Obamacare: Fixing the Mess (for 1Bad65)

This one is for 1Bad65....

In another thread you said..

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Reaganomics.

..snip...

Reagan also predicted the USSR would bankrupt themselves, and he was right on that one too.

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Why did the USSR bankrupt themselves? They were unable to match US defense spending, despite having far more commitment by their elites to win the Cold War, more natural resources to call on, a larger population than the US etc.

Well the usual reason given is the lack of price signals in a command economy yielding decreased productivity and growth, increased percentage of GDP in defense spending and wham.. down comes the Berlin Wall.

So that being the case.. let's talk about Obamacare. What's the connection?

Well if Reagan had had his druthers.. he could have attempted diplomacy and "easing of tensions", moved in the direction of disarmament etc. and made it "easier" for the USSR to compete. If he had.. the USSR might still be around.

He choose not to do this. He choose to "up the ante".. believing that the USSR could not "match his stakes".

My question 1Bad65 is this...
Why is American healthcare fundamentally broken.. in such a way that Obama could be elected on a platform of "reforming it" (i.e. socializing it)?

I would suggest 4 fundamental flaws.. all of them connected to "too much government"..
1. The accident of "employer provided insurance"
2. Licensure laws
3. Obesity and it's connections to government agricultural subsidies
4. Intellectual property and it's resulting increased costs for health care.

Think of our present healthcare system as the USSR. It's socialized already.
So do we want to let it slowly meander to the grave (imagine a USSR existing right now in 2010... ).. or "up the ante" Reagan style.. and applaud the commissars and the apparatchik who want to take things in an even more statist direction (knowing this will surely make the whole thing fail faster and give an opportunity for real meaningful change once the vested interests have been broken by their failure)?

What do you think 1Bad65? (if any of those aforementioned 4 fundamental flaws is something you aren't familiar with I'll be happy to explain it).

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Originally Posted by dimethylsea

This one is for 1Bad65....

In another thread you said..


Why did the USSR bankrupt themselves? They were unable to match US defense spending, despite having far more commitment by their elites to win the Cold War, more natural resources to call on, a larger population than the US etc.

Well the usual reason given is the lack of price signals in a command economy yielding decreased productivity and growth, increased percentage of GDP in defense spending and wham.. down comes the Berlin Wall.

So that being the case.. let's talk about Obamacare. What's the connection?

Well if Reagan had had his druthers.. he could have attempted diplomacy and "easing of tensions", moved in the direction of disarmament etc. and made it "easier" for the USSR to compete. If he had.. the USSR might still be around.

He choose not to do this. He choose to "up the ante".. believing that the USSR could not "match his stakes".

My question 1Bad65 is this...
Why is American healthcare fundamentally broken.. in such a way that Obama could be elected on a platform of "reforming it" (i.e. socializing it)?

I would suggest 4 fundamental flaws.. all of them connected to "too much government"..
1. The accident of "employer provided insurance"
2. Licensure laws
3. Obesity and it's connections to government agricultural subsidies
4. Intellectual property and it's resulting increased costs for health care.

Think of our present healthcare system as the USSR. It's socialized already.
So do we want to let it slowly meander to the grave (imagine a USSR existing right now in 2010... ).. or "up the ante" Reagan style.. and applaud the commissars and the apparatchik who want to take things in an even more statist direction (knowing this will surely make the whole thing fail faster and give an opportunity for real meaningful change once the vested interests have been broken by their failure)?

What do you think 1Bad65? (if any of those aforementioned 4 fundamental flaws is something you aren't familiar with I'll be happy to explain it).

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Not ignoring you, but I'll have to hit this later. I just got back from a long weekend, and I've spent a long time on here already. ;)

Props to you for starting a discussion thread, not a fighting one. :)

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Originally Posted by dimethylsea

My question 1Bad65 is this...
Why is American healthcare fundamentally broken.. in such a way that Obama could be elected on a platform of "reforming it" (i.e. socializing it)?

I would suggest 4 fundamental flaws.. all of them connected to "too much government"..
1. The accident of "employer provided insurance"
2. Licensure laws
3. Obesity and it's connections to government agricultural subsidies
4. Intellectual property and it's resulting increased costs for health care.

What do you think 1Bad65? (if any of those aforementioned 4 fundamental flaws is something you aren't familiar with I'll be happy to explain it).

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I'll give this a shot, but I'm no expert on healthcare. I will say however, the less gov't intervention, the better.

I don't think Obama was elected on a platform to reform healthcare. He mentioned it, yes. But it was never the centerpiece of his platform. Actually, he didn't really have one. He just kept saying 'Hope' and 'Change' over and over. He mostly campaigned on 'Im not Bush', and won on that message. Obama said his first act as President would be to overturn a Bush Presidential decree on abortion. He told the truth there.

Now to your points.

1. I don't consider my employer provided insurance an accident. Me and my wife have both had surgeries while under it, and we've been fine. If you want to see an "accident" in terms of employer provided insurance look up the VA.

2. I'm not familiar with this so I cannot comment on it.

3. I don't know about the connection, but I know about both issues by themselves. Obesety is a personal condition. It's up to the individual how they deal with it, the Gov't has no bussiness providing 'free' healthcare to anyone, obese or not. Also, they do not the Consitutional right to dictate our food intake. If we have reproductive rights, we have digestive rights. It cuts both ways. If my wife has the right to suck a child out of her womb, she better **** sure have the right to eat a Big Mac.

As to subsidies, it's not black and white. I will say I don't how on one hand the Federal Government is anti-tobacco and taxes the heck out of it, yet on the other hand they give millions and millions in subsidies to tobacco farmers. It's nuts.

