as best we can without being a burden on someone else, and help out others in unfortuneate circumstances when and where we can. Government enforcement of such things however is flat out wrong and unrealistic, not to mention that it has been proven time and time again that it just does not work.

Allowing people to selfishly choose not to help others for short-sighted gain but long-term loss is even more "wrong" IMO. Unless most of society decides they'd rather have an Escalade and cut off medical care for people who can't afford it, the current system is simply broken and is wasting huge amounts of money overall.

I never said I didn't care. I'm simply stating the problem as it is, and so far, nobody in human history has come up with an answer. All we do is keep coming up with the same cycle of failed attempts at addressing a problem with no answer over and over again.

I feel that I already pay enough taxes. If we want to make social systems more efficient, lets start with our pork infested government first. I wonder how much money we could free up for things like healthcare without charging taxpayers another dime. How many cancer patients could those lavish tax payer funded political campaigns fund? Does anyone ever check that box to contribute to campaign fundraising? Who put that there instead of a 'contribute to national healthcare emergency foundation' check box instead?

And lets start enforcing personal responsibility (in the economic sense) so that people who don't really need social services cannot get them. That would free up alot of money there.

I just want to see an honest effort to make efficient use of the resources I already put into the system before I am asked to pay another dime. Do you expect investors in a business to keep paying into a failed business when its been proven time and time again that that business is not profitable?

Same thing with the government. Asking for more isn't going to solve the fundamental problems with the system. Make an attempt to fix those problems and see how it goes and show me honest effort before asking me to give up more of my income from day one. Thats all I'm asking here.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: exdeathI just want to see an honest effort to make efficient use of the resources I already put into the system before I am asked to pay another dime. Do you expect investors in a buisness to keep paying into a failed business when its been proven time and time again that that business is not profitable?

Same thing with the government. Asking for more isn't going to solve the fundamental problems with the system. Make an attempt to fix those problems and see how it goes and show me honest effort before asking me to give up more of my income from day one. Thats all I'm asking here.

This I can agree with you on. :beer:

And on that note, I'm going to bed.

 

[exdeath]

On another note... here is another sticky proposition that will force you to contrast your moral stances:

We all can agree here that taking an item from a store without paying for it is stealing.

And even though music, art, software, i.e.: intellectual property, is intangible and can be easily copied and distributed without costing anybody anything, most here would still agree that it is still stealing.

But suddenly when there are ethical considerations such as loss of life or quality of life in a medical sense, taking something from someone else is no longer considered stealing under the guise of being 'for the greater good'?

So why is the free distribution of all music, movies, software, etc, not considered to be 'for the greater good' and the morally right thing to do?

Clearly a person?s life is more valuable than a music file, there is no arguing that. But taking from someone against their will to cover the expenses is still fundamentally stealing by the same guidelines that we define as stealing in the above examples.

To further complicate matters, some people believe it is ok to shoot and possibly kill someone who breaks into your home to harm your family or even steal your property, but it's ok to steal from those same people if it?s the government doing it to save a life in a hospital on the other side of the world?

I?m confused here, and I hope the rest of you are as well. When you understand the juxtaposition and quantification of moral values here, you will hopefully start to understand why nothing will ever be the ideal solution it is portrayed to be. When you start contradicting yourself by exploring multiple defintions for different circumstances to define a simple moral concept as simple as stealing, you have already failed. Continuing to build on top of those failed principles will only result in a system that works in the short term until people begin to disagree and question those definitions and pick what they believe to be the one true answer, and in the end, there are only two answers. Politically we call them the left and the right.

In the end it can be analyzed in terms of a few simple truths: unlimited needs and wants, limited resources, trade offs, personal value judgments, and the ultimate question of who gets what in a society. These are problems that have plagued civilization since the dawn of humanity. Don't believe that the politicians in power have a magic answer that nobody has been able to come up with or hasn't already tried in over 2,000 years of recorded history.



Again, I'm not saying I have any answers; my only goal is to make people think before jumping on the utopian socialist bandwagon.

 

[exdeath]

Also, I find it ironic that the same people that feel that our government can't manage a war, social security, and immigration, somehow believe that despite all those ineptitudes, that same governement can do a good job at managing our healthcare for us better than we can

 

[exdeath]

A little background and my personal views now:

It should be obvious from my history of posts here that I am on the right leaning side of the isle (not to be confused with the current administration which claims to be). I understand that my having a nice car will deprive someone else in another part of the world of owning a car. Do I feel bad about it? Possibly. Does that mean I am going to get rid of my car? Not by a long shot.

