Gas Bandit's Political Thread V: The Vampire Likes Bats

strawman

strawman

MindDetective said:
That does sound, in part, like some unusual circumstances. But insurance rates have always increased. According to what I have read, they increased faster every year before ACA.
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Insurance premiums are indeed growing more slowly. That's because they are instead increasing deductibles and decreasing coverage. What has happened is they've found the maximum employers are willing to pay, so they are increasing costs elsewhere. Further none of the premium charts I see appear to show the same health coverage, they are instead an average of all premiums. Of course with millions of people previously not insured who must now choose to insure or face higher taxes, they will choose cheap health insurance plans with lower premiums. If you don't control for coverage or deductibles you are most certainly going to find the average premium going down.

I haven't found a good graph of out of pocket medical costs, but I'd expect that to show the significant increase as well.
 
Covar

Covar

DarkAudit said:
I can't say I sympathize, because in my case thanks to the ACA I was able to get health insurance without having an entire paycheck go to the provider. I just looked at the current unsubsidized rate chart, and it's still over a third of my monthly pay. And in use, it's cut multi thousand dollar hospital stays down to a couple hundred dollars.

It might be a stretch to say I'm still around thanks to the ACA, but not by much. But without it, I might not have called the ambulance when I was having a heart scare. I would have tried to sleep it off, and who knows what would have happened.

I work a full 40 hours a week (and beyond) at a job that has required me to give up any semblance of a family or social life. I bust my ass night after night, so I get angry at anyone who tries to tell me I don't deserve health insurance because they don't want to pay for stuff.
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As long as you feel they don't deserve it. Shit they might also work 40 hours a week and have their own expenses, but it's not your sad story so their stuff should be yours? Wonder what happens when someone comes along with a sadder story than yours.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
"Deserve" doesn't enter into it. There is no right to health care, just because everybody needs it. Everybody needs food and shelter, too... but I hope you wouldn't say the government should be providing that for you at no cost, either.
 
MindDetective

MindDetective

GasBandit said:
"Deserve" doesn't enter into it. There is no right to health care, just because everybody needs it. Everybody needs food and shelter, too... but I hope you wouldn't say the government should be providing that for you at no cost, either.
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Well...if I might play Devils advocate. Food stamps do help needy families eat and there is a strong economic reason to believe housing the homeless s better than dealing with them in more traditional ways. [DOUBLEPOST=1475639071,1475639030][/DOUBLEPOST]Wow. Unexpected embed.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
blotsfan said:
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
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Yeah, as long as we're saying pretty words that have no basis on real economic models, how about "I wave my wand and nobody wants for anything."

Profit motive is the only guarantee.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Some people do get a genuine lift out of being generous and helping those in need.
Too bad the ones with the overdeveloped profit motive keep taking advantage of them.

--Patrick
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
PatrThom said:
Some people do get a genuine lift out of being generous and helping those in need.
Too bad the ones with the overdeveloped profit motive keep taking advantage of them.

--Patrick
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It's not the "to each according to their need" part that generally breaks down, it's the "from each according to their ability." A lot of people - way more than would leave any system viable - would be content to skate or ride coattails if their reward was not commensurate with their effort. It's been shown to happen every single time it's been tried in the real world.[DOUBLEPOST=1475640667,1475640611][/DOUBLEPOST]
MindDetective said:
Well...if I might play Devils advocate. Food stamps do help needy families eat and there is a strong economic reason to believe housing the homeless s better than dealing with them in more traditional ways.
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That doesn't make it a right.

Gun ownership is a right. That also doesn't mean the government has to pay for your gun.
 
MindDetective

MindDetective

GasBandit said:
It's not the "to each according to their need" part that generally breaks down, it's the "from each according to their ability." A lot of people - way more than would leave any system viable - would be content to skate or ride coattails if their reward was not commensurate with their effort. It's been shown to happen every single time it's been tried in the real world.[DOUBLEPOST=1475640667,1475640611][/DOUBLEPOST] That doesn't make it a right.

Gun ownership is a right. That also doesn't mean the government has to pay for your gun.
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Well, not a guaranteed right under the Constitution. But that is a limited and prescribed view. We can certainly get more philosophical about what a right is...[DOUBLEPOST=1475641147][/DOUBLEPOST]
GasBandit said:
Profit motive is the only guarantee.
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I and any modern economic model disagree. Humans have many more motivations than just monetary gain. It is the Great Blindside(Tm) of our capitalist system.
 
Null

Null

You need food, shelter, and access to medical care to survive.

A gun is a luxury.

Some people might consider those to have different levels of importance.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Null said:
You need food, shelter, and access to medical care to survive.

A gun is a luxury.

Some people might consider those to have different levels of importance.
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The founding fathers did not think so, and it is only because of the influence of the second amendment that we can now have the... luxury... to consider gun ownership a luxury.

But just because you need something to survive doesn't mean you are entitled to it.

MindDetective said:
On second thought, people are guaranteed life, which could arguably cover food, breathable air, protection from the elements...
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That just means you have the right to life - another cannot deprive you of it. Same with guns.

Life, liberty and property the pursuit of happiness.

You have the right to all the guns you can afford.
You have the right to all the food you can afford.
You have the right to all the housing you can afford.
You have the right to all the medical care you can afford.
The government cannot take that away from you.

But you do not have the right to anyone else's time or treasure.
 
MindDetective

MindDetective

Interpreting the right to life as the right to eat, breathe, etc. Is not a hill I intend die on. But it isn't difficult to see how that argument might go. And again, the founding fathers may not have considered all rights, so the argument needn't be limited to what is legal.
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

Obviously my initial statement was hyperbolic; I'm also not a huge fan of the way ACA has been implemented.

