I should fuck a guy in the ass every time those cunts try to 'pray the gay away'. Then loudly scream "YOU'RE MAKING A STRAIGHT GUY GAY WITH YOUR FAGGOTRY!"
I always had this thought about what the tea party is screaming. They don't want the government to provide insurance, regardless of how the costs are quickly increasing beyond what normal people can afford. And costs are increasing, partially, because of all the people with out insurance going to the emergency rooms and failing to pay. Our laws, and the doctor's oaths, are quite clear that the hospitals can not turn anyone away. So they are stuck in this catch-22, we all are. I guess we could repeal the law that forces hospitals to take people regardless of their ability to pay. We would have to be willing, as a culture, to find nothing wrong with leaving someone at a car crash if the EMT's couldn't find a valid insurance card on the victims. At least hospitals wouldn't have to worry as much trying to recoup their costs!
I seriously wonder some days if the tea bagging crowd really understands what kind of place they would live in without all the regulations and taxes they so abhor. Maybe we should start putting together a travel agency: Tea Party Getaways. "Visit exotic places where the free market runs tree and there are no regulations on anything here in beautiful Somalia! Personal bodyguards are extra, we are not responsible for any loss of life or goods incurred during your visit."
I seriously wonder some days if the tea bagging crowd really understands what kind of place they would live in without all the regulations and taxes they so abhor. Maybe we should start putting together a travel agency: Tea Party Getaways. "Visit exotic places where the free market runs tree and there are no regulations on anything here in beautiful Somalia! Personal bodyguards are extra, we are not responsible for any loss of life or goods incurred during your visit."
But you can't use any government funded airports to get there!
What's really hilarious about this is it sounds like he not only crashed all on his own, but also wasn't wearing a helmet. And he's angry at the first responders for having the audacity to save his stupid life.
They don't want the government to provide insurance, regardless of how the costs are quickly increasing beyond what normal people can afford.
So, this is where I begin to wonder what people are talking about. You are implying that increasing health care is outpacing the average citizen's ability to pay, which is certainly a claim being thrown about these days.
Preposition 1. Citizens (as a general rule) can't afford health insurance. Preposition 2. The government should pay for health insurance. Note 1. The government's money comes from citizens.
If the government has only a portion of the citizens' resources (note 1), and the citizens' pool of resources cannot cover health insurance (prep 1), then that would logically imply the government's pool of resource also cannot cover health insurance (call this prep 3). Prep 2 and Prep 3 are mutually exclusive, which makes Prep 1 combined with Prep 2 a logical fallacy.
The actual solution is to reduce health care expenses and focus on that. I'd say destroy the health insurance racket entirely, allowing only Not For Profit health insurance to exist. Then again, even NFP find loopholes.
EDIT: notice I am not talking about insurance in general. I am talking about anytime the claim is where the "average citizen" cannot afford something, which is far different than "some citizens" cannot afford something. Insurance averages the higher potential to the lower potential, but if that average is higher than the cost at hand, insurance cannot work.
The actual solution is to reduce health care expenses and focus on that.
This assumes that there is only one solution, whereas healthcare is a little more complicated than "just do X."
Also, your base assumptions regarding funding are incorrect. Citizen A's $1 plus Citizen B's $1 plus Citizen C's $1 does not equal $3. They equal $3 minus overhead plus the investment return on that dollar. Governments do not only use money; a substantial sum comes from interest on investments, bonds issued, and money borrowed -- all of which are predicated on the idea that a larger entity can negotiate more favorable returns than a smaller one. For example, let's say a city collects $1 million in income taxes, uses $900,000 for expenses, and banks $100,000 with a five percent return. The government has generated $5,000 on its tax revenue that the individual did not have.
The government has generated $5,000 on its tax revenue that the individual did not have.
The money came from somewhere, ultimately. Did it come from the people, or did it come from the government (which got it from .. the people)?