I understand the concept of limited resources, and accept that somewhere along the line, somebody is going to have to be left out no matter how much I may wish otherwise. Like every other animal, we are placed to compete in an eco system for limited resources. For me then, the best way of deciding who gets left out is allowing everyone to fight it out competitively amongst themselves and allow those who put in the most effort to in effect win and rightfully take those resources. It is essentially survival of the fittest in it?s purest form. It may not be fair, but at least nobody is stopping you from trying. At the most fundamental level we are no different than animals.

Animals don't close their eyes and randomly elect which member of their group gets eaten that day. No, who gets eaten is determined by who is the most cunning, who is the fastest runner, etc. You slip up, you are lunch, there is no welfare for the slow and lazy. Intervening and saving a poor unfortunate born cripple from death could condemn a perfectly healthy one to death, because somewhere out there is a lion that needs to eat regardless of how compasionate you feel. Which one dies, and which is the greater good, and who gets to decide that? Let nature run it's course and decide for itself. We have thumbs and walk upright for a reason, because only the best and most resourceful survive. Is it cold hearted? Yes. Don't take it up with me, take if up with whoever you believe your creator is.

It is at the very least no worse than appointing someone to arbitrarily choose who gets what resources, because people have to be left out either way, but it is certainly better in the fact that there is always opportunity for someone to come back and try again even if you fail over and over again. If someone makes that choice for you, you are stuck with it, and there is no trying again. I'd rather leave it up to people to choose for themselves.

I'm sure the Italian suede seats in my car were stitched by hand by somebody barely making $5 an hour, while I have the luxury of driving in a $35,000 car. What do I care, before I had that $35,000 car I was making somebody elses food for $4.75 an hour, many of them driving cars worth more than the one I have now. But there are always two sides to the coin. If you were experiencing desperate times, and that $5 an hour was all you could get at the time, would you not be grateful for having a job? You might not be able to support your family on it in the long run, but it's still $5/hr more than you would have otherwise. The end goal to keep in mind is relativity. Are you better off now than you were before? Stop comparing yourself to everyone else, and ask yourself every day, are *you* better off today than *you* were yesterday? If you are comparing being jobless to earning $5 an hour, which are you better off with? It?s a concept that people easily grasp in video games; you use with what you have until something better comes along. For something better to come along you have to make effort to play your character, you don't just log in every day and check your inventory expecting that it got upgraded for you when you weren't looking.

We've all been there before at some point (with the exception of inheritance brats, annoying as they may be, it?s still not your money). Some of us will stay there. Some of us will be unhappy and fight against all odds tooth and nail to succeed and increase our relative happiness year by year, even if it is only $1/hr at a time. Some will be born with rich parents and become spoiled brats that think they earned it and propose that they know what?s best for the rest of us. Some, like me, will be born with nothing and be ridiculed all their life and work their way up even if they have to unfairly do more work than somebody else. And then when they get there people say we need to take from them now and give it to someone else.

Nothing in our system is guaranteed. The only thing that should be guaranteed is that you have the mere opportunity to succeed if you want, meaning that nobody will arbitrarily decide that you are not allowed to exceed a certain point and stop you or take it away from you. There is no guarantee that you will succeed. There is no guarantee that the same amount of effort as someone else will get you the same rewards. There is no guarantee that you will live as long as someone else who abuses their body with drugs and lives until they are 100. You are only guaranteed hope. Socialism and caste systems take away that hope. You are what someone else tells you that you are and you are stuck with it, until there is a revolt and the pendulum swings the other way.

For all I know that person making $5 an hour stitching my seats has graduated college and started his own upholstery business and became a millionaire.

Does all of this mean I believe that insurance companies and oil companies are in their right to do what they are doing profiting off the backs of people in advantageous and unethical circumstances? Hell no. Remember, I said competition and survival of the fitest up above. When was the last time an oil company was one of the ?people? that got left out and went out of business because of fierce competition? I don't believe that the reason gas prices are high is because crude is higher. If oil companies were only passing along the increase, they wouldn't have record profits right now. And since we have been at capacity with refineries for some years now, I don't believe those profits could come from selling more either since there isn't capacity to make more to sell. So where did those profits come from? If the price of milk rises you can buy orange juice. If juice rises, you can always revert back to water. But what if three companies in the world controlled all the worlds water supply (an inelastic good) and could charge whatever they wanted for it, thereby rendering any alternative or competition non existant? Suddenly we have a serious problem don't we.

And I don't mean unrealistic and false hope alternatives like hybrids, electric, or solar vehicles. I mean alternatives like when when one pump is charging $3 a gal I can go to the pump 2 blocks down the street and get it for $1.20 a gal. Cut throat survival of the fitest compeition. It's what the system thrives on.

There is fraud, corruption, and exploitation of the system. But the system of capitalism in and of itself is not to blame, it is the best alternative we have. People are to blame, and people are a constant any any proposed system.