However, the way many Americans talk about it really rubs me the wrong way. Healthcare - especially the Big Bits, like "suddenly, cancer" or "suddenly, an immunodeficiency disease you'd never even heard of" - is something that, yes, people need and deserve. Even a hobo, even a Syrian refugee who arrived yesterday, even a lazy bum. Frankly, if your current insurance companies aren't doing a good job, find someone who will. I'm not saying the state's the answer, either - as I said, Belgium doesn't have single payer, for example.

Letting someone die in the street from a preventable disease, or not offering life-preserving medicine because someone happens to not have a good enough job, is despicable. You're literally letting people die for your own monetary gain. In the same vein: letting people starve to death while food's being thrown away, die from exposure mere meters away from warmth and a roof, and so on.

I'm not saying those of you who saw deductible etc increases "deserve" that or "should" be the ones to pay for such things. This, as most things where "the strongest shoulders carry the heaviest burden", tends to unfairly tax the middle class. I'm just saying that, to me, the reply "this is horrible, I pay more, I prefer the system where more poor people die" is...Not the right response.
 
strawman

strawman

I like how we are accepting the false concept that before the ACA people who had heart attacks were turned away at the hospital and left to die on the street corner if they couldn't prove they could pay.

Utterly false, but terribly convenient.

Beyond that, though, becoming angry at me because I'm being actively hurt by the ACA is arrogant.

There are a great many aspect to life that hurt one person and help another. Becoming angry at the people who are hurt because it helped you is wrong, and you're wrong to display your anger at how hurt I've been by the law.

I could write a whole sob story about how my latest addition is suffering feeding issues and we can't afford to go to the hospital. This is because the ACA has effectively removed coverage from me and my family. We are instead seeing "alternative healthcare practitioners" (that's code for crackpots who believe in sugar pills with the "essence" of "healthy" substances) because in amongst all the quackery there are techniques, training, and expertise that we find useful. Just google "tuning fork chiropractor" for an example of the kind of people we can afford.

It's very expensive, but our out of pocket expenses would be 10x the cost going to a real neurologist (who would probably consider sending us to the NICU anyway, and then the costs explode).

I could write about my sleep apnea - you know, the thing that causes me to stop breathing at night, dropping my blood oxygen levels to below 60% and causing brain damage - but I have to treat myself and buy and configure my own CPAP machine because, again, I can't afford to use the medical care system because the ACA has forced my employer and my insurance company to drop coverage for everything except the bare minimum the ACA requires.

We have an otoscope, blood pressure cuff, pulse oximeter, and now a stethoscope so we can do some amount of self care while weighing the cost of an office visit against the necessity of one.

We all have struggles and difficulties in life. We are all surviving the best way we know how.

If me talking about how the ACA hurts my family makes you angry, then be angry, but please don't pretend that your hurts are somehow more deserving of my money than my own hurts.

I'm not telling you this because I want or need help. We will manage ourselves just fine.

But I want you to understand that it isn't a choice between my money and your life.

It's not even a choice between my family's lives and your life.

It's that the government shouldn't even be in the business of choosing between the lives of my family and your life.

I used to assume that most people agreed with "the right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins" but that's not true, not anymore. Swinging an economic fist is no less destructive to families as is a physical fist.

The government's fist has gone past the tip of my nose.

So I'm going to complain, elect representatives who support me, and advance my complaints. Not because I want you dead, or think you don't deserve healthcare, but because the system that's helping you is hurting me, and I want to have a system that helps both of us.
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

stienman said:
Though I admit it would be even better to start with "First, do no harm."
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That really depends on your definition of harm. Any taxation, incarceration, etc is a form of inflicting harm. While I agree with the principle behind it, it's also wide open to abuse of all forms.
 
strawman

strawman

But I believe we've gone too far in the other direction, treating taxation as not just a necessity, but an inevitable. "Death and taxes" and so forth suggest that we should view it as a given, and move on to how to do it and what to spend it on rather than recognizing the harm and making absolutely certain that the benefit gained is clearly better than the harm caused.

But then, I'm more interested in limiting government to do only that which is necessary. I recognize that many others desire the government take care of a lot of things that are desires rather than needs, and some go so far as to use the government to force all the community to participate in activities and causes that many in the community simply disagree with.

If anything, we nowhere near "needs only" and "do no harm" and rapidly advancing towards "pet causes" and "forcing everyone to participate in activities only a few desire".
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

Whole other discussion, that. I agree that government is far too involved in some things...And absolutely not involved enough in others. Of course, this is a difficult conversation to have, considering the huge difference in tax levels and government functions between my and your place of residence.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

GasBandit said:
It's not the "to each according to their need" part that generally breaks down, it's the "from each according to their ability." A lot of people - way more than would leave any system viable - would be content to skate or ride coattails if their reward was not commensurate with their effort. It's been shown to happen every single time it's been tried in the real world.
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Right, and as I've said before, this is why I believe government's role should be one of somehow being empowered to force people to do those things that are necessary but nobody wants to do. Yes, on the one hand this would mean things like sanitation, infrastructure, and defense, but the intriguing parts would be how a government would go about mandating things like altruism, or environmentalism/conservation. Not just "when it's convenient," but "because it's necessary for a healthy society."
GasBandit said:
Profit motive is the only guarantee.
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I mentioned this to Kati, and she asked me if I knew how much @Dave pays to keep you as an admin.

--Patrick
 
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