Bush Supporters' Aftermath Thread III

I agree that it has nothing to do with health care. Unfortunately, it's health care that I'm interested in discussing, so I leave you to debate the question with others.

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Foxfyre wrote:

Cycloptichorn wrote:
And, my answer?

Cycloptichorn

Remove the straw men from your answer and try again as I suggested Freeduck should remove the straw man from hers.

What? Where did you suggest it and where is my strawman?

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There also were no straw men in my post at all.

But, here is the most basic, sanitized for your protection, easiest-to-respond to answer:

Yes, it is moral for the government to do so, the same way it is moral for the government to make other decisions what to do with your tax monies.

Just because you disagree with a gov't decision, doesn't make it either moral or immoral. Many decisions made by our government have Practicality at their base, and not morality.

Cycloptichorn

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FreeDuck wrote:

Foxfyre wrote:
Cycloptichorn wrote:
And, my answer?

Cycloptichorn

Remove the straw men from your answer and try again as I suggested Freeduck should remove the straw man from hers.

What? Where did you suggest it and where is my strawman?

The straw man was inserting the healthcare issue when the question did not relate to health care.

You see I think we have to be very clear on what we consider to be right and wrong BEFORE we start making policy about anything.

Personal charity I consider to be right in many cases, ill advised in others.
But whatever charity we extend should be our decision. Can you call it charity if you force somebody else to give it?

So the question is a valid one in order for us to have clarity. Is it moral to force Citizen A, who intentionally prepared himself to support himself and does, to support Citizen B who intentionally did not?

Let's answer that and then see how we feel about universal health care and other considerations.

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As you probably know, the classical version of the Ant and the Grasshopper story goes like this:

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.

The Updated Ant and Grasshopper fable:

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. CBS, NBC, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can it be that, in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Then a representative of the NAAGB (The National Association for the Advancement of Green Bugs) shows up on Nightline and charges the ant with "green bias", and makes the case that the grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of greenism. Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when he sings "It's Not Easy Being Green." Bill and Hillary Clinton make a special guest appearance on the CBS Evening News to tell a concerned Dan Rather that they will do everything they can for the grasshopper who has been denied the prosperity he deserves by those who benefited unfairly during the Reagan summers, or as Bill refers to it, the "Temperatures of the 80's." Richard Gephardt exclaims in an interview with Peter Jennings that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his "fair share". Finally, the EEOC drafts the "Economic Equity and Anti-greenism Act," retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government. Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of federal judges that Bill appointed from a list of single-parent welfare moms who can only hear cases on Thursday afternoon between 1:30 and 3:00 PM when there are no talk shows scheduled.

The ant loses the case.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the government house he's in -- which just happens to be the ant's old house -- crumbles around him since he doesn't know how to maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. And on the TV, which the grasshopper bought by selling most of the ant's food, they are showing Bill Clinton standing before a wildly applauding group of Democrats announcing that a new era of "fairness" has dawned in America.

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Foxfyre wrote:

FreeDuck wrote:
Foxfyre wrote:
Cycloptichorn wrote:
And, my answer?

Cycloptichorn

Remove the straw men from your answer and try again as I suggested Freeduck should remove the straw man from hers.

What? Where did you suggest it and where is my strawman?

The straw man was inserting the healthcare issue when the question did not relate to health care.

We were speaking about healthcare, and your post that posed the question was in reply to a post about healthcare. Also, even if it wasn't relevant, irrelevance in and of itself does not render an argument a strawman.

As to the rest of your argument, you've said it's not relevant to health care so I bow out as I'm only discussing healthcare.

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McGentrix wrote:

As you probably know, the classical version of the Ant and the Grasshopper story goes like this:

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.

