posted
In your example, that wasn't the issue at all. Drawing a comparison between the two is comparing apples to oranges.
quote:cheaper than any private insurance can offer coverage.
But not currently right? That's the whole point of the public option. Private insurance could offer cheaper coverage, maybe even cheap enough to beat a public option's price, but they aren't going to lower their prices out of sheer good will. The public option is as much a crowbar as it is useful in its own right.
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quote: Ohh, okay. I see what you're saying, but I think you're off the mark.
I am off the mark, unless the public option turns out to be cheaper than any private insurance can offer coverage.
Why read this and ignore everything else he just posted? The reasons the program in Hawaii was canceled was that it was a *free program* that was underfunded and turned out to be too expensive. Makes perfect sense considering it provided an incentive not to buy insurance, and was completely taxpayer funded, making it an automatic political and practical loser. Big shocker. That's exactly what the article tells you. Single payer is not free. Ergo, you are off the mark when you talk about "Universal Health Care" (the child part you ignored in referencing it, btw) as if there is only one way to do it.
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quote: But not currently right? That's the whole point of the public option. Private insurance could offer cheaper coverage, maybe even cheap enough to beat a public option's price, but they aren't going to lower their prices out of sheer good will. The public option is as much a crowbar as it is useful in its own right.
So would allowing private companies to compete across state lines but we already agree on that. My concern is that a public option needs to be done right. If it is done poorly, like Hawaii, that will create a nightmare. Simply providing a 'public option' without a lot of preplanning will have many unintended consequences. We already talked about how to fund it and somehow I don't think Congress is going to get it right. There are 5 bills out there, and I wonder how much time we will have to review whatever final bill comes of all of this.
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Conferencing on something this contentious could take some time, and then it'll head right to the president to sign, assuming it survives another vote.
I agree that it has to be done right, but Hawaii's system has some obvious pitfalls that have already been addressed, and I know this because we have a national SCHIP program now that was passed back when Obama first entered office, and it isn't having any of the funding issues that Hawaii's system had, mostly because who can participate is far more limited. Likewise funding the public option would also be very different.
Looking at poorly designed plans is a great way to make sure we get it done right in the future, and the fact that we A. Have good models to choose from, and B. Had a failed model like Hawaii and have since see revised models come out shows that we have the ability to adapt, and aren't inherently flawed.
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quote: Remember, this is the United States. It is unacceptable for so many of our friends and neighbors to be uninsured. It is unacceptable for someone to declare bankruptcy and lose his house because he got sick.
The United States isn't about making sure no one suffers. It's about giving people the freedom to succeed or fail. Living without risk kind of kills the soul.
Indeed, the cost of healthcare is a problem. But putting us further in debt in order to fix it while also adding fines and taxes to businesses and individuals isn't a sound solution.
As for OSC's World Watch, I loved his essay on unions. I thought it was well-reasoned.
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quote:Indeed, the cost of healthcare is a problem. But putting us further in debt in order to fix it while also adding fines and taxes to businesses and individuals isn't a sound solution.
Sure it is. The notion that the United States is about giving people the chance to succeed or fail on their own is crap. Much touted, ballyhooed crap. In reality, the US government has had zero problems using tax dollars to prop up business at the expense of the average citizen. What did that lead to? Mass unrest, rioting, industrial chaos. Eventually government figured out that pissing off the average American worker in the name of business wasn't a sound long term solution, so they went back the other way and started to regulate business for the first time, and you know what happened? Unparalleled stability in the US market, followed by the sharpest series of rises in American wealth and purchasing power.
The government hasn't been about a level playing field from day one, and the notion that they are is a fantasy, right up there with America being a land of freedom and equality. It's part of our national mythos, but I'd like think we're all smart enough here to argue the issue intelligently, rather than resorting to useless slogans.
