Reply With Quote1. Cato is a bunch of liars who until very recently were big fans of the Obama/Romney approach.Originally Posted by blah!
2. If your deep and abiding concern for the constituion leads to people dying and suffering suck it up, buttercup.
To be fair, I suspect if Roberts had ruled differently, most of us (myself included) would have said the same thing- that the Supreme court didn't care about constitutionality but politics.
I'm still shocked Roberts put his own integrity (I hope it's that) over his personal beliefs- which is a sad statement to say, but that's how little I trusted the Supreme Court. This decision restores a little trust.
Given the externalities involved with not buying healthcare, the government has a role in regulating and correcting market failures, so I can see the justification for this.
1. Cato is a bunch of liars who until very recently were big fans of the Obama/Romney approach.
2. If your deep and abiding concern for the constituion leads to people dying and suffering suck it up, buttercup.
Because this was the ONLY acceptable solution, ever! It would have been impossible to keep people from dying and suffering without the individual mandate, right? You guys are really laying this bullshit on thick. Let's see who is next to top you in the melodrama department.
Edit: And Cato didn't write the article, an individual did. It was also also written five years ago, so any claim that this individual is a lair and supported the individual mandate is nonsense.
You'll recall the only GOP suggested alternative solution was something about tort reform which wouldn't solve shit.
http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_H...health_systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ife_expectancy
https://www.cia.gov/library/publicat.../2102rank.html
Things should be better when the worlds most wealthy and powerful country performs so badly in relation to health care of it's citizens? It would indicate the current system is not very good, so probably needs changing?
Come on dude. That's a Koch funded think-tank which has its own extremely biased, anti-government , agenda. That's like saying someone should read Mein Kampf to get a more scientific overview of why Jews are bad. And they posted the article because it fits their line.
What? Oh no, jpinard. They just fought off a Koch takeover.
Their new boss is, er, a randroid.
*sigh*
Wow comparing libertarians and cato to the nazis? That's low even for someone like you.
So Governor Rick Scott (R) of Florida says he's directing all Florida institutions to ignore the mandate because he made up a great big number that it would cost the state. In fact, most of it would cost the Federal government, not just his state, but why use real math?
The hypocrisy of this guy is sickening:
He made his first foray into politics by forming a group called Conservatives for Patients RightsScrew those insurance-less people! They don't need proper medical care! Just send them to overflowing Emergency rooms. Who needs preventative or contiguous medicine?According to Census data released last year, Florida had the nation's third-highest rate of residents without health insurance during the past three years
Here's a nice trip to 3rd world America:
http://www.katiefalkenberg.com/#/app...zHealthCare040
Read Brett. It's an analogy on propaganda and media manipulation, something Hitler was fantastic at. If we can't use the past to educate and protect ourselves - use it as reference (when it fits), then history is for naught. And since Cato and Heritage Foundation are Libertarian, anti-global warming, anti-regulation - and you think about the impact that will have on the next generation and the millions of lives that will be lost through displacement, poverty, and starvation I think the analogy fits. It's just Cato and Heritage use much more subtle techniques, but their goal is the same... manipulate the masses through misdirection, misinformation.
So Jpinard, I am heartless, selfish, and now just like a nazi because I am a libertarian. Any thing else you want to toss over?
You can't read?
Map showing who has universal health care and who doesn't:
From the accompanying article from the Atlantic
What's astonishing is how cleanly the green and grey separate the developed nations from the developing, almost categorically. Nearly the entire developed world is colored, from Europe to the Asian powerhouses to South America's southern cone to the Anglophone states of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The only developed outliers are a few still-troubled Balkan states, the Soviet-style autocracy of Belarus, and the U.S. of A., the richest nation in the world.And even with the ACA we still don't have universal health care, but at least we're getting a bit closer.That brings us to another way that America is a big outlier on health care. The grey countries on this map tend to spend significantly less per capita on health care than do the green countries -- except for the U.S., where the government spends way more on health care per person than do most countries with free, universal health care. This is also true of health care costs as a share of national GDP -- in other words, how much of a country's money goes into health care.
"The overall level of health spending in the United States is so high that public (i.e. government) spending on health per capita is still greater than in all other OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] countries, except Norway and the Netherlands," according to a recent OECD report, which covers most of the developed world.
I think the Koch takeover attempt got defeated- for now at least, read something about that last week. That said, it's still a right-learning organization, just not a full-fledged dolla-a-holla group like AFP is yet.
Thaaaaaaaaat's right Brett, work that victim angle that you do so well.
Coming from someone who lives in a country with universal health care, I have to say that libertarian policies are heartless. Libertarians really want poor people, or people with with preconditions, to not have access to health care because either a) This would raise rich people's taxes or b) This is not specifically supported by a 200+ year old document written when life expectancy was under 40.
so, back to the subject, this is an excellent point:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...dual-mandates/
Not only did the founders support individual mandates, they also supported healthcare mandates. So, uh, neener?
