J.H. Bowden says:
Our Congress resorted to rationing by passing Ted Kennedy’s HMO Act of 1973. This subsidized HMOs heavily, forced employers to offer HMOs as an option, and overturned many state laws against physicians receiving money to **deny** people healthcare. I shit you not.

Hi, I’m new here and I read a bit of your post and I wanted to say that I had learned recently that it was Nixon and the founder of Kaiser who forced HMO’s on to the public. Apparently, they devised that it would make health “care” corporations tons of money. Yes I watched Sicko and I heard the Nixon recording. So, I’m confused. Are you blaming the rise in HMO’s on the Democrats?

yeah, which stats would these be? the one’s that make your argument for you? in whose favor do these stats count, yours?

I looked at ALL the stats, and still arrived at my previous conclusion. Thus, I disagree with you because the stats that count aren’t the one’s that you’re quoting.

If I’m diagnosed with something that will kill me, then I will die. Health care should be for the living, not for the dieing. I don’t want your near-death care, I want health care while I’m alive.

Most democrats are. If they really cared about other people, they would support free markets.

Mike Huckabee’s crackpot idea of preventive medicine isn’t going to deliver healthcare for real illnesses of real people. The problem with American healthcare is the rising costs created by subsidies that aren’t rationed directly. The solution isn’t rationing. For HSAs, we should eliminate the health insurance requirement, allow tax-free withdrawals for all health insurance premiums, and remove the contribution limits that prohibit employers from depositing the full value of benefits directly into an HSA. This step alone will create a healthcare market with millions of people in it. We should reform Medicaid along the lines of welfare reform, and introduce a partial voucher system to reduce Medicare costs. This will help make health insurance more affordable, which is my main goal. If you’re using healthcare to preach something else like class warfare, well, you’re not going to give a shit about making it more affordable.

You should compare the US healthcare system to other countries on the stats that really count. or example, if you are diagnosed with prostate cancer, the mortality rate is 19% in the United States, while it is 44% in Germany, 49% in France, and 57% in the United Kingdom. Or take colon cancer– 30% of Americans diagnosed with die from it, as opposed to 58% in France, 62% in New Zealand, and 74% in the United Kingdom. Breast cancer shows the same pattern: less than 25% of diagnosed American women will die from it, compared with 35% of French women, 46% of British women, and 46% of women from New Zealand. The United States has double the amount of MRI machines per capita than the United Kingdom and triple the amount per capita than the left’s imagined utopia, Canada. The amount of cancer deaths per capita is 70% higher in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. The only way to make things look better for the rest of the world is to look at life expectancy, which has more to do with obesity and firearms — two things Comrade Moore knows about — than the actual delivery of healthcare.

Yeah, fuck HuckabeeCare and the moron supporters of it.

Creationists like Mike Huckabee believe evolution is impossible, since things cannot evolve without the planning of one single intelligence. Mike Huckabee also believes progress in a market economy is impossible without the planning of one single intelligence. He’s a dumbass. No one person can know even a tiny fraction of all of the transactions that occur daily. Markets are the most efficient way of dealing with human ignorance. I preach evolution, not revolution.

For example, are patients waiting too long to see specialists in Tallahassee? What kind of healthcare coverage matters the most to near-elderly residents in Spokane? Capitalism is a discovery procedure. The feedback mechanism is the consumers themselves, and letting them make their own decisions is a method of capturing and conveying that information. Even a purely socialist system has to determine who gets new treatments that are not universally available.

Prices are not obstacles to get what you want, as you seem to believe. Prices provide an incentive to react to popular want and resource scarcity and the means to do so. This is Adam Smith’s insight that as long as cooperation is strictly voluntary, no exchange will take place unless both parties benefit. Individuals who only intend their own gain, by the invisible hand, end up promoting a good they did not intend. There is nothing mystical about this– it would be commonplace, if it wasn’t for the media behemoths, Academia, and Hollywood beating Marxism into the heads of the average citizen everyday.

Fucking over the elderly, the sick, and the poor with a socialist healthcare system in favor of the healthy majority is morally perverse. I clearly explained how a socialist system creates inequalities in my last post. Our healthcare system should help those who really need it, instead of giving handouts to healthy people like me who do not. Socialist medicine is democratic in the worst way. Many forget that Lenin’s social democratic labor party split into two camps, the majority (the bolsheviks) and the minority (the mensheviks)– Lenin thought that since he had a majority, he could do whatever the hell he wanted to the minority. In contrast, I want to help the ***minority*** — the elderly, the poor, and the sick. You said that “some people need to die.” I can’t tell you how much I disagree with this.