When money doesn't come from citizens, it is either imported from other nations (which can definitely help), or it is inflationary and thus meaningless when compared to the fixed pool of total resources.
Inflation is apparently "good" for currency because it allows people to divide the fixed pool cap with more granularity. However, inflation never changes the fixed resource limit itself.
This assumes that there is only one solution, whereas healthcare is a little more complicated than "just do X."
The solution is to reduce medical expenses, period. What other solutions are there? There are a million ways to accomplish a reduction in medical expenses, I'll list three off the top of my head: Reduce doctor liability to reduce doctor's being-sued insurance premiums, decrease the expense of medical schools (which has a million of its own potential solutions) so that doctors aren't in hundreds of thousands of dollars debt upon beginning work, change the normal practice of doctors seeing the patients to only bringing in the doctors as needed (the nurse to doctor ratio is quite high and we should exploit this fact to reduce cost), etc.
EDIT: I only touched on reducing expenses due to doctors, as I see this as a primary healthcare concern. health care expenses can be further reduced by improvements in general wellbeing of the populace through education and regular checkups (an increase in healthcare that should reduce the ultimate cost of healthcare down the road). I won't even touch the pharmaceutical expenses. These are all medical expenses which can be reduced, and ultimately this increase in accessibility due to reduced cost is how we increase medical attention for the people who need it.
You're right; reducing expenses is an inherent part of the solution. But it's not a silver bullet.
The money came from somewhere, ultimately. Did it come from the people, or did it come from the government (which got it from .. the people)?
It came from investment. Fiat money is made up. It's not static, and it grows to accommodate demand. How much money* do you think there is in circulation?
*Don't forget to count bank accounts, credit card debt, collections accounts, interest, stocks, bonds, coinage, etc.
To answer your question directly, it came from "The People," but not in the way you think. It didn't come from the originating taxpayer. It didn't come from Grandma Curly. It came from someone other than Granny taking advantage of the opportunity cost against gains. The economy isn't a limited pot of money, and when one person takes some another person loses it. There's no limited amount of cheese. You can put one piece of cheese in the pot and get two out. This is what stocks do. This is the difference between the Dow today at 12,500 and at 10,000 tomorrow.
They don't want the government to provide insurance, regardless of how the costs are quickly increasing beyond what normal people can afford.
So, this is where I begin to wonder what people are talking about. You are implying that increasing health care is outpacing the average citizen's ability to pay, which is certainly a claim being thrown about these days.
Preposition 1. Citizens (as a general rule) can't afford health insurance. Preposition 2. The government should pay for health insurance. Note 1. The government's money comes from citizens.
If the government has only a portion of the citizens' resources (note 1), and the citizens' pool of resources cannot cover health insurance (prep 1), then that would logically imply the government's pool of resource also cannot cover health insurance (call this prep 3). Prep 2 and Prep 3 are mutually exclusive, which makes Prep 1 combined with Prep 2 a logical fallacy.
The actual solution is to reduce health care expenses and focus on that. I'd say destroy the health insurance racket entirely, allowing only Not For Profit health insurance to exist. Then again, even NFP find loopholes.
EDIT: notice I am not talking about insurance in general. I am talking about anytime the claim is where the "average citizen" cannot afford something, which is far different than "some citizens" cannot afford something. Insurance averages the higher potential to the lower potential, but if that average is higher than the cost at hand, insurance cannot work.
Okay, lets take me for example. I work in a small business, which I am told employs most of the US. To cover just me, with a 5k deductible, it costs 130/month. Not a whole lot. The same family plan is 450/month. Median Household income for NYS is 54k/year. So for a plan that's had a 5k deductible you'd have to pay 10% of your households income, IF you were at the median for the state. If you were in the bottom 50% of households here in NYS, which most of the people where I work are, that percentage gets much higher. So essentially the median, not the average mind you, family here would have to shell out nearly 20% of their yearly income before the insurance here would even kick in.