Every system has its flaws, so capitalism has plenty of them. But right now, I see people who point out the flaws and immediately want to try another system that is proven to be even less effective at spreading wealth, instead of trying to address the flaws in the system we have so that they cannot be exploited by minorities like wealthy businesses and people in power (i.e.: monopolies, political favors, special interests, corruption, fraud, etc).

I don't claim to have a perfect answer, but I know socialism is wrong. Socialism in practice is like the classic case of the class action lawsuit: the companies get run out of business, and the people who are promised their fair compensation get a $2 gift coupon to buy products from a company that no longer exists. Who benefits from that deal? Only the person telling you they are going to help you, be it the lawyer or a politician.

 

[rufruf44]

Originally posted by: exdeath
Also, I find it ironic that the same people that feel that our government can't manage a war, social security, and immigration, somehow believe that despite all those ineptitudes, that same governement can do a good job at managing our healthcare for us better than we can

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: exdeath
But suddenly when there are ethical considerations such as loss of life or quality of life in a medical sense, taking something from someone else is no longer considered stealing under the guise of being 'for the greater good'?

So why is the free distribution of all music, movies, software, etc, not considered to be 'for the greater good' and the morally right thing to do?

Calling it "for the greater good" is a little misleading. There's economic reasoning behind it.

If you really pressed most people, I strongly suspect they would rather have a system where somebody will cover for them when ****** happens, their personal resources fail, and it's their life (or the life of a loved one) on the line -- whereas they probably wouldn't want to give up a significant amount of resources for free or cheaper access to things they can live without. That's why it's okay to "steal" from people to pay for medical care but not for luxury goods; they've already agreed to the other side of the bargain. If having free music and movies was something our society cared deeply about, we'd abolish copyright laws for them and directly subsidize their creation instead. But there are many people who wouldn't want to shoulder part of that cost.

Essentially, society implicitly provides catastrophic health insurance for everyone that can't pay right now; it has to be paid for in one way or another, or the healthcare system will collapse. The only way you can avoid paying for it is to not provide medical services to people who can't pay. When that 'freeloading' single mother's kid is diagnosed with leukemia -- no treatment for him. She had too many kids and was gaming the welfare system anyway, right? When that homeless guy is struck by a car in a hit-and-run -- he dies on the sidewalk instead of being rushed into surgery to stop the bleeding. Oh well, he was probably homeless because he was lazy. When that 50-year-old who got laid off and didn't take great care of himself needs bypass surgery -- let his heart fail. He should have known better than to eat fast food and not exercise.

This is generally considered morally reprehensible and thus is not really an option in my view. It's one thing to say that people don't need generous retirement payments or unemployment benefits. It's quite another to say that when bad things happen to people who can't afford to deal with them (whether through earlier misfortune or their own poor planning) you're just going to let them die.

Now -- yes, obviously resources are not truly unlimited. If we came up with a way to let people live healthy lives to age 200 -- at a cost of a million dollars a day per person -- there's no way you could afford that for even a small fraction of the population.

But I refuse to believe that the US as a whole cannot afford to provide basic medical care and catastrophic insurance for ourselves (which would imply that our necessary healthcare costs are already unaffordable). Can we afford to provide the absolute best in care to everyone in the US? Probably not. But we're not exactly letting accident victims who can't pay bleed to death in front of the ER either, and I hope we never get to that point.

Because you can't really choose to not pay for it, and anyone could potentially need such services, to me it seems like the fairest system is to have everyone be responsible for a fraction of the care they may need (whether through private insurance or a public program). Yes, some people are being "stolen from" in such a system (at least in the sense that they are paying out more than they actually get back in services). There's no way around it; those people have to exist to make up for the ones that require enormously expensive care but can't afford it. That's how insurance works; many people pool their resources to hedge against a disastrous but low-probability event. You can't predict in advance if a particular person will need a million dollars in medical care ten years from now -- but over a large enough population, some people will, and few could afford it on their own. The more you spread out the risk, the easier it is to manage.

If you want to sign a waiver saying that you preemptively refuse all publicly funded medical care that you can't afford, and forfeiting any future right to Medicare or any other universal health care, in exchange for not having to pay in -- hey, be my guest. Just don't come crawling back when you lose your job, get in a car accident, and are stuck with a million dollars in medical bills that you'll be paying off for the next 30 years, or you get old and sick, burn through your retirement savings in the hospital, and get tossed out on the street. I really don't think many people would make that choice if they truly thought it through, unless they had substantial personal financial resources already.

Also, I find it ironic that the same people that feel that our government can't manage a war, social security, and immigration, somehow believe that despite all those ineptitudes, that same governement can do a good job at managing our healthcare for us better than we can

Note that I am not advocating that the government should run our healthcare system. I am advocating that the government should ensure that people have access to reasonable levels of care no matter what, probably through some kind of national fallback insurance program that everyone would have access to.