There is nothing racist in the notion that consumers buy more at lower prices and less at higher prices. There is nothing in racist in the idea that producers supply more at higher price and supply less at lower prices. Your cries of racism here are juvenile.

Lastly, most of us when spending our own money will spend it wisely, making certain we get the most value for our dollar. When someone else is spending someone else’s money for another party, there’s an incentive to spend as much money as possible, without regard for quality. In the United States, 86% of all healthcare expenditures are paid for by third parties, more than Japan, Canada, and Italy. This happens because government pays almost 50% of healthcare costs in the US, and we have a policy where employer-based insurance is tax free, while you have to pay taxes if you buy it individually. The HuckabeeCare you support will only add another layer of government intrusion upon an already bloated system– people like him and Clinton are going to bankrupt any HMO that specializes with their managed competition schemes. In the interest of yourself, and the common good, I strongly recommend you reexamine your ideas about this.

I like that. It beats thrownness. Can I repeat it ad nauseum to everyone I know? Or is it ad infinitum? Ad libidum? Ad… whatever.

Oh, and thanks Raindogzilla for posting this article. yeah, sorry i got riled up objecting to J.H. Bowden’s linguistic acrobatics: socialism this, stalinism that – and got dragged into a totally off topic discussion. I didn’t really mean to.

No health care and no hell scare, so no point in talking about it since it won’t get me in to see a doctor. besides, i came here to get my head filled with happy thoughts of the religion-bashing fun variety, so…

Speaking of Schmuck-a-bee … nothing really, I just wanted to call that clown a schmuck.

days; but went for some twenty years with absolutely no medical coverage. The last insurance I had, was a policy from the musician’s union; when I was working a ’steady gig’…my first stint…at Chicago’s Sears Tower Metropolitan Club, one day a week. When I left that in 1983, I couldn’t afford, even at THAT time, to have any insurance. I was ‘fortunate’, I guess not to have gotten sick etc. in the intervening years.
I still…(force of habit)…have not had myself checked out.
“What’s that Doc…you want me to…bend over? Foist…Have you washed your hands…and clipped your nails?…HmMMM?”
Seriously…with all the latest shtick on people going into the hospital with something minor; and then dying from either a doctor’s fuck up, or catching a Strepp infection from dumb employees not washing their hands…I’ll stay away for the time being.
To me, there are many things worse than death; some of which come from too eagerly (or desperately?) trying to extend ones life beyond any ‘reason’. I’ve known people who’ve ‘extended’ their lives through medical intervention…but paid a terrible price for the result.
Of course, if something seriously gets my attention; I’ll drag myself to a doctor for the usual barrage of tests…that’ll be a REAL drag for me!
I’m also in favor, by the way, of consensual euthanasia. And suicide?
[Yeah...let's not go there?]

The OTHER 800 lb. gorilla in EVERYONE’S room is…
the DENTAL CARE issue!
Talk about…(which nobody does)…EXPENSIVE!!! Yada, yada…
[What's that?...let's not go there, either...?]

OK…FUCK HUCK…
FUCK ALL OF THEM?
FUCK EVERYBODY?…erm…
OK…I may have stepped (shlepped?) over the line on that last one.
Sorry! (NOT!) :shock”:

I’m not talking about hospitalizations and emergencies. I’m talking about preventive medicine. The current system that we now have in the US has been the making of insurance companies for more than thirty years. It is set up to deny care and to make more money for the insurance companies. Medicaid, Medicare and free or reduced fee services for the insurance-less at hospitals are the attempts by the humane liberals in our government to plug the gaps in the landscape of our national health care left open by the conservatives who are in the pocket of the insurance companies.

The insurance companies understand that they can’t make any money from the jobless and the poor. They understand that if “those people” get health care somebody has to pay for it. They don’t want to pay for it. They don’t want their rich pals to pay for it, otherwise they’ll stop being rich, and you know what that means: they’ll have to stop being pals. So who’s left? The ever shrinking middle class. The working people who earn money. The insurance companies must have that money! In the process, they turn the middle class into the poor. This is where we’re heading with our current health care system.

So when you speak of that insurance-less person whom you met at the hospital, ask yourself: who should pay for her care? The government doesn’t pay for anything, it merely redistributes our tax $’s. So follow the money and ask that question (who should pick up her medical tab?): the working middle class, the indecently rich or some combination of the two. The third option is to stop being humane. To stop caring for the jobless, homeless, poor, those who can not pay. Considering our global over-population crisis the third option is not entirely without merit. So either somebody pays or some people need to die. The conservative objection is that liberals want our government to do some wealth redistribution without asking the rich what they think of it all. Frankly, that is a more palatable choice than killing a bunch of people.