4. Intellectual property deserves just compensation. I work in high tech, and this is an issue we deal with as well, albeit in a different manner. I will say that in no other business besides healthcare are individuals (and companies) that make a breakthrough, design a new product, etc expected to not be compensated as the market dictates they should be compensated. Why is healthcare supposed to be done for free, yet other businesses are ok to profit? Once you take away incentives on anything, many smart minds will leave that industry and seek out other industries where they will be compensated to the degree THEY THEMSELVES feel they deserve. I don't know about you, but I want those smart minds who make life-saving medical breakthroughs to stay in that industry. I don't want someone with that type of intelligence designing better toasters, I'd rather them be designing better artificial hearts for example.

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Originally Posted by 1bad65

Now to your points.

1. I don't consider my employer provided insurance an accident. Me and my wife have both had surgeries while under it, and we've been fine. If you want to see an "accident" in terms of employer provided insurance look up the VA.

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Actually 1Bad65 I am talking about an "accident" in historical terms.
Here is the story. No other major industrialized country in the world relies on "employer-provided health insurance". It's an American oddity.
Why do we do this?
Well it goes back to World War 2. Basically the government had laws that established "wage controls", so that companies wouldn't get in bidding wars for the services of the few employees that were available to hire (most of the men were off fighting the Nazis and Japan). Companies were desperate trying to "out-bid" their competitors for rare and valuable labor.. but were prohibited from raising wages to attract those workers.
So they got the bright idea of offering "fringe benefits". One of those benefits was "healthcare coverage". Time went by and of course the "bennies" got sweeter and sweeter. After WW2 Congress passed laws which made health benefits *exempt* from taxation as income. So it then made sense to a company to get "$100 worth of employee loyalty" for their $100 of health benefits, instead of .. oh say $90 worth of employee loyalty for their $130 worth of taxable wage income.
And that's how "the way it is in America" came to be! Isn't that interesting?
I can substantiate all this btw.. but it's common knowledge and not disputed by anyone.

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2. I'm not familiar with this so I cannot comment on it.

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Here is a quote from Vikay Boyapati
"From its inception, the practice of licensure has been motivated primarily by the control of supply by organized medicine — in particular, the American Medical Association (AMA) — to allow the increase of wages for members of the licensed group."
Basically licensure is meant (by the AMA's own admission) to restrict the supply of doctors and thus raise their wages. The AMA also controls the number of medical schools, and thus has control over the number of new doctors given MDs in the US.

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3. I don't know about the connection,

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Subsidies to farmers for corn and other grains produce more grain and corn than the market would normally demand. These agricultural products are then utilized (because they are cheap) to create two classes of highly dangerous products ...
1. High Fructose Corn Syrup (a sweetener used all over American foods)
and 2.) Animal products, such as feed for beef for slaughter, and feed for dairy cows. These animal products create additional sources of low-nutrient/high-calorie nutrition that make the "cheap food" the most unhealthy in the marketplace.
There is trickle-down effects also.. Grain production is used at low prices (because of those subsidies) to feed poultry and create various bread products, and all the waste from those goes into hog feed and swine production.

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4. Intellectual property deserves just compensation.

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Rather than go into this I will make you a friendly challenge...
If you will read the following book "Against Intellectual Property" (it's a book published by Mises.org) which has a free pdf version on the web...
http://mises.org/resources/3582/Agai...ctual-Property
Then I will read a comparable work (political, ideological) of your choosing.
Tit for tat.

I think you will be challenged by this very cogent analysis of the actual effects of intellectual property laws on the market. He asks , does IP do what you think it does (i.e. give just compensation to the originators of the IP and encourage research, development and growth)?

Again.. read this and I will read a work of your choosing.. you could even be a d*ck and make me read Rush Limbaugh's autobiography :D

First I reject the first occupier rule. It is labor that defines ownership.

If you are walking through the wilderness and come upon some unclaimed land, and say, “this is my land”, and then keep walking, that does not grant you ownership. As soon as you leave, to go to the store or whatever, you can no longer claim to occupy the place.

Homesteading, the act of labor that creates a home to occupy is what grants ownership, and even then it's only for the land occupied by the home. You have to labor to define the boundaries of what your own by putting up a fence, or otherwise working the land. The areas of land near to you that are not worked in some way are claimable by the labor of others, despite whatever idea you held of ownership.

Second I reject that ideas do not lead to conflict over scarce resources.

He claims that property laws are only necessary to resolve conflict, and that no conflict can arise out of ideas because, one person cannot take an idea away from another. However conflict does arise over a scarce resource, born of ideas. That resource is consumers. If you are distributing my idea to others for profit or for free you are taking away from me the scarce resource of consumers that I could sell my idea to. So, there is a conflict that needs to be resolved. Otherwise it is just, a competition of force, the “stronger” guy with the most resources will sell the most books. The author claimed that it was not desirable for someone with better resources to take control of the physical property of another, why would it be ok to take control of their intellectual property through force?

It said he was going to offer up a better alternative, he didn’t. :confused:

SanHeChuan,
If you want to discuss Intellectual Property on it's own merits (theoretically) then another thread would be appropriate and I might debate it with you :D.

But what I'm discussing with 1Bad65 is the PRAGMATIC effects of IP as they relate to healthcare. Which is to say.. which is better for national progress, development and general prosperity and the health outcomes of American citizens.

I know better than to start talking theoreticals and terminology with you in the context of a real-world situation. The last time I did that it did no good whatsoever and raised my blood pressure.

Dime,

Once again I'll have to hit on this later. Work is busy this week. So far, I'm enjoying the converstaion. :)

Fyi, I actually work in new product development at my job. ;)