It is at the very least no worse than appointing someone to arbitrarily choose who gets what resources, because people have to be left out either way, but it is certainly better in the fact that there is always opportunity for someone to come back and try again even if you fail over and over again. If someone makes that choice for you, you are stuck with it, and there is no trying again. I'd rather leave it up to people to choose for themselves.

I understand the whole 'survival of the fittest' mentality, and in many ways capitalism works a lot better than other economic systems. But you can't "come back and try again" if you're dead. If you're going to provide a societal safety net anywhere, you can't get much more basic than not letting people die when ****** happens and they need help.

If you feel that this is somehow not your problem, and that even just trying to keep people alive is too much for society to offer -- we'll have to agree to disagree. 'There but for the grace of God' and all that.

 

[exdeath]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: exdeath
But suddenly when there are ethical considerations such as loss of life or quality of life in a medical sense, taking something from someone else is no longer considered stealing under the guise of being 'for the greater good'?

So why is the free distribution of all music, movies, software, etc, not considered to be 'for the greater good' and the morally right thing to do?

Calling it "for the greater good" is a little misleading. There's economic reasoning behind it.

If you really pressed most people, I strongly suspect they would rather have a system where somebody will cover for them when ****** happens, their personal resources fail, and it's their life (or the life of a loved one) on the line -- whereas they probably wouldn't want to give up a significant amount of resources for free or cheaper access to things they can live without. That's why it's okay to "steal" from people to pay for medical care but not for luxury goods; they've already agreed to the other side of the bargain. If having free music and movies was something our society cared deeply about, we'd abolish copyright laws for them and directly subsidize their creation instead. But there are many people who wouldn't want to shoulder part of that cost.

Essentially, society implicitly provides catastrophic health insurance for everyone that can't pay right now; it has to be paid for in one way or another, or the healthcare system will collapse. The only way you can avoid paying for it is to not provide medical services to people who can't pay. When that 'freeloading' single mother's kid is diagnosed with leukemia -- no treatment for him. She had too many kids and was gaming the welfare system anyway, right? When that homeless guy is struck by a car in a hit-and-run -- he dies on the sidewalk instead of being rushed into surgery to stop the bleeding. Oh well, he was probably homeless because he was lazy. When that 50-year-old who got laid off and didn't take great care of himself needs bypass surgery -- let his heart fail. He should have known better than to eat fast food and not exercise.

This is generally considered morally reprehensible and thus is not really an option in my view. It's one thing to say that people don't need generous retirement payments or unemployment benefits. It's quite another to say that when bad things happen to people who can't afford to deal with them (whether through earlier misfortune or their own poor planning) you're just going to let them die.

Now -- yes, obviously resources are not truly unlimited. If we came up with a way to let people live healthy lives to age 200 -- at a cost of a million dollars a day per person -- there's no way you could afford that for even a small fraction of the population.

But I refuse to believe that the US as a whole cannot afford to provide basic medical care and catastrophic insurance for ourselves (which would imply that our necessary healthcare costs are already unaffordable). Can we afford to provide the absolute best in care to everyone in the US? Probably not. But we're not exactly letting accident victims who can't pay bleed to death in front of the ER either, and I hope we never get to that point.

Because you can't really choose to not pay for it, and anyone could potentially need such services, to me it seems like the fairest system is to have everyone be responsible for a fraction of the care they may need (whether through private insurance or a public program). Yes, some people are being "stolen from" in such a system (at least in the sense that they are paying out more than they actually get back in services). There's no way around it; those people have to exist to make up for the ones that require enormously expensive care but can't afford it. That's how insurance works; many people pool their resources to hedge against a disastrous but low-probability event. You can't predict in advance if a particular person will need a million dollars in medical care ten years from now -- but over a large enough population, some people will, and few could afford it on their own. The more you spread out the risk, the easier it is to manage.

If you want to sign a waiver saying that you preemptively refuse all publicly funded medical care that you can't afford, and forfeiting any future right to Medicare or any other universal health care, in exchange for not having to pay in -- hey, be my guest. Just don't come crawling back when you lose your job, get in a car accident, and are stuck with a million dollars in medical bills that you'll be paying off for the next 30 years, or you get old and sick, burn through your retirement savings in the hospital, and get tossed out on the street. I really don't think many people would make that choice if they truly thought it through, unless they had substantial personal financial resources already.

Also, I find it ironic that the same people that feel that our government can't manage a war, social security, and immigration, somehow believe that despite all those ineptitudes, that same governement can do a good job at managing our healthcare for us better than we can

Note that I am not advocating that the government should run our healthcare system. I am advocating that the government should ensure that people have access to reasonable levels of care no matter what, probably through some kind of national fallback insurance program that everyone would have access to.