The Updated Ant and Grasshopper fable:

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. CBS, NBC, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can it be that, in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Then a representative of the NAAGB (The National Association for the Advancement of Green Bugs) shows up on Nightline and charges the ant with "green bias", and makes the case that the grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of greenism. Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when he sings "It's Not Easy Being Green." Bill and Hillary Clinton make a special guest appearance on the CBS Evening News to tell a concerned Dan Rather that they will do everything they can for the grasshopper who has been denied the prosperity he deserves by those who benefited unfairly during the Reagan summers, or as Bill refers to it, the "Temperatures of the 80's." Richard Gephardt exclaims in an interview with Peter Jennings that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his "fair share". Finally, the EEOC drafts the "Economic Equity and Anti-greenism Act," retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government. Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of federal judges that Bill appointed from a list of single-parent welfare moms who can only hear cases on Thursday afternoon between 1:30 and 3:00 PM when there are no talk shows scheduled.

The ant loses the case.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the government house he's in -- which just happens to be the ant's old house -- crumbles around him since he doesn't know how to maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. And on the TV, which the grasshopper bought by selling most of the ant's food, they are showing Bill Clinton standing before a wildly applauding group of Democrats announcing that a new era of "fairness" has dawned in America.

What stupid thing to post.

It really should say: The grasshopper doesn't just die of the cold. Far from it. He makes life for the ants as difficult as possible before he does. Therefore, it is in the ants best interest to share and educate the grasshopper.

Cycloptichorn

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FreeDuck wrote:

Foxfyre wrote:
FreeDuck wrote:
Foxfyre wrote:
Cycloptichorn wrote:
And, my answer?

Cycloptichorn

Remove the straw men from your answer and try again as I suggested Freeduck should remove the straw man from hers.

What? Where did you suggest it and where is my strawman?

The straw man was inserting the healthcare issue when the question did not relate to health care.

We were speaking about healthcare, and your post that posed the question was in reply to a post about healthcare. Also, even if it wasn't relevant, irrelevance in and of itself does not render an argument a strawman.

As to the rest of your argument, you've said it's not relevant to health care so I bow out as I'm only discussing healthcare.

That's cool. I respect your determination to not answer the question. I've never found anybody who tilted very far left who would.

That to me is one of the fundamental differences between modern conservatives and modern liberals. Conservatives say the answer to the question must be factored into whatever policy is ultimately adopted. Liberals won't answer the question but want to go right past it to make policy that will almost always be less effective and efficient, if not downright detrimental, than it would have been had they been willing to take a hard look at the question first.

And that goes for health care along with all other programs.

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Quote:

That's cool. I respect your determination to not answer the question. I've never found anybody who tilted very far left who would.

Hello! I answered your question!

Yes, it is moral for the government to do so, the same way it is moral for the government to make other decisions what to do with your tax monies.

Cycloptichorn

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Foxfyre wrote:

That to me is one of the fundamental differences between modern conservatives and modern liberals. Conservatives say the answer to the question must be factored into whatever policy is ultimately adopted. Liberals won't answer the question but want to go right past it to make policy that will almost always be less effective and efficient, if not downright detrimental, than it would have been had they been willing to take a hard look at the question first.

And that goes for health care along with all other programs.

Either the question has something to do with healthcare or it doesn't. You say it doesn't. I don't see what else there is to it. You admit that the question has nothing to do with the policy, but somehow expect me to believe that the answer to it is a required before you can come up with any solution to the healthcare problem.

Your question isn't central to this problem or any other. It's a made up game question that has no resemblance to reality or anything else that might bear on policy. The answer to that question is the same as the answer to the following: Is it moral for people with no children to be forced to pay for the education of someone else's child? Is it moral for people who don't drive to be forced to pay for highways that they can't use? s it moral for people who don't believe in killing to be forced to pay for war? As cyclops said, this is what governments do. They decide how to spend it once they have it. Some people just can't get over the fact that we're all in this together.

So now that we've had a hard look at an irrelevant question, how about taking a hard look at the actual problem.