I've seen no proof that this will put us further into debt, but even if it did, it would come with long term benefits both financially, and by making us healthier. It reduces costs across the country, as our fat, unhealthy little country pays a prohibitive portion of our GDP on health care costs. It's a long term landmine that the vaunted capitalistic system isn't designed to fix.
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quote:Sure it is. The notion that the United States is about giving people the chance to succeed or fail on their own is crap. Much touted, ballyhooed crap.
When you actually look at the numbers and metrics like upwards class mobility, financial empowerment, and the propensity of the economic environment to be conductive to individual economic ventures, most of the european nations are significantly better at providing "The American Dream" than America is.
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quote: Indeed, perhaps the most significant reason Americans are drowning in health care debt may shock you: Americans are getting far too much unnecessary care. Of our total $2.3 trillion health care bill last year, a whopping $500 billion to $700 billion was spent on treatments, tests, and hospitalizations that did nothing to improve our health. Even worse, new evidence suggests that too much health care may actually be killing us. According to estimates by Elliott Fisher, M.D., a noted Dartmouth researcher, unnecessary care leads to the deaths of as many as 30,000 Medicare recipients annually.
This gives me a lot of concern that we will indeed have even higher costs as more and more overtesting and overtreatments are performed.
quote: and by making us healthier.
I don't see how improving health care will make Americans, in general, less fat or even healthier overall. Overall, too many Americans lead, for lack of a better term, an obese lifestyle whether they have health insurance or not. Further down in the article they explain more about why doctors overtreat or overtest their patients. I do want to improve how health insurance works but I do not believe we will become healthier overall as a result.
quote: The notion that the United States is about giving people the chance to succeed or fail on their own is crap.
Maybe we interpert this differently. Everyone does have a chance to succeed, some 'starting' chances are higher than others but the chance has more to do with the individual person (personal drive, motivation, luck) than being handed down from the Government. People can start their own businesses and become 'successful'. Lots of people try and don't make it for many reasons. The government, federal, state, or local can certainly assist in starting a business or whatever it is someone wants to do but they are not the only source. There are hundreds of other ways to start a business. Not every job will be a high paying job though and high pay is certainly not everyone's definition of success. Plus it's only a chance. There is nothing that says you will succeed but you do always have a chance to change your current circumstances. It may take months or years to change your current circumstances but it can be done. I equate it a lot with weight loss. At it's most basic, if calories expended is greater than calories consumed then you must lose weight. A very simple concept that is very complex and difficult to achieve. Some of the people I have worked with simply say they cannot lose weight no matter what they do. The problem, in my experience, is with the individual person. They make choices all the time that they know are 'wrong' if you want to lose weight yet they knowingly continue to make those choices. I do understand that is another simple statement and making those choices is very complex.
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quote:This gives me a lot of concern that we will indeed have even higher costs as more and more overtesting and overtreatments are performed.
Reducing defensive medicine and inflated medical costs is a chief goal of revamping the health care infrastructure of the country, and it goes way, way beyond simple health insurance. A major focus of the new outlook on healthcare is on preventative care, in other words, lifestyle choices. As far as over treatment, why do you think this will lead to more? Is that a random gut feeling, or are you basing it on anything specific?
Personally I think the changes that Obama himself has pointed to in the health care field are very promising if your goal is to increase health and reduce costs. The Mayo Clinic, as well as a health care system I can't remember the name of in central Pennsylvania among others have totally revamped the way they offer health care. Electronic medical records drastically cut down on accidental deaths, as you know, and that's a key feature of the new bill. There's an article in TIME I would suggest that I'll link to later when I have more time to find it that I think you should read about where Obama might like to take us, as far as a total overhaul goes, and I think it WILL make us healthier, and it will cost less, because it's not an a la carte system designed to squeeze as many high cost tests out of the system as possible.
Right now the focus is swirling around the insurance half, but the actual care half is getting far less attention than it should. I expect that will be the next debate, and I expect it too will be heated, but absolutely critical.
