My title is a little dramatic, but I like it. [:$]
(Please forgive my unscholarly post)
I’m working on a short letter to my local newspaper. I’m going to address the issue of universal healthcare for children. I want the style to be concise (which isn’t my natural way). My strategy is to illustrate how good intentions (yea right), if not based on sound reasoning (economic, moral, etc), can yield the opposite result. I want to show the politicians purported goal (better healthcare). I then plan to show the logistics they wish to employ to reach that goal. I’ll contrast their logistics (socialistic mechanism) with that of the free maket. With this contrast, I hope to show how more wealth (more healthcare) is produced by free markets vs unfree markets, appealing to both commonsense (philosophical) and to empirical data (history - USSR vs USA?) The thesis is that since free men/markets produce the most wealth, less-free men/markets will produce less wealth and if there’s less wealth there’s less healthcare (of course I know free markets simply produce what man wants and the quality of healthcare is contingent upon what he wants, but in all likelihood there’ll be enough healthcare demand to produce a far superior healthcare market).
Even though you can’t say it all in one letter, I’d like to keep it razor sharp so that maybe, just maybe, it’ll cause someone to get past the snake oil the politicians are selling. Can you guys give me some ideas or direction? I think the letters are limited to 300 words.
One point you could make is that the taxation which leads to such “free health care” is immoral and unethical. Stealing from the rich and giving to the poor is exactly that – stealing. If a poor person were to steal someone’s wallet and then use the money to pay for their health care, would this be a legal or moral thing to do? Of course not. Why is it okay if the government does the same exact thing?
For many more suggestions, there is a thread about health care directly below this one in the forum. Check it out.
Yea, I have some notes jotted down. I wrote about ‘noble ideas’ About how Stalin had noble ideas (look good on paper/ good intentions) but it cost millions of lives. I made the connection between it and theft and how no matter the intention, if you employ evil/theft to achieve it, youll have bad results. I also compared the ‘noble’ figures to everyday thugs. Even though the thug intends to do evil, the total effect is limited to his sphere of power. With a ruler, they can intend to do good but if its based on even just a little bit of evil that evil becomes great because of his great power.
Also, it’d be really cool to be able to make a projection on the net increase in deaths due to the socialization of healthcare. In fact, its hard science and numbers like that that people need to be exposed to. This whole healthcare debate needs to be streamlined to a few important numbers. Easier said than done, eh? Well, maybe easy to do, just difficult to ‘sell it’.
If this is true, then explain higher rates of longevity in nations with public healthcare, not only higher longevity, but from what I remember, more healthy years of life.
our current ‘healthcare system’ is FAR from being fully free market. Its obvious that more wealth can generate more healthcare. If this were not the case, then why do you wish to use that wealth?
I didn’t say it is. So, why does American’s subsidization of healthcare correlate with worse public health, compared with Canada and several countries in western Europe, where it is fully nationalized and longevity is higher?
Other factors go into determining lifespan. I’m referring to what the health providers can do. I’ve argued this point many times before, but this is not the topic of my post.
My question is for assistance on writing a letter that ASSUMES my thesis is correct.
So unless your posts have to do with the assistance I’m seeking, please go away. I’ll debate you in another thread.
Which factors and how do they act as an extraneous cause for the correlation above?
I am assisting. My advice: Be objective, dispassionate, honest, and let the facts speak for themselves.
Your letter isn’t going to be very convincing if it completely ignores counterarguments and simply states in so many words, “Universal healthcare is murder because Austrian economists say so.” If you only seek out evidence to support your conclusion, but totally ignore evidence to the contrary, you aren’t going to convince anyone who didn’t already oppose universal healthcare at the outset.
Health care (baring massive outbreaks of contaguous diseases) is not a public good. It suffers from less information asymmetry than many other very successful free markets, such as automobiles (most people know more about common medical problems than they do know about how cars or computers work). There just isn’t any economic justification for government involvement that I can see, even on a neoclassical level*. Therefore, government involvement in medical care must be counter-productive, leading to more sickness, misery, and death (i.e., murder).
Unless this is a straw-man, that is.
I don’t think its so easy to compare different countries. The Japanese are all skinny and eat a lot of fish, and are in great health. Americans tend to be fatter. Also, its much harder to become a doctor in America than it is in many other parts of the world. Our number of graduating dentists have actually declined, and when was the last time a new medical school had opened up? In other countries, nurses are also allowed to perform for than they are here. Add our wonderful civil tort system, and in some ways American healthcare is more regulated than more socialized countries.