It is at the very least no worse than appointing someone to arbitrarily choose who gets what resources, because people have to be left out either way, but it is certainly better in the fact that there is always opportunity for someone to come back and try again even if you fail over and over again. If someone makes that choice for you, you are stuck with it, and there is no trying again. I'd rather leave it up to people to choose for themselves.

I understand the whole 'survival of the fittest' mentality, and in many ways capitalism works a lot better than other economic systems. But you can't "come back and try again" if you're dead. If you're going to provide a societal safety net anywhere, you can't get much more basic than not letting people die when ****** happens and they need help.

If you feel that this is somehow not your problem, and that even just trying to keep people alive is too much for society to offer -- we'll have to agree to disagree. 'There but for the grace of God' and all that.

I don't think it's right to let people die on the side of the street. I don't even think its right to deny illegals life saving treatment when they crash their overloaded vans on our freeways, and I?m vehemently opposed to illegal immigration and the drain it puts on our society. But I don't like the fact that they get all this treatment for free and they are gone the next morning without a trace and nobody can do anything about it. Why don't we send a bill to Mexico in that instance? Should we use threat of military force to convince Mexico that it should take care of its own people instead of encouraging to come over here and empty our pockets?

The other problem is the cost of medical care in general. Someone mentioned a $5 million cancer treatment so real or not I?m going to run with it. Take this oversimplified and short sighted attempt at digging into the problem: If the doctor makes only $250,000 a year, and is only performing one surgery or treatment in one evening, why does that treatment cost $5 million? It's like getting a $1500 Band-Aid in the ER. Part of it is to cover people like illegals that don't pay their bill. Part of it is the ridiculously high malpractice insurance to protect against fraudulent wrongful harm lawsuits. A doctor tells somebody their friend is dead, and they get sued for causing the death (extreme, but not far from the truth). Can anybody reconcile and justify every dollar spent on medical services and tell me where every dime is going? If a Band-Aid in the ER didn't cost $1500 it might be easier to enforce mandatory payment for services rendered.

I just don't see why I have to give something up to pay for that person's healthcare when I am already paying 35+% of my income in taxes after being told that social security, Medicare, and personal income tax were each the only extra thing that would be asked from me for the greater good. Twenty years from now, our national healthcare system will be just as messed up, and someone will propose some other way to fix it, but they need 10% more again, and dependent needy spoon fed people will still cling to every dollar they can keep from the existing systems all the way back to social security. It's always a progressive slippery slope down, but nobody wants to go backwards and reassess and reallocate existing funds. XP would not be what it is had we not ditched DOS and WIN16 and pissed alot of people off. But they got over it didn't they.

If some politician said "we are going to have to take from you for the greater good... so you choose what we take: Medicare, social security, aid to foreign countries, what do you want to give up in order to pay for your free healthcare"? I would be all ears. When is the last time the government proposed a tradeoff decision like that to the public instead of simply asking for more tax dollars like it was an unlimited resource? It's easy for someone on social security to say "just make that person pay for it , I'm not giving up social security but I need healthcare too". How is that fair? The rest of us are forced to weigh choices like that every day. Can't have your cake and eat it too.

Like I said, I don't have an answer.

 

[Vic]

But... but... in Australia, everyone has above-average incomes!!

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: exdeath
Why don't we send a bill to Mexico in that instance? Should we use threat of military force to convince Mexico that it should take care of its own people instead of encouraging to come over here and empty our pockets?

Those are good questions, and frankly I'm not sure what we try to do in that regard. I'm not sure the Mexican government would have the funds to pay all such expenses even if they were inclined to do so.

The other problem is the cost of medical care in general. Someone mentioned a $5 million cancer treatment so real or not I?m going to run with it. Take this oversimplified and short sighted attempt at digging into the problem: If the doctor makes only $250,000 a year, and is only performing one surgery or treatment in one evening, why does that treatment cost $5 million? It's like getting a $1500 Band-Aid in the ER. Part of it is to cover people like illegals that don't pay their bill. Part of it is the ridiculously high malpractice insurance to protect against fraudulent wrongful harm lawsuits. A doctor tells somebody their friend is dead, and they get sued for causing the death (extreme, but not far from the truth). Can anybody reconcile and justify every dollar spent on medical services and tell me where every dime is going? If a Band-Aid in the ER didn't cost $1500 it might be easier to enforce mandatory payment for services rendered.