Anyway, to more directly address the block you quoted: Yes, that's a concern. I see nothing inherent in the new legislation being proposed to suggest that it will get WORSE with what is being proposed. Do you?
quote:I don't see how improving health care will make Americans, in general, less fat or even healthier overall. Overall, too many Americans lead, for lack of a better term, an obese lifestyle whether they have health insurance or not. Further down in the article they explain more about why doctors overtreat or overtest their patients. I do want to improve how health insurance works but I do not believe we will become healthier overall as a result.
Because health care until now has focused on responsive rather than preventative methods of treating Americans. We'd much rather hack off a limb than make sure someone keeps their diabetes under control, despite the fact that the amputation is far more expensive. I think if insurance is expanded to cover preventative care, people will take advantage of it, and will live healthier lives, but currently don't have full access to the tools to do so.
quote:Maybe we interpert this differently. Everyone does have a chance to succeed, some 'starting' chances are higher than others but the chance has more to do with the individual person (personal drive, motivation, luck) than being handed down from the Government.
I'm going to refer to you as Horatio Alger for the remainder of this thread.
I get why this is a popular assertion, but it's just not true. It WAS true (by and large) until the 1860s or so, and then took a nosedive. Why? Because back then, the capital necessary to start a business, such as they were, was considerably smaller, and being "successful" meant having a piece of land that you farmed yourself, which was pretty easy with the US government clearing the land of their native populations at an astonishing clip. But what happened in the middle of the 19th century? Corporations arose and accumulated massive sums of wealth to themselves. Now, this in itself wouldn't necessarily be a problem. The problem was the tools the average citizen had to combat this.
What do you do? Get an education. Okay, how? This was back when the population of the American people that went to school was measured in single digits as a percentage of the total population. It was primarily an avenue for the wealthy, why? Because the average person couldn't afford it, and the government didn't give out loans for it. So okay, there's a pretty large avenue of advancement cut off to the average person. Next, get a job, save up! This was difficult when the idea of a "living wage" was a hotly contested issue mostly dismissed by the US government. The idea that the government should step in to mandate a wage that would allow the average person to simply get by was anathema to most people in government, ans especially in industry. Well then, if the government won't step in, we'll just do it ourselves! So people did the same thing that corporations do: They banded together to use their collective power to force higher wages out of corporations in the form of strikes and boycotts. After all, if corporations can band together for monetary reasons, why can't people band together to use their power, which in this case was labor?
The answer to that question isn't easily answerable, but the government response is well documented. They sided with business without question for a good 40 years. They issued injunctions to shut down labor, they sent in troops to beat peaceful demonstrators, they killed hundreds of protesters and then blamed the whole mess on labor to give them a bad image. It was impossible to amass any sort of savings when rents were being jacked up by cruel landlords, wages never rose, and banks tended to fail at alarming rates. Add to that banking regulations in the 20s and 30s that more or less outlawed ethnic and local banks that until that point had been the only avenue for insular communities to amass wealth and you complete the difficult picture.
You know what the first cases tried under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act were? They were cases that attacked labor has having created an unfair trust within the labor market to obstruct competition. Now, arguably they actually had a tiny bit of a point when it came to attacks on scab labor, when they happened, but a law that was ostensibly passed to protect the average America was first used to ATTACK the average American before it was ever even applied to big business.
The popular song in American society is that anyone who has the ability and tries hard can succeed because there's a level playing field. But until the post-world war two era, there was nothing even close to an even playing field, and it was the government who subverted efforts to make it so.
When did America become a place where people had a better chance to survive? The last couple decades really. Over the objections of a lot of the people you support, Horatio, government stepped in with unparalleled efforts to extend to the average American a helping hand, to really give them a chance to climb out of their collective holes and make something of themselves. This is generally viewed as a handout or some other derogatory term from the Right. The truth of the matter is that America is still climbing out of the hole that we spent a century building for ourselves, and every person doesn't have a real chance at success.