Now to tackle your logical fallacy point. You forget that the nearly 40% of the wealth in the US is owned by 1% of the US population and that the bottom 40% owns less than 1% of the wealth. Your point would make sense IF the wealth distribution was even in the Us but it is not, not by a long shot.
Does the top 10% complain about paying for 80% of the taxes in the country as well? With that we know that the vast majority of people do not fund the US Government at all. IIRC nearly 40% of people don't make enough money to to start paying taxes!
Your prepositions come with many prepositions of their own.
Now to tackle your logical fallacy point. You forget that the nearly 40% of the wealth in the US is owned by 1% of the US population and that the bottom 40% owns less than 1% of the wealth
You are implying that increasing health care is outpacing the average citizen's ability to pay, which is certainly a claim being thrown about these days.
I think, in this case, you are speaking about the median citizen's income vs the mean citizen's income. The basis for preposition 1 would then be false. I tried to very clearly delimit the underlying assumptions, but "average" is ambiguous. When anyone in the media uses it, they generally imply "mean" as opposed to "median".
If the mean citizen's wealth is not enough to cover medical costs, then health insurance cannot work even if all citizens subscribe. Mathematically, it just doesn't make sense.
If the median citizen's wealth is not enough to cover medical costs, then health insurance might still work, so long as the mean citizen's wealth is enough to cover it (and enough citizens are participating).
EDIT: My real point here was that the claim being made about average citizen's not being able to afford medical costs is generally not an argument for health insurance, but rather an argument for reduced medical cost.
To answer your question directly, it came from "The People," but not in the way you think. It didn't come from the originating taxpayer.
This is imaginary money that is invented by way of inflation. All my arguments regarding inflation apply. The true resource pool of finite resources (food, water, number of people, lifetime of people, goods, services) has not changed, while investments made profit by creating additional wealth that was not previously present.
EDIT: I understand economics theory, but much of it utilizes imaginary things that are not real. For example, the housing market sold "location", a good location was worth more for reasons of safety and things making it real: these are tenable costs in the long term. Getting robbed costs money. However, the emotional need is what the markets inflated with, which is imaginary. Eventually houses were unaffordable because they outstripped the ability for a normal person to buy a normal house. I won't touch the whole loan issue. My point is, imaginary increase is just that, regardless of how modern economic norms might teach otherwise. When imagination collides with reality, we see the results repeatedly in recent history.
Double EDIT: This is also why I argue against DMCA. Anything that can be nearly infinitely reproduced with nearly trivial cost, yet has non-trivial cost attached, must force the theoretical resource pool to escape to infinity (although practically it is limited by the consumption of said near infinite resource). This is simply out of line with reality; it gets away from what currency is supposed to do and represent, in my opinion. But I'm not an economics professor.
You are implying that increasing health care is outpacing the average citizen's ability to pay, which is certainly a claim being thrown about these days.
I think, in this case, you are speaking about the median citizen's income vs the mean citizen's income. In that case, the basis for preposition 1 is false. I tried to very clearly delimit the underlying assumptions, but "average" is ambiguous. When anyone in the media uses it, they generally imply "mean" as opposed to "median".
If the mean citizen's wealth is not enough to cover medical costs, then health insurance cannot work.
If the median citizen's wealth is not enough to cover medical costs, then health insurance can only work if the mean citizen's wealth is enough to cover it, and all citizens are participating.It's hard to use the average here when talking about what the man on the street can afford. The average income is some 40% more than the median because of the unequal income distribution.
It also becomes even less meaningful to your argument when you take in account that we tax income progressively. The top 10% scream that they pay 70% of the taxes. Given that the bottom 40%, effectively, do not pay any taxes then the average man on the street has very little to do with paying the government any money!
The "average" citizen in this country makes far more than the majority of his fellow citizens.
My real point here was that the claim being made about average citizen's not being able to afford medical costs is generally not an argument for health insurance, but rather an argument for reduced medical cost.
