[BartSimpson]

Lemmy Lemmy:

The whole healthcare reform question in the USA is a classic example of the Free-rider Problem. People have an incentive to claim they don't want this service even when they do. If they lie about their desire for healthcare while believing that they will still receive the benefits of such a program, they hope to free-ride on others' contributions.

It's 2am and you and your five buddies have been up all night partying and everyone's got the munchies. One guy says "Let's get a pizza". Five guys say "Yeah, I'm in, let's order" and one guy says "Nah, I'm not really hungry". But what happens when the pizza arrives? That sixth guy is in there grabbing and gobbling slices just like the five guys that said they wanted the pizza.

It's easy to say you're against something when you really want it but don't really want to pay for it.

Here's an analogy that matches the reality:

It's 2am and you and three of your friends bought and paid for your own pizza. The other two of your friends want pizza but they don't want to pay for it. They want you and your three friends to pay for their pizza. So they propose that you have to pay a tax on your pizza that will subsidize the purchase of free pizza for them.

The following week no one buys pizza because of the extortionate tax on pizza but now everyone expects to have free pizza.

[N_Fiddledog]

Or...as Margaret Thatcher once said, "Socialism is great, until you run out of other people's money".

[Lemmy]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Here's an analogy that matches the reality:

It's 2am and you and three of your friends bought and paid for your own pizza. The other two of your friends want pizza but they don't want to pay for it. They want you and your three friends to pay for their pizza. So they propose that you have to pay a tax on your pizza that will subsidize the purchase of free pizza for them.

The following week no one buys pizza because of the extortionate tax on pizza but now everyone expects to have free pizza.

But the new "tax" on your pizza replaces your old "pizza insurance" which cost more than the tax. So all 5 people are ahead under the "tax" scheme.

[andyt]

Lemmy Lemmy:

But the new "tax" on your pizza replaces your old "pizza insurance" which cost more than the tax. So all 5 people are ahead under the "tax" scheme.

But Bart doesn't pay the pizza imsurance. His boss usually does. So Bart is under the impression that the pizza is free. You can have your anti-socialist pizza and eat it too, under that system.

[DerbyX]

N_Fiddledog N_Fiddledog:

Or...as Margaret Thatcher once said, "Socialism is great, until you run out of other people's money".

Pity that capitalist governments run such huge deficits and failing capiltalist companies required a massive tax-payer funded socialist bail out.

Privatize the gains and socialize the losses.

[BartSimpson]

bootlegga bootlegga:

No doubt, it almost seems as if some Americans (generally the wealthy and the right) actually want their fellow human beings to suffer. It begs comprehension, especially given that many of them are 'Christians'. I guess most of them never read the bits about love thy fellow man and Christian charity...

According to your own Fraser Institute it is Canadians who fall short on charitable giving when compared to Americans.

http://www.envision.ca/pdf/news/FraserInstitute.pdf

I guess you people never read those bits about loving thy fellow man and Christian charity, eh?

[BartSimpson]

Lemmy Lemmy:

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Here's an analogy that matches the reality:

It's 2am and you and three of your friends bought and paid for your own pizza. The other two of your friends want pizza but they don't want to pay for it. They want you and your three friends to pay for their pizza. So they propose that you have to pay a tax on your pizza that will subsidize the purchase of free pizza for them.

The following week no one buys pizza because of the extortionate tax on pizza but now everyone expects to have free pizza.

But the new "tax" on your pizza replaces your old "pizza insurance" which cost more than the tax. So all 5 people are ahead under the "tax" scheme.

Since no one is eating pizza now exactly how are they ahead?

[Lemmy]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

According to your own Fraser Institute it is Canadians who fall short on charitable giving when compared to Americans.

Ahhh, the Fraser Institute...that elightened bastion of ultra-conservative double-talk. No one in credible academia takes what they have to say too seriously. They rate about on par with Fox news on the bias-meter.

[Lemmy]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Since no one is eating pizza now exactly how are they ahead?

They're eating pizza only when the want it now, unlike before when they were prescribed pizzas they didn't need.

[BartSimpson]

Lemmy Lemmy:

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

According to your own Fraser Institute it is Canadians who fall short on charitable giving when compared to Americans.

Ahhh, the Fraser Institute...that elightened bastion of ultra-conservative double-talk. No one in credible academia takes what they have to say too seriously. They rate about on par with Fox news on the bias-meter.

Read the pdf - that comes from publicly available tax information.

[ManifestDestiny]

andyt andyt:

You're never going to convince us that a system that costs 1/3 more, causes 50% of bankruptcies in your country and leaves 1/6 of your population without care is the way to go. But even if you did, what difference would it make? We don't get a vote. You should expend all that sweat and foam around your mouth on people who can actually make a difference, would be my suggestion.

Fact check on that please! or should we trust your hear say?

[Lemmy]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Read the pdf - that comes from publicly available tax information.