So where do I stand in all this, and does my position really matter? After all, I’m not really all that important, and I know that. But I won’t deny that I am a selfish asshole. I want to live. However, I said before that if I’m ever so far gone that all I am is a drain on resources without giving anything back, I’ll gladly die for humanity, but while I have something to give, I have something to live for. And since this is the only life (right!) I’ve got, I want to live it instead of worrying about how I will pay my medical bills if I get sick or injured. I want to pay only for services rendered, not for insurance, and I want the services rendered to be affordable. Insurance companies should be made a thing of the past. Charging insurance should be illegal. Insurance is legalized racketeering: you pay for protection from illness and injury – things that the insurance company can’t possibly prevent you from having. Insurance is religion, except all the supernatural ooga-booga talk is replaced with creative accounting and fuzzy math: you pay for a promise of a favorable financial future in dealing with medical costs, yet whenever you call on the insurance company to deliver on its promise it never does, kinda like god. See, I brought it back ON TOPIC, sort of.

So, back to where I started… I’m not talking about hospitalizations and emergencies. I’m talking about preventive medicine. Everybody dies eventually, until we perfect immortality, that is fact. I’m talking about the quality of life of the contributing members of society. I have no objection to the rich being rich and having a lifestyle that I find morally repulsive, but I am against the rich living that lifestyle at the cost of quality of life of the working people – that is ethically irresponsible. And if the rich can’t manage to see that on their own, then I have no problem with having the government cut the rich down a notch.

I don’t want free or cheap services at a hospital ER. If I have to go to the ER that means I’m already dieing. I want to go to a doctor before I am sick and get myself checked out regularly. I want to use modern medicine to maintain my quality of life at a descent level. I want to pay for it all, but I want it all to be affordable. The purpose of the insurance company is to make money. The purpose of the government (in this context) is to redistribute money. I want what I pay for health care to go to my doctor, not to the insurance company. Now, I realize that neither system is perfect, as I stipulated before in all cases some people need to die, but I trust the government more (in this case) to make sure that I get what I pay for and that the doctors get what I pay them.

Stardust, you said earlier (I’m paraphrasing, so please excuse me if I don’t get it quite right) that as an ex-xian you came to a certain realization about religion and god and you’ve learned to live without either. Well, I’m making a similar leap. I choose to live without (technically, I refuse to pay for) insurance because I don’t believe in it. Like religion, it doesn’t do what it promises to do. Like god, it doesn’t ever deliver.

Three years ago I left a job that I loved. I know it’s cliché, but I still love saying it: I used to work in rock’n'roll. Technically, I worked in the entertainment industry specializing in audio/visual production. My last job was a seasonal gig on a tourist resort island. The company I worked for didn’t provide health insurance. In fact, while I was there they were investigated by the Labor Department which discovered, to my shock, that my rich bastard of a boss (with whom I was friendly in our daily professional relationship) cheated all of his employees out of over-time pay over many years. Yeah, it was pretty fucked up to sit next to this guy who’s a millionaire and hear him tell his employees about how (cheap he is, or) how little he spent on his last vacation in the Dominican Republic (yeah, a millionaire pennypincher), and then to find out that he’s been cheating me on my paycheck every week. So even though I loved working with bands, musicians and entertainers, even though I had an awesome job where I could sleep in almost every day and show up to work in shorts and a t-shirt, even though this job allowed me a creative outlet in our uniformly commercialized world, and despite many other reasons for which I loved my job, I left three years ago because I decided that I want more. One kind of satisfaction is not enough. There’s ideology and there’s reality – both are inseparable inside every human being. So I decided to avail myself with an education and to partake in some of that social mobility. I left that job and went back to college to finish my BA degree (which I started and didn’t finish after high school). I’m just about done with it and I plan to go to graduate school next year to earn an MA and then a PhD. The only way I can go to grad school is with a university assistantship – a financial support package which now usually includes health insurance. I’m not sure what I’m gonna do about that. I imagine that if I get health coverage through a third party, as in this case, I will waltz right into the appropriate medical facility and tell them that I could possibly be dieing right now and not know it since I haven’t had any kind of medical attention or treatment for the past twelve+ years. I would imagine that they will look at me like I’m a bleeding lunatic, and then I’ll say, well how about you start with a full physical examination and run all the tests that a person like me should reasonably be subjected to, and they will probably say that none of that is covered by the insurance and that I need to have actual symptoms of an illness or an injury to receive covered treatment.

So, here we are then, back where we started. This is the issue. Anyway, if this is too off topic then I will refrain from further comments; I don’t want to break any house rules. So just to be safe here’s the obligatory FUCK HUCK!