Perhaps where we diverge the most is on defining what a "real" chance at success is, and I suspect that your definition would be a great deal more inclusive than mine. You might say that it's not fair that a black kid from the inner city of Detroit has a worse chance of success than does a white kid from Beverly Hills, but it's our legacy of hostility towards this equality of opportunity that has created the situation where the black kid is likely to have been killed before he even gets to college, whereas the white kid is probably prepping for the Ivy League. I'm more than willing to account for generational progress. I think as a society we don't and shouldn't guarantee that everyone can become a millionaire. It's okay if your father is a janitor, and you get a college degree, and then your kid goes to law school, and your granddaughter ends up as the CEO of a big company or owns their own company. We do these things in stages. But when you have a system that was designed from its inception to be hostile to the average worker, a couple decades of efforts in the other direction aren't going to be good enough to dig you out of the hole.
The idea that an Einstein or a Mozart could have been born in Compton and could have risen out of their surroundings due to hard work and talent ignores far too many competing factors. Not everyone has a chance. Not everyone can work hard and succeed. That's not America.
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I don't know who said there was a "level playing field" in the U.S. No one did. But, yes, everyone has a chance to succeed.
Not everyone is going to get rich, and some of us will have to work a lot harder to get anywhere, but the opportunity is there.
quote:But when you have a system that was designed from its inception to be hostile to the average worker, a couple decades of efforts in the other direction aren't going to be good enough to dig you out of the hole.
In Orson Scott Card's article about the unions, the point he made was that a good solution can be taken too far.
The same government that you claim subverted all efforts to level the playing field decades ago has now swung sharply in the opposite direction, to the point where it intends to force a level playing field via "social justice."
How far is that going to go?
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quote:Originally posted by FoolishTook: Not everyone is going to get rich, and some of us will have to work a lot harder to get anywhere, but the opportunity is there.
By that metric, the opportunity for success exists in every society. Out of the one side of your mouth you admit and even opine a systemic bias in the US, and out of the other, you proclaim that it matters not! We still have our chances! Think about it- a wealthy and empowered class exists in virtually every society throughout the world and throughout history. And every single member of every single such class comes from circumstances, at some remove, similar to that of their society's most common and powerless people. Now, you may venerate the rich and powerful as examples hard work and sacrifice, but in so doing you must also acknowledge that either a) their unique circumstances placed them in a position to attain success, or b) they are inherently superior to others in similar situations, and so succeeded where others failed. I don't subscribe to that latter brand of social Darwinism, because unnumbered examples of successful individuals prove that a person's unique circumstances are vital to their success within their society. I have yet to come across an exception, and for every bootstrap story I have heard, I have heard an equally convincing explanation that placed a person's circumstances, dire as they might appear to be on the surface, as positively vital to their later successes.
So, I want a society that promotes broad access not only to the opportunity for advancement, but to the elements of life that lead us to advance ourselves. The "level playing field" is not about retarding the progress of the inherently advantaged individual, but trying to increase the advantages enjoyed by every person in the fields of education, health care, and culture.
quote: The same government that you claim subverted all efforts to level the playing field decades ago has now swung sharply in the opposite direction, to the point where it intends to force a level playing field via "social justice."
Do tell us where you think this is happening. Really, I'm intrigued as to what this might mean. First, I would like to know, to which government of the now you referring? The current administration, which is 10 months old? The previous administration, which pursued a policy of supply side economics proven to increase disparity of wealth? If the current administration, then which policies have shown that the government has "swung sharply" toward a pursuit of "social justice?"
Personally, I don't believe there has *ever* been a government with a policy that authentically pursued social justice. I don't think it can be done, nor would I want it to be done, if for no other reason, than it would be a fool's errand. Really, do explain to us why the government actually believes in social justice, and further explain to us in what way the government intends, as you say, to instill it.
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quote:Originally posted by FoolishTook: I don't know who said there was a "level playing field" in the U.S. No one did. But, yes, everyone has a chance to succeed.
