What do you think of Obama's health care an/or economy package(s)

Charity is for people who can't afford basic things like food or basic healthcare. Charities are usually more effective than government. We don't make all food common (see communism) just because some people can't afford it.

 

I'm not going to read the thread, but I will say that socialized healthcare is the way to go.

I live in Canada.

I have a couple of incidents I want to talk about.

Few years ago, I got into a car crash. I was going to die. Surgery would have cost almost $10k. I had some sort of a brain and spine injury.

We didn't pay a single cent of that price. And I was operated on right away.

I've seen some arguments like "you have to wait".
Yes, you do. However, in emergencies you are treated with priority.

The benefits of socialized healthcare HIGHLY outweigh the cons.

After the incident, I was on a 6 month check up period (I went to a physician for every 2 weeks). Do the math and you get about 12 checkup periods. Each of those would have cost $250 (roughly).

Yes, the healthcare takes a toll on the taxes, but in a form that benefits the entire nation, not the people who can afford it.

The way healthcare is now is absolutely disgusting. Hey, let's put a price on someone's life, shall we?
There are no valid arguments other than "money for me" for privatized healthcare.

 

Flasche, re-read Chris's post please. I think you misunderstood Chris. Keep in mind he was responding to Vess's remarks, and from what I gather, Chris was diminishing the value of what Vess said when Vess drew a godwin-like relationship between current political tides and the Nazi party's slow rise to power. Chris is discounting Vess's remark by pointing out that Vess based his Nazi claim very loosely, and Chris is showing that by Vess's logic, just about any asinine relation can be drawn to the Nazis (such as grammar similarities between German and English). Chris was being sarcastic to make a point.

 

Socialised medicine can be more efficient that privatised medicine in delivering healthcare. The problem with free market economics is that they are solely concerned with making money, while this is good for most industries there are some in which there is a problem as the interests of profit maximisation and benefit to society are sharply divergent. It is for this reason that we have government legislation to deal with these cases.

In the case of healthcare it is in the interests of the insurer to pay out as little as possible while it is in the interests of society to maximise the amount of healthcare produced. With government provided healthcare the only objective to be considered is to maximise the amount of healthcare produced resulting in theoretically greater efficiencies than the private system. You do have to consider governmental inefficiencies but private firms will have their own inefficiencies and the difference between the two might not be as large as you would think.

Socialised healthcare is a good thing for both firms and individuals. With guaranteed healthcare your workers will be more healthy and therefore more efficient without requiring you to go to the extra expense of obtaining or subsidising healthcare plans. This will make US firms more competitive in the global economy as they do not have to add the cost of providing their worker's healthcare onto the price of their products.

 

I like the thread, and I tried giving some input earlier. i came back to it and saw a bunch of nazi shit on here and was dissappointed.

As for the UN being powerless, the UN is perfectly capable of crippling any other nation that is not self sufficient or able to be self sufficient. Economic power lies in the

majority. It's also why the middle east has any power at all and why alaska all of a sudden became important when they figured out the largest oil reserve ever discovered is smack dab in the middle of it.

but that's another discussion.

 

No government can or wants pay for all the health needs of its population. No government medical program says yes to every need, standards will be set to determine whether a person's need and their worth to the nation, balance(this is where the reference to NAZI ideals come in(I'm not a conspiracy theorist this is just what progressive movements end up doing throughout history, (cause it's efficient)). In Michigan State a state wide healthcare program is collapsing. They are now excluding legal immigrants from Medical Care. The United States government is not have a history of making good decisions. Just because Germany or Canada can do it doesn't mean America can.

Right now our nation's debt is so large that it's only sensible to cut government spending(that includes programs), why we're trying to spend more money in this time of crisis simply makes no sense. Government Medical Care may be a great system, it could be the next best thing to the touch of Jesus. We can't afford it right now. Take this idea put it on the shelf and wait for the crisis to end.

And now a side note:
Holy crap! I mention one political comparison and you guys jump on yelling conspiracy theorist. Socialist ideals; Obama and Hitler have them, as well as every other socialist. I'm not saying Obama's gona spout a mustache a start Killing jews. I don't want to start a flame war but you guys are just ridiculous. He's a socialist, I am not, according to most of the polls neither are the majority of Americans. And personally I'd like to keep the most successful capitalist country alive just so that you Europeans and people in Australia and all of the world have the option to live capitalist if you want to.

 

If you're worried about national debt you can't afford anything, you should shut down anything that costs money and start selling off national landmarks to get rid of it, although I'm not really sure what good it would do. Loads of countries have shitloads of national debt and to be honest I haven't really noticed a difference. I don't even know what national debt means or how it works, and I doubt that most of the news people who complain about it do either, it just sounds scary so they yell it as loud as possible. Nobody in government seems to be panicking about it and they're the ones who would be in a position to do something about it if it was a problem.

