Quote:Original post by Chris Reynolds
A lot of people strive to get a good job in order to get good health insurance. Free health insurance is just one less reason to need a job. And I don't see how getting free insurance will increase one's desire to watch their health.. What I can understand, is that if I couldn't afford insurance, I would be watching my own health and trying hard to find a job that provides good insurance, out of fear.

People work jobs that don't provide health insurance. That won't change. People pay for health insurance and don't watch their health. That won't change. To the extent that health care providers want to keep their costs down, they would need to come up with better ways of helping their patients watch their health. From what I understand, in some countries doctors are given bonuses for every patient they can get to stop smoking. That gives them incentives to keep after people and if those people don't have to pay to see their cessation programs through to the end they have less reason to give up and return to smoking.

Quote:Original post by Ftn
everyone has health care, and everyone pays for it through taxes. Simple.

I could add that the health care costs here are around 8% of the GDP, I guess. I remember seeing OECD statistics from year 2008 that they were 7.4% of the GDP.

Not that there wouldn't be problems boiling beneath the surface. Some claim there are problems because of too far gone privatisation that will drive the prices up...

Quote:Original post by WanMaster

Quote:Original post by LessBread
I was happy to see him call out the Republicans for lying about death panels and such. That alone made missing the second half of the World Cup qualifier worth it.

So who would you say has best defense, Obama or Team USA?

Relative to their respective areas of endeavor, Team USA. The Republican noise machine caught Team Obama off guard and subsequently pelted them with uninterrupted lies for a month.

Money money money money, money (x6)Some people got to have itSome people really need itListen to me y'all, do things, do things, do bad things with itYou wanna do things, do things, do things, good things with itTalk about cash money, moneyTalk about cash money- dollar bills, yall ...

For The Love Of Money

Quote:Original post by Promit

Quote:Original post by Chris Reynolds

Quote:
If society provides free health insurance, the incentives to produce health-bearing jobs and to increase prevention are both accelerated. It enables lifestyles that don't put people into hospitals in the first place.

A lot of people strive to get a good job in order to get good health insurance. Free health insurance is just one less reason to need a job. And I don't see how getting free insurance will increase one's desire to watch their health.. What I can understand, is that if I couldn't afford insurance, I would be watching my own health and trying hard to find a job that provides good insurance, out of fear.

What about the problem that many small businesses simply can't afford health insurance? And that the people working for them sometimes aren't even considered by the companies for a private policy?

Why aren't people exploring divorcing health care from employment as part of reform? The reason health care is linked to employment is old wage caps from the depresssion era. Employers couldn't raise wages so they offered "free" healthcare. From one government enforced price ceiling we have this unholy nexus of employment and health care, along with tax code to propagate it.

So fix the tax code. Make health insurance 100% deductible. Make health care expenses 100% deductible. Use the Commerce clause for what it was intended for and break the protectionist policies of states and let insurers sell across state lines to increase competition.

Break down state and federal mandates that favor lobbies that have been writing health laws for decades. In each example try to identify barriers to entry for competition and dissolve them. These are acts that should be noncontroversial unless you own an insurance company or are benefiting from government cartelization.

After having attempted to exhaust each possible roadblock created via government to competitive and ubiquitous health care then we could look at the end product and have a reasonable debate.

Looking at a stacked deck and claiming we need a new dealer from the same casino is shortsighted in my opinion.

Quote:Original post by Kaze

Quote:Original post by Chris Reynolds

Quote:Original post by LessBread
Bleed over from link

Society is immoral because it doesn't want to pay for cancer treatments even as it subsidizes tobacco: Tobacco Subsidies in United States totaled $530 million from 1995-2006.

Panel Votes to Keep Tobacco Subsidies (1995)

Very good point.

This is one of the main reasons I believe the republican party is far more of a traditionalist party than a libertarian party. As much as they complain about socialism with their older more rural base I seriously doubt they would even joke about scrapping programs like social security, medicare and the massive farm subsidies that are my universal comeback to anyone who touts how free the US marketplace is compared to the rest of the world.
Additionally if you got rid of farm subsidies you would probably have a lot less illegal immigrants since central and south American farmers would be able to make money working their own land.

Republicans are protectionist and corporatists to the core. They support the warfare state just like the Dems support the welfare state. It's really just two sides of the same coin.