Not everyone is going to get rich, and some of us will have to work a lot harder to get anywhere, but the opportunity is there.
Okay? There's opportunity in Zimbabwe, too. Or the DPRK.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:The previous administration, which pursued a policy of supply side economics proven to increase disparity of wealth?
Proven?
For the record, I've lost faith in both republicans and democrats on most issues. But I'm unabashedly in favor of supply side economics.
quote:Social justice is a notion used to describe a society with a greater degree of economic egalitarianism through progressive taxation, income redistribution, or even property redistribution, policies aimed toward achieving that which developmental economists refer to as equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.
What do you consider "authentic social justice?" I'm not asking this in a smart-alecky way. I'm just curious.
quote:By that metric, the opportunity for success exists in every society. Out of the one side of your mouth you admit and even opine a systemic bias in the US, and out of the other, you proclaim that it matters not!
We all have limitations, some inborn, some environmental. That is what I mean.
Posts: 407 | Registered: Jul 2003
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quote:The previous administration, which pursued a policy of supply side economics proven to increase disparity of wealth?
Proven?
For the record, I've lost faith in both republicans and democrats on most issues. But I'm unabashedly in favor of supply side economics.
Supply side economics is and has always been a folk religion among conservatives. It appeals to all the fallacies and wishful imaginings of the would be "self-made man," but in practice it has been shown to increase wealth disparity, reduce tax revenues without growing the tax base, and ultimately slow economic performance as the demand side of the economy shrinks.
I'm by no means in favor of whatever sinister social justice program you believe is the agenda of our current government (though it isn't), but we cannot view supply side and Keynsian economics as binary opposites. They are not. Among many differences, Supply side economics hinges on a belief that free markets tend towards an overall, and long term, economic benefit. We know from painful experience in the industrial revolution, as well through our depression era and more recent financial crises, that financial and industrial innovation without proper regulation do not always lead to a net long term economic benefit, according to any metric. Whether you choose to focus on how the top 10% of earners are doing in any given period and draw your conclusions from that, is up to you- but I'm looking at overall performance, health of the economy, the state of the lowest wage worker, and the size of the middle class. Keynesian economics urges us to seek ways of encouraging economic growth, while attempting to protect ourselves from damaging our economy while attaining short term gains. A mixed economy got us out of the depression, with WW2 providing a huge impetus for the government to pursue public sector projects that private business could never have financed, nor would ever have had any reason to.
My main thing with this is that we shouldn't treat economic policies as matters of faith. There are right and wrong ways to do things, and there is more validity in some ideas than in others. I prefer to remain agnostic- if I see something working, and more importantly if I see something working in a way that satisfies me as to its long term sustainability, I will like it. The reason I want the middle class and working class well protected against private business is the same as the reason I want private business to remain strong. Both things benefit our lives and enrich our culture in the long term. As I said, I don't believe a socialist authoritarian government is even feasible, in any country. But I do think a well run government that knows its business and knows its strengths and weaknesses is possible, and that's what I want.
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Keynesianism at least faded from its high point with some of its reputation intact. Supply-side economics exited having been proven to be a pretty bad idea. Does anyone take the Laffer curve theory seriously anymore?
Posts: 805 | Registered: Jun 2009
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Um....To the best of my knowledge, yes, people take the Laffer curve seriously. It's just not particularly predictive. The central thrust of the idea -- that there is a point at which diminishing returns are obtained by increased taxation -- is still considered valid, obviously.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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The Laffer Curve as defined by Ibn Khaldun is worth taking seriously. The Laffer Curve as presented and incorporated into Arthur Laffer's general economic theories ('laffernomics?') is silly and ignorable.
Laffer himself has been sort of drifting from network to network saying painfully ignorant things about economics and social policy for a while now so hopefully interest in his ideas is waning considerably still.
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Have a look at the UK's economy in the seventies, with the 98% marginal taxes on top earners, and tell me that there's no diminishing returns.
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