Fascinating *said in my best Spock voice*.
Not quite. It was an attempt to seize majority control, not an external takeover. They're absolutely Koch-funded. Their original name was the "Charles Koch Foundation"! Whether they continue to be after recent event is an open question.
Sheesh, I've seen this stupid argument so many times over the last couple of years. Look, there are a lot of solid grounds to support the individual mandate on, but let's do it on the basis of facts, not fantasy. The Seamen's Protection Act of 1798 in no way contains an individual mandate to purchase health insurance. Here's the relevant language of the Act:
"Section 1. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That from and after the first day of September next, the master or owner of every ship or vessel of the United States, arriving from a foreign port into any port of the United States, shall, before such ship or vessel shall be admitted to an entry, render to the collector a true account of the number of seamen, that shall have been employed on board such vessel since she was last entered at any port in the United States,–and shall pay to the said collector, at the rate of twenty cents per month for every seaman so employed; which sum he is hereby authorized to retain out of the wages of such seamen.
"Sec. 2. And be it further enacted, That from and after the first day of September next, no collector shall grant to any ship or vessel whose enrolment or license for carrying on the coasting trade has expired, a new enrolment or license before the master of such ship or vessel shaH first render a true account to the collector, of the number of seamen, and the time they have severally been employed on board such ship or vessel, during the continuance of the license which has so expired, and pay to such collector twenty cents per month for every month such seamen have been severally employed, as aforesaid; which sum the said master is hereby authorized to retain out of the wages of such seamen. And if any such master shall render a false account of the number of men, and the length of time they have severally been employed, as is herein required, he shall forfeit and pay one hundred dollars.
"Sec. 3. And be it further enacted, That it shall be the duty of the several collectors to make a quarterly return of the sums collected by them, respectively, by virtue of this act, to the Secretary of the Treasury; and the President of the United States is hereby authorized, out of the same, to provide for the temporary relief and maintenance of sick or disabJed seamen, in the hospitals or other proper institutions now established in the several ports of the United States, or, in ports where no such institutions exist, then in such other manner as he shall direct: Provided, that the monies collected in anyone district, shall be expended within the same."
In sum, the master of the vessel is required to withhold from the sailor's pay 20 cents per month "to provide for the temporary relief and maintenance of sick or disabled seamen."
So what's wrong with the argument that this shows early Congressional support for an individual insurance mandate? Two things:
1) This isn't an individual mandate, it's an employer mandate. The responsibility is placed on the vessel's master, not the individual sailor. There is no penalty placed on the sailor for not contributing his 20 cents. The only penalty applies to the vessel's master. BTW, PPACA contains an employer mandate as well as an individual mandate, so you might use this act to support that mandate, but there's another problem:
2) This isn't health insurance. It's a common fund to provide for the care of all "sick and disabled" seamen, but, unlike health insurance, there is no promise of care for any particular individual. Health insurance as we know it wasn't invented until the 1920s.
You see, it's not an individual mandate/tax/penalty to purchase health insurance for yourself. It's just a mandatory tax on the employer, who is not "an individual." Which comes out of the employee's salary, given a competitive market. Which is then used to purchase health insurance for the pool. Which provides health care for anyone in that pool that wants it.
Totally different if you just focus on the nouns instead of effects.
No, there's no insurance involved. Your health insurance premiums, whether through your employer or yourself, guarantee payment for your care. This laws establishes a common fund for care, but it in no way guarantees that you or anybody else will get any of that care. So call it what you want, but it's not insurance.
And yes, there is a difference, beyond the nouns, between an employer and an individual mandate. A mandate doesn't mean who pays for it. It means who gets penalized if it's not paid. In this case, the employer, not the employee.
You'll also note that the mandate applies to the owner or master of the vessel. The owner, of course, is not necessarily an individual, so you're really stretching to read an "individual" mandate there.
Okay, I'll start off by saying that, by and large, people are being entirely too rough on the libertarian argument in general. That being said, the Supreme Courts have been entirely generous about what the exact reach of the Federal Constitution is, throughout the history of the courts and, in particular since the 1930s. The current incarnation of the courts that supported the ACA happens to be the most conservative court in the last century. And as a reminder, the courts DO decide what is constitutional and what is not.
All the woulda shoulda that that's NOT what the framers meant is (a) irrelevant, as the political system has a means (the Supreme Court) to actually make these calls, (b) likely inaccurate, as the founders wrote the constitution as a direct response to the Articles of Confederation's pathetically weak states' rights oriented approach, and (c) stupid, as the founders were not oblivious to the fact that the world was a quickly changing place, and the government needed to be able to change in order to remain competitive in the world marketplace.