My point was that part of the reason why costs are so high is because hospitals are forced to take patients that can not pay. One of the easiest ways to reduce costs is to allow them to turn away those who can not pay.
To do otherwise is to continue to subsidize the healthcare of the poor. And by poor I mean the bottom 40% of earners.
Also, nearly every other nation on the planet has government provided healthcare system that is in general cheaper and provides better out comes. That's how the rest of the world has reduced costs.
@Ryan - I'm jumping in late here, but I don't think the plan was "make the government pay for insurance" as much as it was "the government will make it's own insurance agency that would cover people for a lot less than the insurance companies would". The insurance companies lost their shit and bought a ton of politicians. They were afraid that it would drive them out of business, which isn't the case. They would only go out of business if they decided that their executives needed millions of dollars and their investors deserved giant payouts. Their bottom line is money, not the health of their policy holders. That's what has caused so many issues. If an insurance company could make you pay a few hundred dollars a month, and then not actually ever pay anything besides a copay here and there, that's what they'd do.
We moved away from the gold standard for a good reason.
It only represented one resource. Exporting gold would have meant there was less currency, even though we might import as much value in silver. Resources weren't actually lost per ce, but the resource profile changed. Currency based on resources is still a solid idea, but it must represent all resources. As soon as non-finite resources are represented by currency (e.g. we print more money because we need more money, or that mp3 is worth $3 but there are theoretically infinite copies of it), the currency will lose its usefulness as these infinite resources take up more and more of the resource pool for which currency is supposed to represent. Time might be considered an infinite resource, but a person can only do so much in a certain amount of time and a man's lifetime is only so long; thus even time as measured by its person-utility is quite finite.
"the government will make it's own insurance agency that would cover people for a lot less than the insurance companies would"
In principle, this could be a very good idea. The gov't creates a provider that doesn't have profit motive, so it doesn't screw all its clients. It must be careful about subsidizing, though. Not too much, not too little.
Their bottom line is money, not the health of their policy holders.
QFT.
The problem with gov't as a provider is this:
The insurance companies lost their shit and bought a ton of politicians.
They would thus still control any gov't created provider by these means. And most likely, they would imbalance the subsidy to either make the gov't funded provider look wasteful or not competitive with private insurance (and thus not worth its cost).
Okay I'm going to pose a question to people who believe currency should not at all represent resources, because I'd like to better understand the thinking that a majority of people seem to share.
Assume we can steal energy from various stars, we have energy-to-matter converters and matter-to-energy converters. The resources as being distinguished become fairly moot with the exception of total energy quanta (including accounting for matter with E=MC^2).
Does currency still hold a place, to what end, and how is its value determined?
(I follow ST:TNG view: currency goes away, but maybe that's not realistic)
(I follow ST:TNG view: currency goes away, but maybe that's not realistic)
The Federation still had credits and still traded using gold-pressed latinum.
Duh.
Srsly? *furiously searches Google* Nooooo! but wait ... "the term has never been used on-screen and is thus considered non-canon." *whew* I almost thought I got my ST knowledge wrong. That would be a serious faux pas!
So barter system is out?
For a modern economy, yeah.
To interpret modern economy as world-wide economy, I'd say I'll give you three pigs for your two goats; if you accept, I give you three pigs worth of moneys, which you convert into three pigs, and you give me two goats worth of moneys, which I convert into two goats, err wait, why did we exchange our moneys? You owe me two goats, George! I'll FedEx you the pigs.
Fame will become currency when there are no restrictions on resources.
Wow, so we could model all currency in that future by power law Given my current trends, I'd be on the far right. Poor, poor me.
EDIT: At this point, my response is Nine-esque, because obviously there isn't much more sense in defending myself without creating a whole new thread, and I just don't care that much. Back to Republicans/politics!