Over here we don't say 'you aren't valuable you can't have medical care', there are rules to stop people coming here just to get free healthcare, but as far as I know any british citizen can recieve any treatment, including immigrants. The british government doesn't make brilliant decisions all the time either, no government does, that's no reason why they can't try to once in a while.

All us europeans and australians do live capitalist, all western countries are strongly capitaist, some just have a little more socialism in them than others, because pure capitalism is as silly as pure socialism.

 

This entire argument boils down to whether health care is like roads, or if its like cars.

If you think that the health of citizens should be a public concern (I do; I don't like epidemics, and I don't like death), then you feel that medical facilities are like roads -- they should be paid for by each of us because we all may need to use them.

If you think that the health of citizens should be a possession owned by those citizens, and that the rich should have snazzier bodies with really nice spinners, then you feel that medical facilities should be run by suits unregulated by government interference.

My position:
I am Canadian, love the Canadian health care system, and am married to an American, so I am anecdotally familiar with both systems. Additionally, I was a research associate for a 3 year study out of a university here, comparing and contrasting the health care in Canada versus that provided in the USA. We studied wait time and quality of care according to a variety of metrics, in both countries and across multiple socioeconomic regions, for breast and colon cancer, with properly anonymized data going back literally decades, well into the 1980s. The conclusion? Defenders of the status quo like to cite "waiting times" and "lower quality of care", but they don't really know what they're talking about. People in the middle class -- the great bulk of people -- get essentially equivalent levels of care, and wait the same amount of time in Canada and the USA, despite the fact that Americans pay much more. The rich (again in both countries) tend to jump the queue -- often travelling to other countries or just other regions of the same country where they don't have to wait (see Steve Jobs liver transplant earlier this year). The real difference is for poor people. In Canada, they get treatment, in the USA they simply don't. There's millions of people in the USA without any coverage at all. My wife was one of them for months, when we were so poor we simply couldn't afford the hundreds of dollars a month to pay for it. Now that she's a Permanent Resident in Canada she finally has health care again, and its just fantastic.

I acknowledge that governments struggle with efficiency in terms of delivering healthcare. But as some have said in this thread already, the good far outweighs the bad. Will you ever get a Republican-leaning American to admit that? No: the indoctrination is too strong, the propaganda too evolved.

 

Anybody who doesn't acknowledge this is ignorant.

As much as I don't like Canada as a whole, healthcare is definitely its pull factor.

 

If you use Hilter/Nazi's in you're comparison you're probably gonna
1. Not be taken seriously
2. Start a flame war
Congrats for the ironic post.

 

Well, sorry... but what you said sent similar vibes that websites like InfoWars and PrisonPlanet (and their unquestioning followers) send, and they seem to carry a lot of the same undertone as some of your posts carry, so I presumed you were talking about or thinking along the lines of the NWO conspiracy stuff.

I can't and won't attempt to change your mind, but I suggest at least reading this:

"Obama's No Socialist. I Should Know."
-Billy Wharton, Member of Socialist Party USA

 

Everything about a person is a public concern, because everything about them affects everyone they interact with in some way.

Of course you can't socialise every part of someone's life because doing that would remove most of the point of living, but health is a particular concern because as you said, poor health is often contagious, and also because poor health prevents people from doing things in society like working and paying taxes and procreating on account of being dead, or ill.

Someone being in good health benefits everyone because more working, healthy, procreating people in a country means more tax income, more stuff being made, a better economy etc, which is exactly why companies already give people health plans as a condition of their employment, because they can't work if they're sick.

As companies are not expected to buy their own roads, to use your analogy, I see no reason why they should be expected to buy their own worker's healthcare when there are established methods for the government being able to do it. What is good for people is good for business, never let it be said I am not capitalist.

 

Socialize health care please. +1

I haven't had healthcare since I got dropped off my state funded one since I was 18 since my mom can't afford it and neither can I.

 

I personally think that mixing both systems would be better.
Not speaking about emergencies.
If you can't afford paying, you wait.
If you want to get fixed nao, you pay extra (and you also fund care for those poor).
Fully social healthcare won't work. It will slowly fall apart till total collapse.

Canada is a bit different story. You are one of the wealthiest nations worldwide. You got oil. You got the money.

USA is broke. Fully social healthcare would probably make you military look like cheap D:

 

QFT

Agreed, 100%, and nicely phrased.

 

Does it hurt you to hear that Hitler and Obama have the same ideals? (modulo killing Jews)

nebajoth: You *probably* have a family that can afford to pay medical bills in such cases.

If you can't pay for medical insurance NOW why do you think that a politician can change it? Medical services' quality will go down or there will be queues. People with more money will buy private insurance/services to a point where public system can offer only basic services reliably.

Another problem in public system is that taxpayer's money doesn't follow him/her.