I don’t think its socialism that always fails so much as it is central planning in general, which is what we have (along with 50% socialism).
Also, the methods for reporting statistics differ greatly. Infant mortality in America is, for example, pretty damn low. Our statistics just differ. While I agree the USA’s system does suck, I think its portrayed as being even worse than it is by the “medical-industrial complex” and their rent-seeking ways.
Why not write an article about how the AMA are murderers? At least socialists are often blinded by idealology, while the AMA is just full of assholes.
No, you seem to be on point (except so far, I seem to ascribe to Keynesianism?) and that’s an interesting point.
First, the amount of training necessary to become a doctor far exceeds the amount of training necessary to become a mechanic. Shouldn’t that therefore mean that there is a far greater information gap in the case of doctors? Or do you believe that this is only the case become of government licensing requirements? The human body, as it seems to me, is a lot more complex than a computer or a car. Because the latter two are man-made, we can more predict how and why it might fail. Both are closed systems, invented by man. In the case of the human body, it’s a rather open system, connected to just about everything around us, and we don’t have full knowledge of how it works precisely because we didn’t create it. With healthcare, scientists are learning new things all the time. With a continually new influx of information doctors and consumers repeatedly need to be aware of (such as when drugs on the market are found to do more harm than good).
Also, I wouldn’t say that automobiles are necessarily are a “successful,” free market because auto repair fraud would be rampant would it not be for the Better Business Bureau. And such a system can’t work for healthcare (a “Better Doctor’s Bureau”) because human health and life cannot be replaced. Also, there are the problems with misleading warranties that led to the establishment of lemon laws.
Furthermore, support for universal healthcare isn’t simply argued on the grounds of the information gap. Because health insurance involves distributing calculated risk, health insurance spending is more efficient when the costs and expenses are evenly distributed among many people. This is why, in general, an insurance company with a larger pool of members will run at a lower cost than an insurance company with a smaller pool. This has lead to a movement away from the doctor-patient relationship and to the rise of large insurance companies, which manage healthcare through HMOs, misleading consumers about what they’re covered for in the same way that car dealerships used to mislead consumers about car warranties
So, the information gap is irrelevant, because doctors and patients themselves don’t decide on treatment, but both have to work through a third-party bureaucracy. A system which abolishes HMOs and has all citizens in one national pool thus reduces the costs, not just on the whole but also per capita. So, while less Americans have healthcare and healthcare quality is relatively comparable to that of socialized medicine, Americans tend to pay three times as much in healthcare bills as their European counterparts. So, even from an individual perspective which sees all wealth distribution as evil, public healthcare is pareto-optimal, making us all better off without making any one person worse off.
Empirically, the only negative results of socialized medicine have been moderately longer wait times, which seems to be blown out of proportion by the media. I am certain of this and skeptical of claims that public healthcare is of substantially reduced quality, because surveys establish, across the board, that most individuals in nations with socialized medicine are satisfied with the system they have.
I agree that it’s difficult to compare countries, but I still think that a fair comparison can be made, if the sample of nations studied is sufficiently random and relevant effects of the kind you just described are accounted for.
In America, we have high rates of obesity, but not the highest and also, so do many countries with national healthcare. And, on the other hand, there are many nations with private healthcare that have very low rates of obesity.
I’ve been talking quite a bit about this with some liberal friends.
I hate our current health system with a passion. In fact, I hate it enough to completely boycott hospitals and doctors, except in absolute emergencies such as injury. I consider hospitals and pharmeceuticals to be extremely dangerous. To make up for this, I spend a lot of time researching health and spent extra money on very healthy foods, and have a network of friends in alternative healthcare with a good deal of knowledge about anatomy and holistic health. I am a large proponent of alternative health practices, and have amazing luck with herbs to treat various maladies, which are virtually free, very low risk, and which I believe to be God’s answer to basic health issues. I believe that, in fifty years, people will look back at the current technologically and chemically based medical industrial complex and think it is as barbaric as we consider barbers bleeding patients to be.
So, three points I use:
I choose to boycott the current medical system, out of fear for my own safety first and foremost. Why should I be expected to pay in, through my taxes, to a system I boycott?
