It continually blows my mind that people assume I am dead set on imposing private moral beliefs on others. If I ran a hospital or medical practice, I WOULD perceive an obligation to help people in need. I can and do give money to people who need it, or what assistance I can to anybody I encounter who needs it. I simply do not believe in compelling people to follow my conscience and dispose of their property, time and skills according to a moral code they might or might not share. I also do not believe that emergency life-saving treatments create an undue burden on society to the degree that people can be rightly compelled to be insured. Or that absent other artificial strains on the marketplace creating undue hardships in obtaining medical care, the burden would be nearly as great on emergency facilities.
Additionally, my point about the coexistence of publicly and privately funded systems in competition forcing the former to raise its standards of quality (and thus spend more), and the latter to raise its prices due to increased costs, holds true for education. Without the obscene tax burdens of public schools (not to mention regulatory hassles that serve to protect the public education monopoly), private education would be far more affordable.
Hell, I'm not even convinced of the necessity for school as we know it. This is the age of the internet, where everyone owns multiple devices capable of accessing it. The entire country could "attend" a lecture by a single professor. This is not a 19th century nation of primarily farming communities, where the best way to teach is put all the kids in the only building in town that has a set of encyclopedias.
I think a better system would be some sort of (privately) administered aptitude tests, that you could take at your time of choosing, to certify you possess certain levels of math or reading skills, and you could simply refer an employer or other interested party to your accreditation. Higher and more specific or specialized education could also be more streamlined. While I agree that it is a good idea to be well-informed on a variety of subjects, that is not what is going on with college electives. When my brother failed his nursing exams, he took courses that had nothing to do with nursing, but in subjects he enjoyed to inflate his GPA until the next opportunity to reapply to the nursing program came around. How did that contribute to his education or the advancement of his knowledge of nursing? All he did was game the system. Why shouldn't an adult be able to make the choice to concentrate exclusively on relevant courses to his degree, and skip Sociology or Literature or History if he is going to be an engineer. Greater privatization is the best way to obtain such flexibility.
I believe that absent the impositions of bureaucracy and corporate practices creating massive admin & clerical burdens, restricting the options and inflating the costs, the burden of providing care for the indigent would not sufficiently strain the industry or society as to make a minimal insurance necessary.
Interesting. I wasn't aware of that, do you have a link or reference?
In any case, I definitely admit that life expectancy is only partially linked to quality of health care - certainly factors like nutrition, violence in the society, and even climate play a certain role.
Sure, but how is your alternative better? If you aren't rich, you either won't have insurance at all and won't even live to see your "death panel", or you'll have limited insurance that won't get you any better result than the socialized medicine would, and most likely worse. If you're rich, you probably do have better insurance than that (as a side note, you can still have additional insurance in most countries with socialized systems), but even if paying absolutely any price for any extra day of life is worth it for you, the result is ever-increasing insurance premiums for everyone else. And even an insurance company will draw the line somewhere - the only difference is that it'll be a company making the call instead of a "death panel".
But you'd at least have the option of a relationship with that death panel. When you get to pick who's going to make the decisions for you, and when you have a whole family that might be prone to abruptly switch to competitor if they don't like how you handle grandpa's treatment, you're probably going to like the decisions they make a lot more.
The problem with just about ANY societal issue these days is that there is no simple solution, where you change one thing and it improves that thing, with no negative repercussions elsewhere. We've created an interdependent system of great complexity that has become self-perpetuating. Emotional cri de ceour such as the original poster is prone to might get people all het up and bothered, but there is no easy fix for their problems, such as by passing a law that will specifically prohibit what people believe is the cause of that person's problem. If you say, forbid insurance companies from refusing to pay for pre-existing conditions, they are going to adopt other practices to cover the costs. We've built a leaky dyke and Obama and moondog can only point out new holes and demand fingers to plug them up. Maybe its time we learned to tolerate damp feet, rather than being pinned in one place perpetually holding back a flood. Now we're at the point where the medical industry is not just carrying the costs of providing medical care, but also of supporting an entrenched bureaucracy and clerical industry throughout the medical provider, insurance and governmental regulatory agency portions of it. There are a lot of people invested in keeping government, doctors and insurance companies unable to function without each other, and all providing mutual masturbatory perks in order to defend the status quo. Corporations provide political donations, so insurance companies can claim favors from the government that protect them from many forms of consumer competition. From their perspective, it is much more efficient to sell group plans to employers, than service individuals like car insurance companies do, or cell phone networks, or other service providers. The established corporations like stringent rules on how they provide service, because it prevents competition from arising.
The only guaranteed way of making ANY service or commodity provider responsive to customer wishes is through competition, which is why corporations, when push comes to shove, favor regulation of their industries. Regulation insulates them from competition, and allows them to narrow their focus on meeting the regulatory conditions, secure in the knowledge that they will not have to respond to unexpected challenges, because all their competition is jumping through the same hoops. A hamburger chain that becomes too fixated on a particular unpopular product has to worry about a rival chain coming up with something different. But if the government requires that they all serve specific burgers, and outlaws a bunch of other foods from being sold in burger chains, that sort of regulation closes off entire areas of concern. Rather than a free form brawl, it becomes a limited boxing match, so they only have to worry about punches above the belt. They don't have to fear another opponent jumping in, or a surprise kick.
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.” GK Chesteron
Inde muagdhe Aes Sedai misain ye!
Deus Vult!
*MySmiley*
- 06/11/2014 03:14:02 PM
526 Views