Fit2BTied Loc: Texas

You say you are blessed ($) but you prefer the government (by taxing and redistribution) handle the charity. How very socialist of you. Charity is a heart thing, but not to people like you.

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

I don't have all the answers but CA is the same way. We used to have free community colleges. The only thing you had to pay for was books; something else that has increased astronomically. I also think the education was better then. Many of today's students would be better off not going to college and amassing huge debt to pay for it. We don't need everyone to have a college degree. But then, in today's world if you want a good high school education you need to go to community college. Unfortunately, many businesses required a degree for jobs that didn't need a degree to do them.

It a different world we live in. I had GI Bill benefits and worked part-time that earned enough to live on.
Really good-paying part-time jobs aren't as plentiful as they once were. I started with a newspaper route when I was 12. None of these jobs exist for kids now.

I blame some of it on parents who want to give their children everything. How many were involved in the college admission cheating scandal? I think a just sentence would be for each of those parents to pay the whole way for 5 deserving students who were not admitted to the same school.

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

How do you figure Medicare is more efficient? More layers of bureaucracy. If you want economies of scale let employers and local governments group together even across state lines and get group policies for the employees.

Bcon

Publicizing the the good that people do is not in the interest of the MSM. The more hate they can stir up with their left wing cohorts, the better it is for their sales.

acknowledgeurma

https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20110920.013390/full/
Wherein one finds:
"...non-partisan data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) demonstrate definitively that private insurance is increasingly less efficient than Medicare".

As for "employers and local governments" grouping together across state lines, they already are grouped together. That group is called the United States government.

acknowledgeurma

Yes, I'm heartless, that's why I think everyone deserves good shelter, food, healthcare, etc.

And as for the government taxing and redistributing, it already does that, only not in the direction you imagine.

Mikeyavelli

The evil that men do lives on, the good is interred with their bones.

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

Interesting, but not definitive I would say. I will have to dig into this subject some more. Obamacare changed everything. One of the problems we constantly hear about is Medicare fraud. Anyway, thanks for sending this.

acknowledgeurma

My contrary self is in the uncomfortable state of having to agree with everything you wrote, yes but...

Regarding "the education was better then":
Many (most?) of my courses were taught by tenured professors whose lighter teaching loads allowed more time for research and study to keep abreast of their field. Today, many (most?) courses (especially at community colleges) are taught by Instructors and Adjunct Professors who rather than doing research, have to schlepp themselves from part-time position to part-time position just to get by.

Regarding "I blame some of it on parents who want to give their children everything."
Now you're sounding like one of those commies who wants a confiscatory death tax that robs children of their just inheritance.

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

Lanhee Chen, fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford

It’s very easy for a politician to stand up before voters and say, “Health care is a right,” and then passionately advocate for “single-payer” or “free health care” or “Medicare for All”—whatever term they might use.

But before we consider the merits of the government managing your health care—and that’s what this all boils down to—maybe we should ask a more basic question:

What do we mean by “health care”?

Because if you get sick—and here, we’re talking major illness—or you’re in serious pain, you don’t just want health care; you want quality health care.

And where is your best chance of finding that?

The answer is right here in America.

For skilled doctors, cutting-edge medical treatments, and care without long delays, no other country rivals the United States. Not even close. Nobody from Texas is going to Canada for medical treatment. It’s almost always the other way around.

Sure, our health care system has lots of issues—and we should address them—but do we really want to upend all the advantages that we do have and start from scratch? Because that’s what would have to happen if we completely turn health care over to the government.

So, let’s imagine we make the change. We hear a lot about how great free health care would be, but it’s only fair we look at the downside.

The first is that government-run health care takes medical decisions away from patients—that means you—and puts them in the hands of bureaucrats. They decide, for example, how many MRI machines are going to be available, or under what conditions you can get back surgery or a bypass, or even whether you qualify for cancer treatment.

That’s how it works in the United Kingdom under its single-payer system. Because it has finite resources, the National Health Service, or NHS, sharply restricts access to treatments like hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery, and even prescription drugs to deal with common conditions like arthritis and diabetes. If you suffer from any of these ailments and many others in the UK, you may just have to live with the pain.

And let’s hope you don’t have a medical emergency.

In a January 2018 article in the New York Times, patients in emergency rooms around London are described as having “to wait 12 hours before they are tended to. Corridors are jammed with beds carrying [the] frail and elderly.” To deal with the situation, “hospitals [were] ordered to postpone non-urgent surgeries until the end of the month.” That hardly seems like an improvement over what we have in the US.

A second big problem with single-payer systems is that they are expensive—really expensive.

A recent study by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University found that a Bernie Sanders-style “Medicare-for-All” health system would cost a tidy $32.6 trillion over ten years. That’s on top of what the federal government spends on health care today. And this is not a new number. Other studies have found the cost to be roughly in the same range.

So, how would we pay for it?

Kenneth Thorpe, a professor at Emory University and health policy official in the Clinton Administration, spells it out: “If you are going to go in this direction [Medicare-for-All]… the tax increases are going to be enormous.” Not just for the rich, Thorpe estimates, but for working Americans and the poor, too.

