Why the Republican objections and talking points are nonsense

[fpb]

One: there already are death panels in American health care provision. They are the accountants who decide how long the companies can afford to give healthcare to customers who have chronic or expensive conditions.

Two: the Republican notion that the current system can be tweaked or bullied to remedy such problems is nonsense. It is positively crazy. If seriously pursued, it will lead to a situation where corporations have to deficit spend to keep patients with chronic and expensive conditions alive, which will eat into their budgets and threaten the rise of a Fannie May and Freddie Mac situation.

Three: in order to deal with chronic, expensive or long-term cases, there is need of a body which is not only capable of but allowed to deficit spend. There is only one such body: the State. The State routinely deficit spends on such things as the police and the military, the courts and the jails, which never will bring in an income but which are indispensable for society. Indeed, Adam Smith's classic definition of the "expenses of the sovereign", by which he meant the public sector, is: all those expenses which are necessary for society but which the private sector cannot profitably pursue.

Four: it is an atrocious lie that people who demand a right to health care are "inventing new rights". The denial of health care to anyone is the denial of the three basic rights: life, because it places the person in the immediate and evident danger of death; liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, because it reduces what is left of life to a despairing struggle to be allowed to draw a few more breaths. If you think this is what the Founders meant, you are not only a fanatic, but a sadist.

Comments

[thefish30.livejournal.com]

1. I would rather deal with a death panel of accountants who can be a) chosen beforehand insofar as I choose which company to have my insurance with, b) taken to court/arbitration, and c) paid "around" as it were, if I can afford it, or can set up a payment plan.

The alternative of a death panel in whom we have no choice, whose word is law, and whom it is illegal to circumvent is much scarier.

Also, as Lewis pointed out, the greed of those who treat you for their own benefit may someday be sated, or sleep; but the zealots who treat you 'for your own good', as defined by themselves, never give up until you are 'cured'. Given some recent ill-publicized fiascos involving insane, poorly researched, anti-child, anti-family, economically devastating regulation shoved through under cover of obfuscation with the hand-wave "It's for the children", I am extremely reluctant to hand over any more health care power to those who would do me good whether I want it or not.

(Google CPSIA, lead, childrens' books, used clothing. Just part of the insanity: circulation (sold, lent, or given) of all childrens' books' printed prior to 1985 PROHIBITED.)

2. Agreed. There is no remedy for it, Democratic or Republican.

3. I think the body that is supposed to be dealing with it is the church. But we are sadly a long way off from that.

4. My right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is the right to not have them taken away from me, not the right to have them provided for me. The right to the pursuit of happiness taken as a positive, not a negative right, leads to a mare’s nest that you will never find the end of. With the founders, I distinguish between rights and obligations. I have a right to life. I also have an obligation to care for the sick. I do not wish the government to co-opt that obligation any more than I desire it to raise my children for me. Social justice, mercy, and charity are not served when the government regulates our virtues as it does our vices, performing our acts of mercy for us and denying our personal agency in them. This is the role of church and family.

And do not try to make me believe health care we cannot afford as a collective of free individuals somehow becomes affordable when the government gets involved. Health care costs what it costs, and government pork and inefficiency is not going to make it cost any less than self-interest and market forces will.


I don’t expect to change your mind on health care, but perhaps you may allow I am not a nonsensical sadist. :)

To oversimplify, I suspect you view (and perhaps not without reason) government as an imperfect father, obligated to provide for his children as well as protect them; while business is a powerful cutthroat, exploiting the poor for gain. Wheras I veiw (and perhaps not without reason) government as necessary social contract with an alarming tendency to sprout sucking tentacles which invade every home and church given half a chance; while businness is a bunch of people like any other, good, bad, and indifferent, trying to get along in the world, but who will ultimately thrive or perish according to how well they fill other people’s wants and needs.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

My right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is the right to not have them taken away from me, not the right to have them provided for me
In other words, it is a worthless abstraction that has no relevance on the way anyone or anything is supposed to behave towards you ("no... right to have them provided for me"). The right to life begins with chucking anyone who violates it into jail. That means that someone else is providing it for you.

I have rarely seen so much unreason concentrated in so few statements outside a Communist Party policy statement.

One must, then, either be a sadist or a statist?

[wemyss.livejournal.com]

You're blethering skite. Again.

Then again, the third possibility - excluded in your attempt to formulate a false dilemma - is that one who disagrees with you is neither a fanatic nor a sadist, but, rather, possesses at the least an elementary knowledge of economics.

You know, if people look at you askance, my dear Fabio - and they do - it's not what you think. No, literally: it's not What You Think, which, bar the 'social conservatism' on abortion and sexual morality, is quite surprisingly congruent w the sodden and undigested mass of Euro-socialist, er, thought (to use the term loosely). It's the unnecessarily rebarbative fashion in wh you so often say it.

I'm commonly quite tolerant of this, but then, I'm a bird of rare plumage; others may be less so. I merely implore you, in a friendly manner and for yr own advantage, to consider a different rhetorical mode. It wd serve you better, and yr causes w it.

[fellmama.livejournal.com]

I agree, of course. And a note on rhetoric--I frequently disagree with what you say, but it's undeniable that you write well and are adept at, as my father would say, "firing for effect."

[ani-bester.livejournal.com]

Your last point, I think I will adopt it into my argument for healthcare, because that's pretty mch pwns most objections without merit.

Now granted I've not been fond of any plans I've seen so far, but I think it's because they ignore social and financial realities and do not fix the errors other federal plans have made, not because I think the idea in and of itself is not worthwhile.

But of course in congress all intelligent debate is eclipsed by hysteria on both sides. One the one hand if you support it at all for any reason you are "facist," (or a nazi or a communist pisk one *eyeroll*) but on the other of you opposse it at all for any reason you are "evil" and "hate poor people," and "have no soul."

With such well thought out debating points as those, we're never going to get anywhere >.>