I disagree. The only thing standing in the way between a better world for all Americans is idiots like you who believe everything you're fed by the left-wing media. And don't even try to deny it, J. I've been on HuffPo and the DailyKos several times in the past, just to see what the other side thought, and the same BS that came from their comment boxes comes out of your mouth every time you debate. The only noticable difference is that you hold some maturity and are careful not to use several of their key words.
It's true that I read Daily Kos often and Huffington Post every once in a while. Daily Kos is left-biased, unabashedly (Huffington Post is more like a circus), but I don't read it for the left-wing bias. I have my own, personal left-wing bias that serves me just fine. I read them for the information that I can't get out of the traditional media. Occasionally their analysis is helpful in formulating my own. However, unlike yourself I know how to think critically and I actually do it, and so my judgments are my own and they are usually sound (unless I have bad information). Also, in case you missed it, all those anecdotal examples of healthcare nightmares I gave were out of my personal life and acquaintanceships.
Comparing my references to left-wing sources to your own references to right-wing ones is fallacy on two levels: It implies that my doing so somehow makes it okay for you to do so (the “tu quoque” fallacy), and it implies an false equivalence between my methods and yours. I would pit the robustness of my judgment against yours any day; our opposing political differences are, in this context, irrelevant. I have to deal with plenty of left-wing idiots too. The difference between them and yourself is that at least they're usually on the just side of the issues, which makes their idiocy, if no more forgivable, at least somewhat more ignorable.
And its not as if insurance companies are killing people. The way you say it, the CEO of Statefarm is twiddling his thumbs behind a big oaken desk, his only job deciding whether or not my great aunt Doris gets to live or not. ... The only difference between your claim of "spreadsheet murder" and her claim of "death panels" is who is saying it.
That isn't a valid rebuttal. Your
saying something doesn't make it so. You have to provide a reasoning for your claims. For my part, while I haven't posted a big bibliography of statistics, I've pointed to the easily verifiable
fact that there never have been government “death panels” nor would there be under this legislation, and to the relatively-easily verifiable
fact that insurance companies routinely deny coverage and claims (or only partially approve it), in order to maximize their profits. In making my case I have pointed only to the suffering of the sick, which was perhaps an error on my part, but I'll tell you now that, on the other side of the coin, you can also examine the rising profitability of the health insurance industry over the past twenty years even as health insurance and drug costs have begun to bankrupt our national budget, our state budgets, and corporate budgets. It's all written down in ink.
See...you're smart enough to perform variations and combinations on the talking points you already know, but you aren't actually
thinking about this stuff. Let's consider your next thoughts:
Access to health care would only become more complicated if the government took a bigger role in it. Just look at the treatment of Medicare patients over ones who have private insurance. You've made this argument several times to me.
I've never made such an argument. In fact I've made the
opposite argument: Access to healthcare would become immensely
simpler under a national healthcare system. Why? Because the government bureaucracy administering public healthcare would be interested in moving patients through the system efficiently. Contrast that to the corporate bureaucracy, whose interest is in maximizing profits by manipulating insurance money disbursements. There wouldn't be any claims paperwork. You wouldn't have to spend time and energy arguing with insurance companies. You wouldn't get stuck with unanticipated out-of-pocket expenses when your claims are rejected. You wouldn't have to worry about not being able to afford to go to the doctor when you get sick.
We see this
all the time in the comparison between civic systems and businesses: When a city is faced with a budget shortfall; they try to cut services in a way that will be least injurious to people. When a business is faced with a budget shortfall, they cut costs by tweaking their business model into something more profitable. You need to stop comparing government and business; they're not the same thing and they shouldn't be held to the same standards. If you could understand that, you would see why something like healthcare should never be privately-run (or, if it is privately run, should be subject to extensive regulation). Healthcare is all about helping people in one of the most basic senses. It's not about turning a profit, or at least it shouldn't be, because that kind of prioritization degrades healthcare service. You know, electric companies would be a lot more profitable if they didn't have to string wires out to the rural parts of the country. And if it had been up to private enterprise, those wires wouldn't have been strung in the first place, and certainly not well-maintained. And that would suck for all those people who live out there. But, hey! It'd be more profitable for the electric company, right?