Charles Blahous, the author of the Mercatus study, puts it this way: “Even a doubling of all projected individual and corporate income taxes would be insufficient to finance these added federal costs.” And he considers that a conservative estimate.

Canada knows all about exploding health care costs. In Ontario, the country’s biggest province, those costs took up 46% of its entire budget in 2010. By 2030, that number is projected to be 80%. In other words, in a few years, Ontario will have little money to pay for anything except health care.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, government-run systems depress the search for new cures. Biomedical research spending in the US far outpaces that of any country with nationalized health care, even when you account for differences in population or size of economies. That’s one reason medical breakthroughs rarely come from countries where the government controls health care; they come from the United States, where the government doesn’t.

The lion’s share of biomedical research and development spending in the US—over $70 billion in 2012—comes from the private sector. Discovering new medical cures and technology is a profitable business—and thank goodness it is. Those profits drive innovation. Take away the profits and you will surely take away the innovation.

Single-payer, free health care, Medicare-for-All: they might sound great, but like all visions of utopia, they ultimately produce a lot more harm than good.


https://www.hoover.org/research/rx-rose-colored-glasses
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170615111035.htm
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-government-share-basic-research-funding-falls-below-50
https://www.researchamerica.org/sites/default/files/uploads/healthdollar12.pdf
https://freebeacon.com/issues/study-sanders-medicare-plan-cost-32-6-trillion/
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/sustainability-of-health-care-spending-in-canada-2017
http://townhallreview.com/2017/09/bernie-plan-good-true/
https://www.healthcare-now.org/296831690-Kenneth-Thorpe-s-analysis-of-Bernie-Sanders-s-single-payer-proposal.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/13/us/sanders-medicare-for-all-plan-support.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/opinion/sanders-health-care-medicare.html
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/medical-advancements-who-is-leading_b_807796
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-much-does-federal-government-spend-health-care
https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/charles-blahous/even-doubling-all-projected-individual-and-corporate-income-taxes-could
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/analysis-senator-bernie-sanderss-tax-and-transfer-proposals
https://www.mercatus.org/publications/federal-fiscal-policy/costs-national-single-payer-healthcare-system?utm_source=bridge&utm_medium=bridgepost&utm_campaign=medicareforall
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/world/europe/uk-national-health-service.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-40485724
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/26/stop-rationing-cataracts-patients-nearly-blind-nhs-warned/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2034914/GPs-told-ration-cancer-scans-bureaucratic-directive.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/nhs-rations-operations-hip-patients-beg-treatment-cuts-funding-a8453531.html
https://fortune.com/2018/07/10/nhs-70-years-uk-britain-single-payer/
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2016-08-03/canadians-increasingly-come-to-us-for-health-care

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

We go out of this world with nothing, shouldn't we come into it that way, and let merit decide. No, we can't do that because not everyone is born into an equal opportunity to develop their talents? What to do, what to do? Life isn't fair.

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

Foundation for Applied Conservative Leadership

I am not part of the government's herd, and frankly, I resent the arrogance of some government official who is trying to tell me what medicines I need to take.

As adults, we still have a right to object.

There may be a reason why. It could be health concerns. It could be a religious objection.

Do you feel similarly?

But what about your kids?

This is where it gets tough. They can't make up their own minds. But who makes this decision... the government or parents?

This was the fundamental question in a State Senate race last year. Former Oklahoma State Senator Ervin Yen was a doctor who opposed vaccine choice.

He was the Committee Chair who almost took away all parental rights in regard to vaccine use. He was trounced in his primary 60% to 40% by a relative unknown.

His defeat also probably made Oklahoma a Constitutional Carry state.

Why?

Because Yen opposed that too.

But it was the vaccination issue that defined that campaign.

In other words, you can't always choose how a campaign is going to shape up issue wise, so you need to understand some of these other divisive issues in order to be effective.

That's why we are going to have a national expert to help us make sense of the vaccine choice issue.

Freedom of medical choice should be a fundamental right, but it is being rapidly lost in today's world.

The media is constantly attacking people who object to all the vaccinations their kids are forced to take. So what is their objection?

Mark Blaxbill will hopefully help you make sense of this subject.

His daughter suffers from autism, so this issue is personal and touched his life in serious and profound ways.

The objection is always "the herd." But does this really work? Is this another government theory in which we have all become part of a mass government experiment?

I hope you think this is a topic you might want to learn more about.

And even if you don't, isn't this a topic worthy of understanding? This is a growing issue which will become more divisive in the next few years.

There are billions of dollars at stake for Big Pharma, and the health of innocent children and their parents is on the line.

Fit2BTied Loc: Texas

Government providing a safety net for a small percentage of those in need (supplementing private charity). Good thing.
Government providing for the needs of the masses. Recipe for disaster (Venezuela). But of course the unaffected ruling class won't give 2 $#!+s. The United States will never be a socialist country! Patriots - this needs to be our mantra!

Fit2BTied Loc: Texas

Wow Just Wow Mic Drop

kankune Loc: Iowa

You come from privileged wealth. So...do tell us how ordinary not so privileged people can attain the wealth you talk of.