If there is socialized health care, then couldn’t it conceivably be considered a burden on society NOT to accept whatever vaccines and other “preventative” health items are in vogue in the scientific community? In twenty years, I could certainly imagine a law being passed that you HAVE to take vaccines, or face criminal penalties. In short, government funding leads to government control. Government control leads to coercion over individual behaviour.
The whole system in Washington D.C. is now so corrupt. Any national health plan they enact will be bound to be corrupt, and further entrench the mafia style corporate medical players. Look what an unholy disaster the prescription drug benefit is, with its bar on the government collectively bargaining. As great as it would sound, we could guarantee it would be poisoned by the pharma/hospital lobby to steal lots and lots of public wealth while providing minimal benefit.
The whole idea of medicine is broken. It only treats the symptoms, while ignoring the underlying reasons, which oftentimes are psychological, spiritual, or nutritional. Anything that furthers it is destructive, and retards humans really figuring out how our systems work. For pete’s sake, modern medicine denies the existence of chakras and energy, which various cultures throughout history have described in basically the same way, and modern technology can see! How incredibly backwards and stupid! (This is my personal belief, at least, probably wouldn’t go over so well in a modern newspaper)
As a side note, from a new understanding I have of Federalism, I may not have such a problem with socialized health care being implemented on a state level. If you really wanted socialized health care, you could band together with like minded folks and implement it in, say, Massachusettes. It is much easier to move out of Mass. than it is to move out of the country. This has some flaws, of course…
I’m curious what anyone thinks about my understanding of federalism here.
Well, I don’t know if any of those ideas will help you, hope so.
What the media is good at is blowing out of proportion how successful socialized medicine (allegedly) is. David Kelley’s A Life of One’s Own explodes this myth.
People have intuitive understandings of their own bodies, and how to cure themselves. The same isn’t true of computers and cars.
The BBB is, of course, a private institution, as is (or was, at least) the AMA and the ADA. Whether or not a human can be replaced is irrelevant. What needs to exist are the incentives for doctors to act ethically in their treatment of patients. The government can provide this, and so can the marketplace.
The argument generally goes that information is a public good, so it will tend to be under-supplied. For that reason, government regulation should exist to protect people from markets with asymmetric information. It should be pretty obvious that this is nothing more than an excuse for intervention, because at the worst this would justify the government providing information.
Well, HMOs were created by congress in 1973, and they didn’t become too popular until more legislation was passed making them more attractive relative to their competition. When congress supports and subsidizes managed care, of course the doctor-patient relationship will suffer.
That isn’t true at all. Market forces tend to create large firms when they are optimal, and break them down when they are not. In insurance, this is very difficult due to the many and varying state laws, as well as the number of insurance companies who rent-seek horribly. The only way to determine how big an insurance pool “should” optimally be for is with economic calculation, and the only way economic calculation is performed is via voluntary transactions in the marketplace. Bigger is not always better.
You need size, but you need innovation too. The market achieves a compromise between these two, as large pools tend to be more efficient and grow, until innovation displaces them.
Well, when America had a freer market in health care, its system was the envy of the entire world. We had far more medical R&D and innovation than other nations, and we even had that old-fashioned doctor-patient relationship. Other countries are also much smaller than the US, so the scope of their planning is much reduced. Central planning of the medical industry in the USA seems to have had much more disastrous effects than in other nations. I believe the incentive to rent-seek in the US is higher, due to the government simply having power of a much larger economy than anywhere else on Earth (except China now I suppose).
To my knowledge, there has never been a free market in any good or service which got progressively more expensive and/or worse in quality as medical care is getting. I think without exception, every free market that exists continues to provide better goods and services more cheaply (although there are a few hiccups now and then).
Higher corporate taxes does not alleviate this problem. Corporate taxes hurt the poor the most. The bottom quintile of per capita income pays about 6.3% of their taxes to corporations.
Without taxes, inflation would hurt the poor the most.
Cheaper healthcare prices would exist if there was more competition. However, currently we have a government-supported oligopolistic healthcare system. They can charge monopoly prices. Our government has too many regulations that prevents new, competing firms from entering the market. It also limits the quantity of doctors. However, these regulations are useless and are lobbied by big healthcare companies in order to prevent new potential competitors.
Contrary to the popular conception, our healthcare system is NOT a free market healthcare system. Our healthcare is an oligopolistic healthcare system, therefore Canadian healthcare is “cheaper”. But a free market healthcare system is better than BOTH American and Canadian.
Also, when you say “universal healthcare systems,” what do you mean? Healthcare is provided to everyone in most countries in Europe.