To interpret modern economy as world-wide economy, I'd say I'll give you three pigs for your two goats; if you accept, I give you three pigs worth of moneys, which you convert into three pigs, and you give me two goats worth of moneys, which I convert into two goats, err wait, why did we exchange our moneys? You owe me two goats, George! I'll FedEx you the pigs.
Comments
So they are stuck in this catch-22, we all are. I guess we could repeal the law that forces hospitals to take people regardless of their ability to pay. We would have to be willing, as a culture, to find nothing wrong with leaving someone at a car crash if the EMT's couldn't find a valid insurance card on the victims.
At least hospitals wouldn't have to worry as much trying to recoup their costs!
I seriously wonder some days if the tea bagging crowd really understands what kind of place they would live in without all the regulations and taxes they so abhor. Maybe we should start putting together a travel agency: Tea Party Getaways. "Visit exotic places where the free market runs tree and there are no regulations on anything here in beautiful Somalia! Personal bodyguards are extra, we are not responsible for any loss of life or goods incurred during your visit."
Preposition 1. Citizens (as a general rule) can't afford health insurance.
Preposition 2. The government should pay for health insurance.
Note 1. The government's money comes from citizens.
If the government has only a portion of the citizens' resources (note 1), and the citizens' pool of resources cannot cover health insurance (prep 1), then that would logically imply the government's pool of resource also cannot cover health insurance (call this prep 3). Prep 2 and Prep 3 are mutually exclusive, which makes Prep 1 combined with Prep 2 a logical fallacy.
The actual solution is to reduce health care expenses and focus on that. I'd say destroy the health insurance racket entirely, allowing only Not For Profit health insurance to exist. Then again, even NFP find loopholes.
EDIT: notice I am not talking about insurance in general. I am talking about anytime the claim is where the "average citizen" cannot afford something, which is far different than "some citizens" cannot afford something. Insurance averages the higher potential to the lower potential, but if that average is higher than the cost at hand, insurance cannot work.
Also, your base assumptions regarding funding are incorrect. Citizen A's $1 plus Citizen B's $1 plus Citizen C's $1 does not equal $3. They equal $3 minus overhead plus the investment return on that dollar. Governments do not only use money; a substantial sum comes from interest on investments, bonds issued, and money borrowed -- all of which are predicated on the idea that a larger entity can negotiate more favorable returns than a smaller one. For example, let's say a city collects $1 million in income taxes, uses $900,000 for expenses, and banks $100,000 with a five percent return. The government has generated $5,000 on its tax revenue that the individual did not have.
When money doesn't come from citizens, it is either imported from other nations (which can definitely help), or it is inflationary and thus meaningless when compared to the fixed pool of total resources.
Inflation is apparently "good" for currency because it allows people to divide the fixed pool cap with more granularity. However, inflation never changes the fixed resource limit itself. The solution is to reduce medical expenses, period. What other solutions are there? There are a million ways to accomplish a reduction in medical expenses, I'll list three off the top of my head:
Reduce doctor liability to reduce doctor's being-sued insurance premiums, decrease the expense of medical schools (which has a million of its own potential solutions) so that doctors aren't in hundreds of thousands of dollars debt upon beginning work, change the normal practice of doctors seeing the patients to only bringing in the doctors as needed (the nurse to doctor ratio is quite high and we should exploit this fact to reduce cost), etc.
EDIT: I only touched on reducing expenses due to doctors, as I see this as a primary healthcare concern. health care expenses can be further reduced by improvements in general wellbeing of the populace through education and regular checkups (an increase in healthcare that should reduce the ultimate cost of healthcare down the road). I won't even touch the pharmaceutical expenses. These are all medical expenses which can be reduced, and ultimately this increase in accessibility due to reduced cost is how we increase medical attention for the people who need it.
*Don't forget to count bank accounts, credit card debt, collections accounts, interest, stocks, bonds, coinage, etc.
