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Last edited by Bereta_Eder; November 1, 2024, 20:27. -
People making bank every time a natural disaster happens creates division in society. You end up with a special interest that benefits from the government being slow to respond to crises. People buying far more of an essential good than they can personally use during a crisis shouldn't be allowed either because they probably intend to flip the merchandise for a quick buck.Originally posted by Elok View PostComment
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I'm no libertarian but I do like smaller government as a fraction of the economy mainly because I think monopolies provide inferior goods and services. That said I've always felt that in the case of healthcare supply and demand (market economy) probably can't work to provide good service and even if it could it's painfully obvious that the US has one of the least financially efficient if not outright the least financially efficient healthcare systems in the world and that to the extent that market economics is part of that system, I've personally seen results that are even more messed up than The Resident portrayed them in all of its cynical depravity.
I don't understand why we got the affordability healthcare act instead of just going single payer. I also wonder if any republicans would endorse privatizing the armed forces? How do they think private prisons worked out compared to state operated prison? Democrats who were controlling both houses and the white house had no excuse for avoiding single payer. Republicans on the other hand have no excuse for not recognizing how badly dysfunctional the privatized healthcare system really is or that other privatizations have at least sometimes been disasters.
Having said all that, looking at our public schools, I have to say that if we're going to do single payer healthcare I hope it won't involve a national monolithic healthcare workers public sector union and that I really hope it will not operate mostly from local funding. My kids attend a great school but across the country there's a pattern that wherever people most desperately need their public schools to get out of poverty is precisely where we find the least functional schools and covid seemed to show that whatever priorities the teacher's union has, student welfare is not on the list of indispensables.Comment
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Until we have Campaign Finance Reform... The MASSIVE healthcare industry will continue to bribe government officials to keep this expensive and deadly system in place.Keep on Civin'
RIP rah, Tony Bogey & Baron OComment
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May be a minor or irrelevant point, but single payer healthcare systems are effectively a monopsony, not a monopoly.Originally posted by Geronimo View PostOne day Canada will rule the world, and then we'll all be sorry.Comment
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Click here if you're having trouble sleeping.
"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones." - François de La RochefoucauldComment
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The government will always, reliably, be slower to respond to crises than people looking to make a quick buck, because the people looking to make a quick buck will get paid more to act rapidly while the government employee will not. Also, the people looking to make a quick buck are not bound by nearly as many rules. This is why, after Michael, we saw enterprising people buy up loads of chainsaws out of town, drive them into Panama City, and sell them for a huge markup; it was worth the hassle because they were making a quick buck. They realized the hurricane knocked down a lot of trees, and people needed to dismember those fallen trees and would be willing to pay a premium to get the ability to do so. There was never, that I know of, a government task force assigned to distribute free or discount chainsaws. If there had been, they would have moved much slower, because the government is made up of many people who have to ask permission and obey convoluted protocols, and when they did get the chainsaws on site, pretty much every idiot on the block would have grabbed a chainsaw because hey, free stuff, except for that one jackass you find in every neighborhood, who would have done the thing you described in your last sentence. Only he would have had much lower starting costs and thus higher profits, courtesy of the taxpayer. But he couldn't do that at all if prices for chainsaws were allowed to rise locally, thanks to a functioning market. Another victory for price gouging!Originally posted by giblets View PostComment
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Also, as somebody who has worked in the US healthcare system for not quite a decade now (in one way or another), it is absurd bordering on obscene to blame its inefficiency on capitalism. The US system is nothing at all like a free market. The single largest payer, by a huge margin, is the government, which also subsidizes a lot of what it isn't buying direct. Said gummint swings that weight around by applying arcane and frequently unfathomable regulations via bureaucratic fiat. Fraud is rampant and generally unpunished. The grossly illogical "insurance" system makes prices opaque and creates massive incentives for profiteering. Everybody pays too much because nobody knows what anything costs or who's paying so you get a tragedy-of-the-commons situation where everybody uses as many resources as they can to dump the costs on the insurer, who will then use that to justify premium hikes, which the government or employer will then blunt the impact of so the person receiving the services will have no reason not to continue with the robble-robble. Nobody has any incentive to cut costs or raise efficiency so prices will only go up until they crash, which is due to happen in, oh, about a decade for Medicare. And also Social Security, as it happens. They'll both go insolvent around then, kicking in automatic cuts. But I wouldn't be surprised if prices went up faster than that and made it happen sooner.
In the meantime about three-quarters of the annual budget is entitlements + interest on existing debt, the latter equaling the annual cost of the military (excluding R&D and military-related entitlements like veterans' pensions). And it's only going to go up. The only solution to this is some mixture of "reform healthcare" or "cut entitlements," but both are politically toxic so people say stupid crap about "fraud and waste" when they say anything at all. And there is waste. Massive waste. In the healthcare system. Which they won't touch.
Would actual single-payer be better? Probably. Almost anything would, really. But I hear Europeans accept a much greater amount of resource rationing than Americans might be willing to tolerate.Comment
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Originally posted by Lorizael View PostBy the time former President Donald J. Trump took the stage at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, a parade of speakers had already spent hours disparaging Latinos, Black people, Palestinians and Jews; directing misogynistic comments at Vice President Kamala Harris; and echoing language used by the Ku Klux Klan.
In the backlash that followed, Mr. Trump’s campaign publicly disavowed only one of the remarks, a line from the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe: “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” A senior campaign adviser, Danielle Alvarez, said in a statement, “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”
Here is a look at other things speakers said at the rally, which the campaign has not commented on.
Tony Hinchcliffe
In addition to disparaging Puerto Ricans, Mr. Hinchcliffe made a crudely sexual anti-immigrant remark about Latinos in general. “It’s wild,” he said of people crossing the border. “And these Latinos, they love making babies too, just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.”
Two minutes later, pointing to someone in the audience, Mr. Hinchcliffe said: “Cool, Black guy with a thing on his head? What is that, a lampshade? Look at this guy, oh my goodness. Wow. I’m just kidding, that’s one of my buddies. He had a Halloween party last night. We had fun. We carved watermelons together.” (Watermelons have a long history as an anti-Black stereotype.)
No, I did not steal that from somebody on Something Awful.Comment
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No, I did not steal that from somebody on Something Awful.Comment
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