And for what its worth, that's all a good thing. Americans currently live in one of the most prosperous times in human history, and this prosperity was built upon (among other things) the back of Social Security and Medicare. Saying that we should haven't pursued these programs due to idealistic ideas of what the founders were trying to get at through a moronic lens that weeds out anything attempting to help the social good is fucking stupid. The idea that we'd somehow be a better society if 60% of seniors were still in dire poverty because OMGLOL FREEDOM is retarded. And so it is with health care.
Also, for what its worth, the idea that this health care bill is socialized medicine, or even close to it, is stupid. It is, at its core, a last-ditch attempt to fix up our current, very-nearly-entirely-private health care system by putting in measures so that they can't fuck customers after they've taken their customers money, and so that people who lose the health care lottery have a shot in hell of getting care in a health market that has been completely perverted by being employer-driven. For what its worth, if the ACA hadn't come along, our current health care system would likely have collapsed anyway, and there's a not-small number of people who are hoping that it still does, because of the belief, likely accurate, that a true socialized system is vastly superior to the patchwork system we have in place.
The one thing that can be considered an affront to your personal freedom, the mandate, can be thought of legally in many ways. It exists entirely to protect the 99% of those who can afford to purchase insurance and choose to do so from the 1% of the population who would rather shirk personal responsibilities and suddenly seek out care and/or insurance only in the case they suddenly get sick or seek emergency care. If it makes you feel better, you have complete freedom to not buy insurance -- but if you make over 300% of the poverty line, you will be asked to help pay for the chance that you will seek catastrophic care -- which is nice, because until now, those of us with jobs with health insurance have been paying for these deadbeats.
Cato's numbers are writing from a different reality. In a world where Insurance Companies MUST provide you health care (i.e. cannot ban you for pre-existing conditions and lifetime caps, etc, and other fixes in the ACA that were sorely needed and were highly popular), the smart money is for individuals to not pursue insurance until they got sick.
This not only protects the Insurance Companies, but drives down health care costs and insurance premiums across the board. As mentioned previously upthread, when healthy people bail out of your insurance pool, costs go up. Putting in the legal requirement to cover preexisting conditions without forcing personal responsibility somehow would likely have blown up the whole system.
Going to 'non-employer consumer decision' is really rough. Insurance fundamentally works because, effectively, people pool their resources and insurance companies take the good with the bad. While I hate the fact that our insurance system is tied to employment, it does mean that employers tend to have a good cross section of healthy and non-healthy in their employment. The fear with going pure consumer-based is that savvy companies will find a way to lure healthy individuals over and leave the sickos on their competitors rolls.
The easy response to this, of course, is single payer. There are other, non-easy answers, but the problem is still pretty rough, and any attempt to change the (bad) mooring of insurance to employment is doomed politically, because one side will then be able to accuse the other side of taking everyone's insurance away.
Very-nearly-entirely private?
In 2010, total health care expenditures was around $2.5 trillion. Medicare accounted for more than $500 billion, and Medicaid was north of $400 billion.
The government (federal and state) has been the biggest player in our health care system for decades. They are the 800 lb gorilla in the health care marketplace, not Kaiser or Wellmark or the Blues. Sure, there are private actors, but we haven't had a nearly entire private health care system since at least 1965.
This is the point where the conservative outrage just goes off the rails for me. I'm pretty sure that most every fiscal conservative likes to argue about how detrimental it is for folks to leech off of the hard workers and how they should pull their own weight. Now we require those who can to do so, and those who can partially do so to do so, and those who can't, well, they can't anyway and they would qualify for medicaid under current policy, so there's not much change now. And this idea is abhorrent to conservatives for some reason I can't begin to fathom, but that comes out of their mouth as "entitlement". (Or at least it does from Senator Hatch around these parts.)
Entitlement in my mind is having the government require guarantee of service to uninsured people in the most expensive way possible and having the money for it effectively come out of the rates that I pay to the hospital (whether directly or indirectly, through increased insurance rates). Requiring that everyone pull their own weight seems great to me, but apparently to conservatives it's suddenly entitlement somehow. My mind literally boggles.
There's a pretty substantial history of Supreme Court Justices moving towards the center on political beliefs despite party polarization when they're appointed, which also applies regardless of which side they were on initially. Apparently the "appointment for life" thing actually does work, to an extent.
nice map. And one thing that jumps out at me reading the things in your post, is that there must be a large margin of corruption in the whole usa 'mixed' medical system. Looking at the finger prints from the financial crisis, and the general lack of morality shown by the top tier of managers in all that, i'd place a sure bet that it most likely is in the private sector of your health care where the most money/government system gets creatively used.
Well stated! I count myself among that not-small crowd that you mentioned. Not because I want a collapse of the current system, but because with our current pathetic excuse for a political system I don't see any other way that we'll get to a truly balanced system that provides for everyone.
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