You wouldn't pay $5M for a single surgery -- but you might spend millions over time on a serious disease. An individual surgery usually isn't the big cost -- unless it's some crazy experimental procedure, or it takes a team of surgeons 12 hours, you'd probably be talking more in the $25-50000 range for a major surgery (keep in mind that you're paying for the time of at least one surgeon, an anesthesiologist, several nurses, and equipment expenses such as sterilization and any disposable equipment or things like blood transfusions). It's the billing for the hospital room, plus diagnostic tests, plus radiation or chemotherapy (can be $10K+ per month), plus drugs to fight off infection... it adds up. Plus you probably can't work regularly, so something has to cover living expenses for you and your family.

If a hospital has 200 beds, the rate for them in total is going to provide a significant amount of their operating income for the year. You're paying for the doctors, the nurses, the med students, the administrators, the insurance, the equipment, the computers, the labs, and everything else that goes on. If their outlay (in terms of upkeep, equipment, salaries, taxes, insurance, etc.) is, say, $100M a year and they have 200 beds, being in one for a day is going to cost you on the order of $1300 for them to be breaking even -- probably more taking into account people they have to treat that can't pay. Some of those expenses could probably be reduced, but others are essentially fixed.

You wouldn't pay "$1500 for a band-aid" in the ER -- but you (or at least your insurance company) might pay $1500 if you went in, got checked out, had some stitches put in, and were sent home. It's not that it truly cost $1500 in materials -- you're paying for the administrative costs, the doctor's time, upkeep of the place, the people who can't afford to pay, etc.

Is there waste? In places. Record-keeping is a pain and a huge cost -- a lot of places are going to electronic medical records to try to help (it also cuts down on things like prescription mistakes). Better treatment protocols and cheaper/faster diagnostic tests can help cut down on unnecessary or ineffective treatments. Early intervention and better management of chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension can cut down on expensive and debilitating complications later.

Is there corruption? At times, yes. It's not that people aren't trying to stop it, but in a medical system that serves 300 million people you can't keep close tabs on everything. But I'm not sure that there being waste and corruption -- which there will invariably be in anything involving people and politics -- is a good reason to keep screwing people who can't afford insurance.

I just don't see why I have to give something up to pay for that person's healthcare when I am already paying 35+% of my income in taxes after being told that social security, Medicare, and personal income tax were each the only extra thing that would be asked from me for the greater good.

...

If some politician said "we are going to have to take from you for the greater good... so you choose what we take: Medicare, social security, aid to foreign countries, what do you want to give up in order to pay for your free healthcare"? I would be all ears. When is the last time the government proposed a tradeoff decision like that to the public instead of simply asking for more tax dollars like it was an unlimited resource? It's easy for someone on social security to say "just make that person pay for it , I'm not giving up social security but I need healthcare too". How is that fair? The rest of us are forced to weigh choices like that every day. Can't have your cake and eat it too.

No easy answers to these. I agree that we shouldn't just try to throw money at the problem without taking a hard look at the other factors involved. Maybe a minimal universal insurance plan+FSA with tax incentives could be cheaper than what many self-employed people are on now, yet still have enough profit margin to cover a lot of low-income citizens.

Taking money out of Medicare to fund what is, essentially, more widely accessible Medicare is probably just robbing Peter to pay Paul (though maybe they could scale back some parts of Medicare to cut costs; I don't know enough about exactly how it is funded and where exactly they spend the bulk of their money.) Maybe they need to scale back, change, or even eliminate future SS benefits at some point, and do more to encourage people to save for retirement privately. But while it's easy for someone on SS to say "I need SS and healthcare too", it's also easy for someone not dependent on SS to say "they don't need SS and I need healthcare".

We actually spend a relatively small amount of money on foreign aid relative to things like our defense budget and other entitlement/welfare programs. Not starting a war in the Middle East every few years might free up some funds...

 

[exdeath]

Originally posted by: Matthias99
Not starting a war in the Middle East every few years might free up some funds...

War is going to happen whether we like it or not. We don't control the world and police everyones' thoughts and morals. Just as we have political division here in our country, the values of people in other cultures may not agree with ours. Thats all fine and well until they start spreading their culture by threat of force. What we can do is make full use of ALL the weapons we have to end those conflicts quickly instead of letting them drag on for years and cost billions in a political cat and mouse game.

I refer to in modern times of course to the bigger picture of Islamic uprising, conquest, political manipulation and distortion (require that toilets in GB face away from mecha or its discrimination? give me a fvcking break) and violence all across the globe (Middle East, Africa, France, Spain, etc), not Iraq, which we should have been done with and walked away with the T shirt years ago. Iraq is a dropped ball GWB clusterfuck. If we had any reason to go to Iraq, we had just as much reason to go to Iran and NK by now as well. The fact that we didn't and only singled out the least threatening of the three proves that something is not quite right.

Though the threat of 3rd century Islam to the 21st century civilized world is an argument for another thread.