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FreeDuck wrote:

Foxfyre wrote:

That to me is one of the fundamental differences between modern conservatives and modern liberals. Conservatives say the answer to the question must be factored into whatever policy is ultimately adopted. Liberals won't answer the question but want to go right past it to make policy that will almost always be less effective and efficient, if not downright detrimental, than it would have been had they been willing to take a hard look at the question first.

And that goes for health care along with all other programs.

Either the question has something to do with healthcare or it doesn't. You say it doesn't. I don't see what else there is to it. You admit that the question has nothing to do with the policy, but somehow expect me to believe that the answer to it is a required before you can come up with any solution to the healthcare problem.

Your question isn't central to this problem or any other. It's a made up game question that has no resemblance to reality or anything else that might bear on policy. The answer to that question is the same as the answer to the following: Is it moral for people with no children to be forced to pay for the education of someone else's child? Is it moral for people who don't drive to be forced to pay for highways that they can't use? s it moral for people who don't believe in killing to be forced to pay for war? As cyclops said, this is what governments do. They decide how to spend it once they have it. Some people just can't get over the fact that we're all in this together.

So now that we've had a hard look at an irrelevant question, how about taking a hard look at the actual problem.

The question has to do with distinguishing between right and wrong, good and bad, positive and negative in the ethics of personal contribution.

If you don't make that distinction up front, how in the world can you develop an ethical health care policy that does not penalize the responsible American for the benefit of the freeloader?

And what incentive is there to encourage people to not be freeloaders?

Once that is decided, THEN we can deal with the consideration that a moral society takes care of those who cannot help themselves.

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Well, if you want to start digging, then you have to get all the way to the bottom. How do you know if someone is a freeloader? How do you determine who is ethical? What should happen if someone who is a freeloader becomes responsible? What should happen if someone who is responsible becomes a freeloader? How do you know if a responsible person is being penalized for the benefit of such "freeloaders"?

Do you consider insurance to be ethical? Insurance spreads its costs over a pool of people, some responsible and some not so. Doesn't that mean that the responsible are being penalized? Does that make it unacceptable? What of my earlier examples of education, highways, etc... do those penalize some for the benefit of others?

We don't develop public policy based on such hypothetical "right and wrong" cases. We develop policy based on the situation as it is, the desired outcome, and the cost (both in dollars and in other intangibles) of the solution. In the case of nationalized health care, the objective would be to ensure that the most people have an as yet undefined minimum reasonable level of health care at a reasonable cost to all citizens and taxpayers. We don't assume that those who cannot currently afford health insurance are irresponsible. Indeed, I take some offense to that having gone many times without insurance for prolonged periods of time because I could not afford it. I don't consider myself "irresponsible" for not being able to afford health care.

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I bumped into a little tidbit the other day in reading "The Father of Spin"...as early as the 30s, the AMA was engaged in public relations campaigns designed to turn public thinking away from universal medical care.

Does anyone know of a single example where a nation has turned to a government sponsored and funded universal medical program and then, after the 'experiment', the citizens of that nation have gone on to reject the program?

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FreeDuck wrote:

Well, if you want to start digging, then you have to get all the way to the bottom. How do you know if someone is a freeloader? How do you determine who is ethical? What should happen if someone who is a freeloader becomes responsible? What should happen if someone who is responsible becomes a freeloader? How do you know if a responsible person is being penalized for the benefit of such "freeloaders"?

Do you consider insurance to be ethical? Insurance spreads its costs over a pool of people, some responsible and some not so. Doesn't that mean that the responsible are being penalized? Does that make it unacceptable? What of my earlier examples of education, highways, etc... do those penalize some for the benefit of others?

We don't develop public policy based on such hypothetical "right and wrong" cases. We develop policy based on the situation as it is, the desired outcome, and the cost (both in dollars and in other intangibles) of the solution. In the case of nationalized health care, the objective would be to ensure that the most people have an as yet undefined minimum reasonable level of health care at a reasonable cost to all citizens and taxpayers. We don't assume that those who cannot currently afford health insurance are irresponsible. Indeed, I take some offense to that having gone many times without insurance for prolonged periods of time because I could not afford it. I don't consider myself "irresponsible" for not being able to afford health care.