Tax returns aren't a good measure of charitable donations in Canada. To be a claimable deduction, you have to donate thousands if you make a decent wage. Few Canadians bother to claim their charitable donations because it has no effect on their tax return. For me, I usually donate between $500 and $1000 per year, but I never claim it because I make too much money for it to matter.

[Thanos]

ManifestDestiny ManifestDestiny:

Why cause he does not make enough for owning his own business

Not that it's germane to the conversation but I do make somewhat less than others who are in the same line of business. But that's by choice, not by any business mistakes of my own. For lack of a better way of describing it, I find the being away from home part of the oilfield lifestyle rather disturbing, and borderline traumatic. I hate living in hotels for weeks on end, I hate being away and not being around to help out my family, and I vigourously hate being around the sort of genuine rednecks that seem to overpopulate the oilpatch. As such I tend to take large amounts of personal time off in between jobs and usually only go back when I start to run out of money. I could quite easily make more money by committing myself to staying out in the field for longer stretches, but I simply find the harshness of the lifestyle and the stone cold heartlessness of too many of the genuine rednecks out there too appalling to be around for long lengths of time.

Plainly put, I HAVE to go home at the end of a job before I fucking start freaking out for real. I'd like to see you go out on one of these jobs and have some crazy cowboy welder or pipefitter come up to you and say, without any prompting from you whatsoever, "Y'know, that Hitler really did have some good ideas. It wasn't all bad stuff that he did" which, verbatim is almost exactly what one of them said to me one day, completely out of the blue. And my inherent inability to tolerate redneck stupidity and vileness such as this is the greatest reason my cash flow isn't what it should be. Taxes and other stuff like that have nothing to do with it. If anything I've been paying far less tax than I did before just because of all of the perfectly legal loopholes my accountant knows how to exploit.

End of story. And it has nothing to do with the issue at point. IMO the United States took a huge step forward on Sunday night. Access to decent health care without bankrupting your family in the process is a basic human right, not a privilege restricted for the well-off. It's common sense to almost everyone else on the planet, except for the capitalist profiteers and government-hating nutcase demographics in the USA.

[andyt]

ManifestDestiny ManifestDestiny:

andyt andyt:

You're never going to convince us that a system that costs 1/3 more, causes 50% of bankruptcies in your country and leaves 1/6 of your population without care is the way to go. But even if you did, what difference would it make? We don't get a vote. You should expend all that sweat and foam around your mouth on people who can actually make a difference, would be my suggestion.

Fact check on that please! or should we trust your hear say?

From that virulent left wing rag, the National Post: http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/francis/archive/2009/05/12/health-care-lies-about-canda.aspx


Sorry, I was wrong about the bankruptcies - it's 67%:
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jun2009/db2009064_666715.htm

50 million uninsured is about 1/6 of your pop, no?

[andyt]

http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/francis/archive/2009/05/12/health-care-lies-about-canda.aspx

The real story
Here are the facts as to why Canada’s medical system, far from perfect, is dramatically better than America’s:
1. It is cheaper even though it takes care of the entire population, or 10% of GDP compared with 15% in the U.S.
2. Canada’s health care system which fully looks after 32 million people costs roughly what the private-sector health insurance companies make in profits in the United States looking after less than half the population for excessive premiums.
3. Canada’s health care system is cheaper still if the litigation costs of fighting over medical bills is eliminated as it is when the government is the sole-insurer. Estimates are that court costs and judgments add another 2 to 3% of GDP to the total medical tab.
4. Canada’s health care system enhances economic productivity. Workers diagnosed with illnesses can still change employers and be employable because they are not rejected by employers with health benefits due to pre-conditions.
5. Infant mortality is much lower in Canada and Europe than in the U.S.
6. Outcomes with major illnesses, such as cancer and heart disease, are better than in the United States.
7. Longevity is better in Canada and Europe than in the U.S.
8. No emergency is neglected in Canada.
9. Some elective procedures may take longer if compared to blue-ribbon U.S. health care but that’s no comparing apples with apples. More appropriately, the overall population’s care should be compared and there are tens of millions of Americans who are uninsured or uninsurable.
10. No one in Canada goes broke because of medical bills whereas ARP estimates half of personal bankruptcies are due to unpaid, high medical bills.
11. Canadians are able to choose their own physicians and to seek multiple opinions.
12. Canadian doctors and nurses are better trained than American counterparts and U.S. physicians must study for at least a year in order to qualify to practice in Canada.
13. Drugs made and invented in the United States are cheaper in Canada, Europe and Japan because our communal health care means volume discounts and savings passed along to society. Americans are overpaying.
14. Americans are being cheated by a patchwork quilt system where the highest risk people – veterans, the indigent and elderly – are insured by governments but the “gravy” or young, healthy people are handed over to private insurance companies.

Is Canada’s system perfect? No and nobody said it was. Networks should stop allowing propagandists to tell lies and any arguments about other countries’ practices should be ignored as totally irrelevant.
The United States is a rich and talented nation and it’s very upsetting to me, as an American, that it does not have the world’s best medical care for its citizens instead of one of the worst.
Americans deserve better.

Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blog ... z0j1PucyD9
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