I'd be willing to go without expensive military spending like advanced body armor, special forces training, aircraft carriers, and F22s on one condition: we mind our own business in the world, help nobody, and when provoked and threatened, we reply with 100 ICBMs and wake up the next morning and go about our business as if nothing happened. Speak softly and carry a big stick as it were.

In an ideal world nobody would need a military or need to exercise their right to self defense (in general), but in that same ideal world, everyone would be healthy and never need free health care.

 

[Brentx]

Originally posted by: SarcasticDwarf

Originally posted by: b0mbrman

Originally posted by: SarcasticDwarf

Originally posted by: b0mbrman

Originally posted by: SarcasticDwarf

Originally posted by: Eli
Poor is realitive.

Even the poorest americans are rich compared to most of the World's population.

True, but that statement does fail to take into account the cost of living. I simply can't find any apartment no matter how small under $500/month here. That $500/month could fully support a dozen families in other countries.

You choose to live in that area (or choose not to move). Take a $50 Greyhound bus ride to my little Texas town and you can get 1BR/1BA for $200. Under $500 will get you 2 BR/1BA. Squeezing just north of $500 will get you an extra half-bath and a townhouse design.

(Also, in all these situations, you'd get the added bonus of having me as your landlord )

Yes and no. First, the wages are certainly lower there. Second, the area would almost certainly not have positions in my specialization.

Yup...and that's the tradeoff. We probably would pay comparably for specialized work though. A gigantic chunk of our local economy is service, so there's not a lot of competition on the consumer side for housing -- that's what makes it cheaper.

So in the end, I don't really choose to live in the area, I have to unless I want to change careers (which is not financially feasable).

That's hard to believe up on Oshkosh. Housing around UW Milwaukee is around 400, and that's on the East Side.

 

[DrPizza]

exdeath, what you don't seem to realize is that you ARE paying for those poor people who don't have insurance. And, because they don't have insurance, you are probably paying more for them than you would if they did have some form of insurance.

Some people have two choices: go to the doctor and pay $15 copay (or whatever the copay amount is) OR, take an ambulance or taxi to the ER, avoid the copay, take up more people's time (at a greater expense) for something simple like a sniffly nose in a child, take a taxi home - ALL covered by taxpayers.

 

[exdeath]

Originally posted by: DrPizza
exdeath, what you don't seem to realize is that you ARE paying for those poor people who don't have insurance. And, because they don't have insurance, you are probably paying more for them than you would if they did have some form of insurance.

Some people have two choices: go to the doctor and pay $15 copay (or whatever the copay amount is) OR, take an ambulance or taxi to the ER, avoid the copay, take up more people's time (at a greater expense) for something simple like a sniffly nose in a child, take a taxi home - ALL covered by taxpayers.

Good, since I am already paying for them, then I shouldn't expect I need to pay any more taxes just because of a semantics change.



But actually I'm not paying for it, my employer is, which isn't right either. When I go to the doctor to get a bandaid and my bill is $0.50 like it should be, the insurance plan I pay $60 a month to is billed $1500 for a office visit to pay for the 3000 people that didn't want to pay their $0.50 bill, then we wonder why a band-aid costs $1500 and wonder what is wrong with the healthcare system and why people can't afford it...

Regardless of capitalism or socialism, people need to pull their own weight or the system will not work. We can start with monthly payments to form a pool to draw upon, and have high but reasonable co-pay's and deductables so that the person drawing from the pool puts in an amount proportional to what they are directly using, but we can't make it absolutely FREE for anyone who simply wants it or we will bankrupt this country. Even a disabled elderly person can put rubberbands on newspapers while laying in a hospitol bed to pay their share. There is SOME kind of community service that can be performed to pay your fair share into the system no matter what your situation is, or your family members can pitch in for you and scrub a few toilets at the hospitol on your behalf.

I'm sorry, it's just basic economics. No system with more going out than in can sustain itself, and expecting someone else to pay more than their fair share to pick up the tab is unreasonable.

 

[Matthias99]

Regardless of capitalism or socialism, people need to pull their own weight or the system will not work. We can start with monthly payments to form a pool to draw upon, and have high but reasonable co-pay's and deductables so that the person drawing from the pool puts in an amount proportional to what they are directly using, but we can't make it absolutely FREE for anyone who simply wants it or we will bankrupt this country.

I'm definitely in agreement on this.

Just in more basic economic terms, the deductibles HAVE to be high if you want the insurance premiums to be affordable but still cover high amounts of care for extreme cases (or else there has to be money coming into the system from somewhere else). Something like having low copays for basic services (or giving a few free visits to the doctor each year, etc.), but if you want anything beyond that you have to pay 50% of the cost until you've paid out some significant fraction of your AGI. Then you're covered beyond that for anything medically necessary (though you may be on the hook to pay back more of it later, assuming you can).