Still, some expansions of Medicaid for indigent people is better than nothing, and some enhancements to undercovered people would do a great deal of good for the world.
I agree with you here (obviously), but I wanted to point out that here, for some reason that I can't figure out, you start referring to Medicaid, which is not the same as Medicare. I wonder if you knew that, and if you know what the basic difference is. Medicaid has been a very helpful program, but enormously expensive to state governments, because state governments just can't do what a national system like Medicare can do—they don't have the scale for it. Medicaid is a flawed premise; it's like forcing every state to build its own aerospace industry when it would be so much obviously better for there to be only a single national aerospace industry—which is the way it actually is. Like airplanes, healthcare is a hugely expensive sector that relies on economies of scale to become more effective. This same line of thinking is why I support globalization in principle, even though I fervently oppose the way it's actually unfolding.
My problem with the public option as promoted by President Obama is that one of two things will happen: 1) Not that many people will go for it, and we'd have invested that much money for nothing or very little results. 2) Too many people will go for it, and with prices that much lower than private insurance companies, the government won't be able to sustain it without raising taxes. If a few more bucks of my money go towards a noble goal like that, then I have no problem.
Your Concern No. 1 is why people are so strongly in favor of a so-called
robust public option. When the centrists proposed not-for-profit co-operatives as an alternative to public insurance, liberals were quick to point out that we have already had the same basic thing in the past, and they were all taken over or pushed out by the for-profit segment from the 1980s onward. That's what happened to Blue Cross Blue Shield. It's not a point of contention that for-profit healthcare insurers will win the day in the free market, because what they do is sell junk insurance, and people keep buying it because they don't realize that it's junk until they need to use it. Well, nowadays they buy it because there are very few non-profit alternatives left. That's what created the chain of events which led to the healthcare crisis that has been building for the past fifteen years or so. Co-ops and other half-assed measures don't stand a chance against the for-profits. Only a well-empowered national public insurance alternative would be able to do it.
That brings me to your Concern No. 2: The public option might become very popular. That's less of a concern than you might think, but you are on to something. It's already a given that public insurance would pick up the poorest people, those who are least able to pay, and the sickest among us. In other words, the public option would, in the short-term, actually serve to enrich the profits of its private competitors—at the expense of taxpayers.
What would happen in the long run is one of two scenarios: If the public option is weak, then it will never be able to overcome these starting disadvantages, and it will become ineffective. On the other hand, if the public option is strong—meaning well-funded, empowered to negotiate with providers, and truly competitive legally—then the superior healthcare access it affords would cause it to become the provider of choice, and we'd end up with a de factor national single-payer system—a much more efficient, effective, accessible, and affordable system than the one we have to day. The insurance industry has been lobbying the government against the public option to the tune of millions of dollars a day for exactly that reason, because under that scenario they would lose out.
But ask yourself: If people
want public health insurance, who gives a damn what the private insurers want? Let 'em rot. If the government can do it better, for more people, for less money, why shouldn't it?
But, 436 people should not be allowed to make that decision unless they have the majority consent of the 300 million people that the represent, which, for whatever reason, they do not.
You are wrong here, my friend, in three ways: First, there are 535 voting seats in Congress, not 436. Second, we elected them to be able to make decisions like that. If we don't like their decisions, we can un-elect them. Third, the vast majority of Americans support healthcare reform. There isn't a single credible poll that has said otherwise. In fact I don't know of any poll at all, credible or not, that has said otherwise. People know that things are screwed up.
The insurance and drug companies aren't raising their prices just to kick more people off of their rolls. They have to make a profit. And putting a price ceiling on insurance isn't viable either, because that will kill private health insurance or make it even more unavailable to everyone, something none of us want, I hope.
Those are arguments against for-profit health insurance. I should be making them, not you.
Since no one's called me out on it, I think we agree that tort reform is a good way to drive down costs.
Yes, I completely agree with you. However, I am loathe to spend time on it, because it's become a right-wing talking point that tort reform is the only healthcare reform we need, which is obscenely wrong. I consider it a distraction.