I think you mean fully socialized medicine. Individual health insurance costs can be funded or subsidized through government spending without doctors all being government employees.
Hah! Funny!
Where I live, there is a zendo nearby which I used to attend. I stopped going because the Zen monk there, who was Korean, had repeatedly made several claims which were anti-science, which made me skeptical of his supposed wisdom.
One such claim was, “Listening to the body is the best medicine.”
He said this was proved by the fact that Buddhist countries tend to have less hospitals, compared to non-Buddhist countries, like America.
Surely, you don’t believe that if I meditate on my loins, I’ll get some kind of mystical insight into how they work? For centuries, we didn’t even know that our cognitive faculties were housed in the brain (the Egyptians didn’t think so) and falsely assumed certain organs performed completely unrelated roles as to what they actually do. Hence, there are expressions, “You’ve got a lot of gall,” and “You’ve got balls,” based upon the past mistaken belief that a large gall bladder contributed to aggression. And there is the expression “the heart,” based upon the belief that the heart housed our emotional capacities.
One of the most widespread mistaken nations about health is the superstitious idea of the “life force.” In eastern philosophy, it’s referred to as chi, although the concept is pretty cross-cultural. As a result, there are all kinds of hokey practices in folk medicine. Taoists had attempted to train themselves to become immortal through gaining sustenance from the breath and from saliva. Many in Asia also ingested cinnabar, which is now known to be toxic.
Of course, this doesn’t stop silly westerners today from giving some semblance of authority to Asian folk medicine. Imagine what this would seem like in the reverse: Asians come over to the west with serious illness and we attempt to treat them using western “alternative medicine” – by slapping leeches on them, having them drink snake oil, and asking them to repeatedly bless the Lord.
For now, I’ve got to go out the door soon. I’ll respond more later.
Thats really not what I ment. Everyone has to learn a bit about how to deal with common ailments, and people do tend to seek medicines which actually work. Obviously mistakes will be made, but more frequently people are using the Internet to read about new treatments (although the AMA isn’t too happy about that, they’d rather you visit a doctor for anything and everything).
Robin Hansen at GMU has does a lot of reteach that indicates Americans are still getting more health care than is optimal. Obviously that was a bigger problem way back when “medicine” was witch-doctors which often killed patients.
“Chi,” or whatever it is, is real. One of my dad’s friends (we’ll call him “Rob”) has studied eastern and western style medicine for years and once performed a little test on me, my two brothers, and my dad. He told my dad to hold his left arm out to his side, straight with his shoulder. Rob then held my dad’s wrist and pressed a particular spot with his thumb while simultaneously pressing another spot on my dad’s forehead. He told me dad that he’d be applying just a little bit of strength to lower my dad’s arm back down to his side, and that he should resist. My dad, despite all of his efforts, could not keep his arm up. He then tried the same thing on each of my brothers. Neither of them could resist either. Rob claimed that he’d challenged bodybuilders, and even they couldn’t keep their arms up.
So I told him to try it on me. I was sure it wouldn’t work. Rob put his hands in the same places as before and told me he’d be applying a minimal amount of strength, and that I should resist. Sure enough, I was able to keep my arm up. I was pretty proud of my “mysticisim-proof” body, but Rob asked me if he could check for “blockages.” I said sure, and he started feeling around the base of my skull. He poked in one particular spot and asked if it hurt when he pressed there, I was surprised that it did, and I told him so. He then told me to lay down on my back. He leaned over me and told me he was going to release the “energy” or whatever, and popped my neck twice with a swift, calculated rotation in each direction. A warm, pleasant, tingly sensation came all over my neck and moved into my face. He then asked me to stand up so he could try again. He tried again and, despite my best efforts, was able to easily force my arm back to my side. Flow was restored and I was “fixed.”
He told us later that what is often referred to as “chi” or “energy” is really just the body’s electrical field. And there are certain points on the body’s surface that act as the positive and negative ends of batteries that you can manipulate to shut off the body’s flow of electricity to particular muscle groups, which is what he was doing to our shoulders when he rendered them temporarily inoperable.
Whether he’s right or wrong, I don’t know. I can’t cite any research and I’d doubt that much has been done. But whatever he did definitely worked. So while there are definitely TONS of fallacious claims made by eastern (and western!) doctors, I don’t think the idea of an existence of a “life force,” when interpreted as the body’s electrical field, is superstitious.