I'm sorry, it's just basic economics. No system with more going out than in can sustain itself, and expecting someone else to pay more than their fair share to pick up the tab is unreasonable.

To clarify, though -- healthy people have to pay "more than their fair share" to cover for sick people who can't possibly pay enough to cover their treatments. At least in the short term, or if they won't live long enough and make enough money over time to repay all the payouts they've gotten. People need to pay back what they can -- but if you get a million dollars in treatment over the course of a year, and you make $50K a year and are able to pay back $25K a year, it'll take 40 years to pay back the million dollars! If they retire 20 years later and then can only pay back $5K a year for another 10 years, they will (through no fault of their own) be a net negative over their lifetime for the system. Other people have to pay out more than they get back for it to work. That's just how insurance works.

 

[exdeath]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Regardless of capitalism or socialism, people need to pull their own weight or the system will not work. We can start with monthly payments to form a pool to draw upon, and have high but reasonable co-pay's and deductables so that the person drawing from the pool puts in an amount proportional to what they are directly using, but we can't make it absolutely FREE for anyone who simply wants it or we will bankrupt this country.

I'm definitely in agreement on this.

Just in more basic economic terms, the deductibles HAVE to be high if you want the insurance premiums to be affordable but still cover high amounts of care for extreme cases (or else there has to be money coming into the system from somewhere else). Something like having low copays for basic services (or giving a few free visits to the doctor each year, etc.), but if you want anything beyond that you have to pay 50% of the cost until you've paid out some significant fraction of your AGI. Then you're covered beyond that for anything medically necessary (though you may be on the hook to pay back more of it later, assuming you can).

I'm sorry, it's just basic economics. No system with more going out than in can sustain itself, and expecting someone else to pay more than their fair share to pick up the tab is unreasonable.

To clarify, though -- healthy people have to pay "more than their fair share" to cover for sick people who can't possibly pay enough to cover their treatments. At least in the short term, or if they won't live long enough and make enough money over time to repay all the payouts they've gotten. People need to pay back what they can -- but if you get a million dollars in treatment over the course of a year, and you make $50K a year and are able to pay back $25K a year, it'll take 40 years to pay back the million dollars! If they retire 20 years later and then can only pay back $5K a year for another 10 years, they will (through no fault of their own) be a net negative over their lifetime for the system. Other people have to pay out more than they get back for it to work. That's just how insurance works.

 

[exdeath]

Originally posted by: exdeath

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Regardless of capitalism or socialism, people need to pull their own weight or the system will not work. We can start with monthly payments to form a pool to draw upon, and have high but reasonable co-pay's and deductables so that the person drawing from the pool puts in an amount proportional to what they are directly using, but we can't make it absolutely FREE for anyone who simply wants it or we will bankrupt this country.

I'm definitely in agreement on this.

Just in more basic economic terms, the deductibles HAVE to be high if you want the insurance premiums to be affordable but still cover high amounts of care for extreme cases (or else there has to be money coming into the system from somewhere else). Something like having low copays for basic services (or giving a few free visits to the doctor each year, etc.), but if you want anything beyond that you have to pay 50% of the cost until you've paid out some significant fraction of your AGI. Then you're covered beyond that for anything medically necessary (though you may be on the hook to pay back more of it later, assuming you can).

I'm sorry, it's just basic economics. No system with more going out than in can sustain itself, and expecting someone else to pay more than their fair share to pick up the tab is unreasonable.

To clarify, though -- healthy people have to pay "more than their fair share" to cover for sick people who can't possibly pay enough to cover their treatments. At least in the short term, or if they won't live long enough and make enough money over time to repay all the payouts they've gotten. People need to pay back what they can -- but if you get a million dollars in treatment over the course of a year, and you make $50K a year and are able to pay back $25K a year, it'll take 40 years to pay back the million dollars! If they retire 20 years later and then can only pay back $5K a year for another 10 years, they will (through no fault of their own) be a net negative over their lifetime for the system. Other people have to pay out more than they get back for it to work. That's just how insurance works.

I don't recall my auto insurance premiums factoring in the fact that some people drive $250,000 Ferraris they wreck or that get stolen

They do however factor in the increasing rate of hit and runs in Arizona as a result of undocumented illegals who think they are above the rules that the rest of us follow, and think they can't be held responsible and are free to run amok and wreak havoc because nobody knows who they are. Anonymity FTW...

 

[piasabird]

Poor is a state of mind. Everything is relative. You can grow all your own food and live off the land and never go to a store.

 

[exdeath]

Originally posted by: piasabird
Poor is a state of mind. Everything is relative. You can grow all your own food and live off the land and never go to a store.

Only if you can afford to own land and pay taxes on it.