1. Running things for yourself means a free market system, not a government-run system. How is a government-run system you running things for yourself?
2. A business executive is not unaccountable, he has to satisfy his customers. Otherwise they won't but the product he is selling. Unless of course, you were somehow "mandated" to buy a bad product at an exorbitant price you don't want...
3. I'm not sure the list of government services you have provided is a case for government involvement in health care. It's a list of one failure after another. For example, do you really think public schools are better than private schools?
1. I didn't realize that I had suddenly become an insurance company. This is incredible! What am I going to do with this newfound power?! And you're telling me EVERYONE is an insurance company? Remarkable! Seriously, though; only in a Randian utopia can you honestly say that we don't need the government to provide any services because we can just compete with companies ourselves if we don't like it.
2. A business executive is absolutely unaccountable if he provides a service in a market that A) is not subject to the Clayton and Sherman antitrust acts, which insurance companies are not, and so they price-fix and do all the other ultimate ends of a perfectly free market or B) provide services in an inelastic market, which insurance is because there is a limit on supply thanks to the limit in supply of physicians thanks to licensing, the fact that health care is necessary to the survival of the patient, and a bunch of other reasons I don't feel like typing. The bottom line is that insurance is different from all other markets because it doesn't actually provide you with the product you desire, it provides you with cash in return for cash and always at a loss to the public in total.
3. Yes, I do like the fact that everyone has the chance to go to school! I don't give a damn if private schools provide a better education. Even ignoring the self-selection that goes on in private schools, I would rather pay for millions of students to get a sub-par education than see them wallow in illiteracy. Why don't you tell me who would pay for education if not the public. Charities? Maybe corporations could pay for education in return for indentured servitude in adulthood? It's just not in the immediate interests of any particular monied interest to educate children, and yet they all benefit from an educated workforce in the long run. For-profit education necessarily means even more stratified results but with the added 'bonus' of lots of unprofitable students simply going without schooling.
Why don't you try this on for size: Who would build the roads into poor or middle-class residential areas without the government? Who would provide the mail? Having utilities like these available to the poor not only provides them with the opportunity to actually contribute to society by working, but it helps businesses to sell things to them.
Oh yeah, and why would the rich ever pay their private guards or mercenaries to patrol the poor quarters? Why would ANYONE pay for a war?
You brought up the NIH! What are you talking about?!!
Any sort of government intervention is ALWAYS associated with inefficiency and stagnation. People don't understand that universal health care in other countries comes at the price of insanely high taxes and lower quality service. Other countries don't have the kind of quality that we have in America, they don't produce major tech advances, and they have to deal with delays we would find appalling.
Put people in charge of their own health care decisions, so they can buy the highest-quality healthcare they can afford. THAT'S the way to improve healthcare.
This is absolutely positively a canard. It has been proven time and again that there is just as much inefficiency in private industry, sometimes even more because *gasp* without the responsibility to the authority of the public, the people in charge scam and waste as much as they can, running their ship into the ground and jumping off with the spoils. Profit motive is great as long as it's strained through regulations that stop this kind of cannibalistic BS. I'm afraid humans are not perfectly logical Epicurian godlings who always know exactly how to pursue their own interests.
EDIT: I thought I should respond to the second part of this. Besides the fact that fewer people in these countries are dying from treatable illnesses - a metric I would consider more important than even their superior cost-effectiveness - I hate to tell you that our position at the forefront of research is quickly being overtaken. We are still riding on the momentum of the last century in which our universities and our
socialist! government programs along with the luck of being across the ocean from World War II and the Iron Curtain created the "brain drain" that put us where we are today. Hell, NASA only worked because we managed to grab up former Nazi scientists (and of course because we paid for it). The fact that our government largesse paid for tons of research that would otherwise be unprofitable is the reason we discovered the atomic bomb and atomic energy, along with innumerable other discoveries that maybe one in a million venture capitalists or charities would pay to research, and yet the
common good of performing this seemingly pointless research became clear when we shot ahead of the entire world by nearly every academic and technological metric. Our golden era was also the era of the greatest level of government spending (and, coincidentally, the era of the highest taxes on the rich, the smallest financial sector with the strictest regulations, and the most unionization). Today, why would a scientist want to work in America when he knows his research will be unfunded and he will live a pauper unless he happens to discover something immediately profitable to a corporation? The numbers speak for themselves: tons of foreign students are coming to American universities and simply returning home because they know they'll actually have a job once they get their pHD. A government-funded job. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies continue to lay off research divisions because their potential customers can't afford drugs for rare diseases. I suppose in the purely axiomatic world of free-marketeers our increasingly poor and uneducated nation will simply springboard its way back to the stars with some hard work and elbow grease.
Germans pay twice the tax rate compared to America.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_around_the_world
Look, you can have universal health care, if you are willing to 1. pay through the nose for it and 2. have a bunch of idiot politicians make your healthcare decisions for you.
I like how your link is to "
average personal income tax rate." Of course the United States will have a lower number - a huge percentage of our income goes to a small percentage of our population, and they pay much lower taxes than in other nations. If you were to list median income taxes those numbers would be WAY different. Someone posted the numbers right in this thread that show we are the ones paying through the nose both as individuals and as a nation. If politicians are idiots and they screw up health care, it is because we as a nation elect idiots and we deserve what we get. I'm proud enough of my nation that I'd like to take on that responsibility. If a bunch of corporate barons screw up health care (and they have), we have no recourse except to form our own insurance companies (ahahaha!). I suppose it is still our fault because we refuse to exercise our political power to stop this.
Part of being a republic means that we have power over our own fate. If government were as evil and incompetent as you say it is, why did we even create one after the revolutionary war? Why did we create another when the Articles of Confederation proved insufficient? Why does the preamble of our constitution contain the words "promote the general welfare?" Why was the post office enshrined in our constitution as a government-mandated government-run monopoly? Were at least half of our founding fathers even further to the left than we are today? This is getting pretty tiring.