To answer your question directly, it came from "The People," but not in the way you think. It didn't come from the originating taxpayer. It didn't come from Grandma Curly. It came from someone other than Granny taking advantage of the opportunity cost against gains. The economy isn't a limited pot of money, and when one person takes some another person loses it. There's no limited amount of cheese. You can put one piece of cheese in the pot and get two out. This is what stocks do. This is the difference between the Dow today at 12,500 and at 10,000 tomorrow.
Now to tackle your logical fallacy point. You forget that the nearly 40% of the wealth in the US is owned by 1% of the US population and that the bottom 40% owns less than 1% of the wealth. Your point would make sense IF the wealth distribution was even in the Us but it is not, not by a long shot.
Does the top 10% complain about paying for 80% of the taxes in the country as well? With that we know that the vast majority of people do not fund the US Government at all. IIRC nearly 40% of people don't make enough money to to start paying taxes!
Your prepositions come with many prepositions of their own.
If the mean citizen's wealth is not enough to cover medical costs, then health insurance cannot work even if all citizens subscribe. Mathematically, it just doesn't make sense.
If the median citizen's wealth is not enough to cover medical costs, then health insurance might still work, so long as the mean citizen's wealth is enough to cover it (and enough citizens are participating).
EDIT: My real point here was that the claim being made about average citizen's not being able to afford medical costs is generally not an argument for health insurance, but rather an argument for reduced medical cost.
EDIT: I understand economics theory, but much of it utilizes imaginary things that are not real. For example, the housing market sold "location", a good location was worth more for reasons of safety and things making it real: these are tenable costs in the long term. Getting robbed costs money. However, the emotional need is what the markets inflated with, which is imaginary. Eventually houses were unaffordable because they outstripped the ability for a normal person to buy a normal house. I won't touch the whole loan issue. My point is, imaginary increase is just that, regardless of how modern economic norms might teach otherwise. When imagination collides with reality, we see the results repeatedly in recent history.
Double EDIT: This is also why I argue against DMCA. Anything that can be nearly infinitely reproduced with nearly trivial cost, yet has non-trivial cost attached, must force the theoretical resource pool to escape to infinity (although practically it is limited by the consumption of said near infinite resource). This is simply out of line with reality; it gets away from what currency is supposed to do and represent, in my opinion. But I'm not an economics professor.
If the mean citizen's wealth is not enough to cover medical costs, then health insurance cannot work.
If the median citizen's wealth is not enough to cover medical costs, then health insurance can only work if the mean citizen's wealth is enough to cover it, and all citizens are participating.It's hard to use the average here when talking about what the man on the street can afford. The average income is some 40% more than the median because of the unequal income distribution.
It also becomes even less meaningful to your argument when you take in account that we tax income progressively. The top 10% scream that they pay 70% of the taxes. Given that the bottom 40%, effectively, do not pay any taxes then the average man on the street has very little to do with paying the government any money!
The "average" citizen in this country makes far more than the majority of his fellow citizens.
To do otherwise is to continue to subsidize the healthcare of the poor. And by poor I mean the bottom 40% of earners.
Also, nearly every other nation on the planet has government provided healthcare system that is in general cheaper and provides better out comes. That's how the rest of the world has reduced costs.
The problem with gov't as a provider is this: They would thus still control any gov't created provider by these means. And most likely, they would imbalance the subsidy to either make the gov't funded provider look wasteful or not competitive with private insurance (and thus not worth its cost).
Assume we can steal energy from various stars, we have energy-to-matter converters and matter-to-energy converters. The resources as being distinguished become fairly moot with the exception of total energy quanta (including accounting for matter with E=MC^2).
Does currency still hold a place, to what end, and how is its value determined?
(I follow ST:TNG view: currency goes away, but maybe that's not realistic)
Fame will become currency when there are no restrictions on resources.
Duh.
EDIT: At this point, my response is Nine-esque, because obviously there isn't much more sense in defending myself without creating a whole new thread, and I just don't care that much. Back to Republicans/politics!