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

[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 >.>

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Absolutely right. You know, if you were not married and a couple of continents away, I'd be in serious danger of falling for you. 8-)

Seriously, the plan as forced through Congress by the Democrats is insanely complex and has all the makings of a coming failure. But that is no reason to become hysterical about the principle of state-run health care. It took me about a hundred rounds of mutual insults before I could get superversive to understand that I am not scared of the State because we have in Italy a thing called Administrative Justice - a branch of the magistracy with equal dignity and power to civil and criminal justice - to which any citizen who is dissatisfied with State provision or performance can appeal. And his argument was - in the USA there is no such thing, so to create a national health system would be dangerous. Which sounds to me like saying: because we have a state system that needs reform - perhaps by inventing something like Administrative Justice, perhaps by some other means - we do not dare reform a health system that needs reform. It is using one evil to support another, in the final expectation that both shall endure and worsen. And there I thought that one of the points of democracy was to allow reform.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Reform implies believing it's possible. Which is hard when "government is not the solution, government is the problem" is movement dogma.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Exactly. As I said elsewhere (though to the wrong person):
You right-wing anarchists all fail to understand what the Founding Fathers said - their actual words go in one ear and out the other. And as it never occurs to you to imagine that there might be an ethical foundation to the duties of the State - a foundation expressed by Jefferson and his co-signers in language so luminously clear that only ill-will can explain its being misunderstood - you end up with the nightmare of a State that is force for its own sake; from which you escape into anarchistic dreams that will never have any reality. The dreams go away; the nightmare bully State of your own evil dreams becomes reality - because you have rejected the plain substance of Jefferson's luminous words. And that is why every bout of Republican rule ends up leaving the American state more legally omnipotent, more unbound by law or custom, and more indebted and predatory, than it has ever been before. Ayn Randism and George W.Bushism are Siamese twins, and neither can live without the other.