We don't develop much public policy based on ethical considerations any more, it's true. Most public policy is now based on how many votes can be bought with the policy.

That has not always been true, however. For well over a hundred years, our government thought it unethical (and unconstitutional) to confiscate wealth from Citizen A in order to provide charity to Citizen B or to provide charity to anybody at all.

And apart from the ethical question, Blatham, no doubt quite unintentionally, offered another good reason why: Once you put an entitlement program into effect, it is virtually impossible to end it no matter how expensive, inefficient, or ineffective it becomes.

So....again, before we turn a full 13 to 15% of the USA private economy over to the government to administer, I personally want those ethical questions addressed.

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Quote:

And apart from the ethical question, Blatham, no doubt quite unintentionally, offered another good reason why: Once you put an entitlement program into effect, it is virtually impossible to end it no matter how expensive, inefficient, or ineffective it becomes.

A misapprehension of the point of that rhetorical question. I asked whether anyone knew of a circumstance where the citizens wished to turn back the clock after developing a universal health care scheme.

It would seem fairly clear that if citizens in nations who have moved to such a system show no (or very little) desire to abandon it once in place, that such systems meet their needs and wishes very well. In such situations, ought their governments to over-rule such favorable citizen consensus in order to match an ideological position?

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Health care in this country was top notch and affordable for most before the government got involved in it. You could usually get in to see the doctor when you needed to and your operation did not need to be postponed for many months or years. And no taxes were confiscated to pay for it. A doctor could afford to charge a small fee for an office visit because he wasn't forced to pay hundreds of thousands in malpractice insurance just to do business.

Given that option, now, I would guess many citizens would take it. But once the government is involved, prices are distorted, and the system is disrupted, it becomes extremely difficult to return it to the private sector.

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Bernie wrote-

Quote:

It would seem fairly clear that if citizens in nations who have moved to such a system show no (or very little) desire to abandon it once in place, that such systems meet their needs and wishes very well. In such situations, ought their governments to over-rule such favorable citizen consensus in order to match an ideological position?

At some point Bernie it becomes necessary, for financial reasons rather than ideological ones, not quite to over-rule such a consensus as to dilute it piecemeal.

This is because it is a well known fact that free medical care has the capacity, such is the nature of the game, to eat up the whole of the financial resources of a nation. Treatment can always be improved and new conditions and research into them has a seemingly infinite capacity to extend endlessly. Fear being the magical ingredient.

Politics in the UK is now driven by the debate over the dilutions and extensions. It's a bear pit actually but the result is fairly satisfactory.

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My twin brother's wife is the chief administrator for three large hospitals in a region of BC. The last decade or so has seen a significant decrease in funding to hospitals and other medical services in the province and as a consequence, many cuts have been forced on all administrators. It is appreciated, in retrospect, that cuts have led to decreases in waste.

Of course, to suggest that a system such as is present now in the US has less waste is usually an ideological argument based on a fairly unreflected faith in efficiencies of a free market system. And there are powerful and wealthy lobbies promoting just such a notion.

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The U.S. health industry is the worst of two worlds - 1/2 funded through private insurance plans and 1/2 funded by the government. As the insurance industry has adapted its methods to conform to the government part of the equation, both are now hopelessly screwed up.

Private insurance overall does do a better job of administraton at least to control fraud, but the artificially high costs driven by the government programs coupled with caps on what the government will pay has pushed private insurance to do all sorts of unhelpful things they would not be doing without that extra influence.

There really does have to be a better way.

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There is Foxy.

Everybody gets a free service and the waiting list problem provides the funding for the impatient. Emergencies excepted under the provisions of the Hippocratic oath.

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Bush Supporters' Aftermath Thread III

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