Jonny wrote:Mountaineer Buc wrote:
Oh, aren't you so clever.
How's that working out for you?
Do I start with the fact that nowhere in the second amendment are you guaranteed the money to buy a gun, or should I get into how Life...In addition to liberty and the persuit of happiness are inalienable rights of all mankind that are currently infringed by the government?
To put the shoe on the other foot, would it be an infringement of your second amendment rights if you had to pay $1,500 a month for use of a gun shop with a $5,000 deductable in order to own the gun you want?
If the insurance industry slapped you with a 100% increase in your life insurance policy because you owned guns since gun owners tend to commit suicide with their guns, would that be an infringement?
Or would you rather take your AR-15 and shut the **** up while people go to the doctor they can't afford?
I know I am very clever MB, being clever works out great because I can manipulate my emotional opponents with ease.
I have always told you that a "right" simply means that the government will not interfere or penalize you for exercising a right you already possess.
Are you one of those that assumes a "right" means the government will pay the costs for the service you hope to receive? If your answer is no, then we are on the same page. But if your answer is yes especially in the area of healthcare, then you are a hypocrite and I take great pleasure in pointing out the inconsistency.
Remember, I am a classical liberal, and classical liberals do not confuse rights with privileges. I want to buy my own damn gun AND healthcare. But it is you leftists who are inconsistent with how you define a right. Why does "right to life" mean government buys you healthcare, but that does not apply to 2nd amendment? Also why doesn't right to life mean right to food or right to wife?
Moral of the story to resident leftists: Please be consistent on how you define a right and apply it accordingly across the board.
Jonny, you're thinking about things in a tribalistic, 7th century kind of way. Sure your "classical liberalism" ideals are a nice goal, but the reality of our 21st century lives doesn't necessarily allow for us to take the direct "anarcho-capitalist" path to achieve "anarcho-capitalist" outcomes. Everything in the modern world is effected by boundaries, in some shape or form, so by default nothing is a free market; so everything must be considered within this framework.
When you look at healthcare and health insurance you are looking at something that, by definition, cannot operate successfully as a free market, and it is why Americans pay "double the price for half the healthcare", compared to the other top industrialized nations.
It is our own outdated Wild West mentality that has set this unfortunate situation up. To be clear, here are the basic requirements of a "free market", and why health insurance is incompatible with that method of price determination and goods distribution:
1)
Buyers and sellers must be able to freely enter and exit the market as they please:- this is inherently a snag on the healthcare market because nobody *chooses* to enter it, it just happens. You're biking and you hit a rock, you break your leg, but you don't already have health insurance, so now you're, out of nowhere, $40,000 in debt. And this is exactly why costs are what they are, because hospitals, pharm companies, medical supply co's have been able to rely on Joe Blows paying out huge inflated sums that they have to pay out because they were caught with their pants down without insurance.
- Also, and this point bleeds into the second, that not only do buyers of healthcare not freely get to enter and exit the healthcare market, but neither do sellers. Becoming a doctor to today's standards is not something you can just relatively "walk into" - it's a lifelong commitment, based on years and years of specialized training and thousands and thousands of dollars in investment to become an accredited seller in this type of market. There is most certainly a gateway from this end as well. Again, nothing is a black and white free market or not, it is all part of some spectrum, but being a fruit merchant in the town square is much different than being a doctor.
2)
There must be information transparency about the quality and cost of goods:- With the aforementioned "gateway", doctors have by far the upper hand in comparison to the buyer, in terms of portayed quality or necessity of the good they are willing to provide to the buyer. The buyer of healthcare must surrender a great deal of trust to the doctor's relative expertise about the subject being purchased, and therefore does not allow for the buyer to operate with maximum discretion. This inherently skews the market to the seller.
3)
The buyer must be able to freely choose which service provider to purchase from, based on information gathered from 1 and 2:- Again, a problem inherent to healthcare purchase is that if you break your leg, or have a heart attack, you're not exactly in the position to shop around. You're going with the closest guy to you. Say that guy charges 50% more for reason (because he can, hey, why not). And the thing us, we're not talking about a $5 service, we're talking about life changing money between 10-15% on some if this stuff. The immediacy that people often have to purchase healthcare infringes on the "free market" nature.
Point being, nothing in this world is a free market, everything is subsidized to some degree, and if you earnestly look at the healthcare market place it's plain to see that nothing about it is conducive to the "open and free" end of the spectrum, and in fact, we've been trying that and it done nothing but make "big pharma" and "big medical" rich at the expense of the American People
Sure, it's great, "I wanna do what I wanna do, don't tell me what to do" ... But we live in a modernized world with modernized problems (with modernized solutions to match). A federal government serves that purpose. It's what coordinates tackling the 10-state problem of keeping the Mississippi healthy, it's what gets us too the moon, and helps us solve nationwide epidemics. I'm not saying hand the keys over blindly, but sometimes we need to take a step back and say "hey do these set of rules even apply to this type of game?"
