This will probably be my last reply, as I have a tendancy to hijack Socialized Medicine threads with individual arguments.
So, every citizen of every 1st world nation besides the U.S is a mindless drone? Maybe, it is possible that people actually *prefer* to have healthcare be a public good (like education, or roads, or police)? In my view, the mindless automatons are those who blindly accept whatever the corporate media tells them is the right thing to do, in this case, to restrict the public from operating a non-profit healthcare system.
What the heck does the "corporate media" have to do with this? I've never once heard anything promoting free market healthcare on the mainstream media, with the exception of one John Stossel piece on 20/20. This does generally jive with the argument I always get, which is that anyone who wants to take care of himself and remove the government from everyday life has simply been brainwashed by the corporate media that generally opposes that position.
That's why at some point, health insurance should be mandatory. Many people don't buy insurance because they simply don't feel the need. They're young and healthy, why spend the money? Well, that just fits in with the whole distorted American ideal of "individual freedom to do whatever I want no matter who it affects." They don't pay in, and there is less money to go around for things like physician compensation.
Um... If we don't force people to buy pornography, there's less money to go around for things like Ron Jeremy's salary. The problem isn't people deciding not to buy something; the problem is them deciding not to buy it and then demanding it for free.
But it's not "undisciplined" people opting out. It's the healthy people that are supposed to be in the system but instead, they figure, "I'm more important than society in general." And that is the pervasive attitude in the libertarian/conservative culture of the U.S. We are groomed since birth to be extremely individualistic. It's part of our political culture. Many Americans just don't understand that in other countries, people hold different views. For example, Canadians see health more as a public good, where everyone sacrifices a little bit in order to hold the country together and make sure everyone is covered.
Why are the healthy people supposed to be in the system? Why is this good for society in general? I'll say what I've said a million times before, which is society is just a conglomeration of individuals. It may very well be a rational choice for someone with low health risk to opt out, if they are willing to deal with the consequences. I'm perfectly aware that other people have different views. I understand it completely. I disagree with those views. I also frankly could care less what health system Canada has. I am not a Canadian. That's up to the Canadians.
All of that being said, medicine is slowly bankrupting ALL of the industrialized nations, primarily through government spending. I'd argue that socialized medicine in Canada is doing as much to tear the country apart as it does to hold it together.
Lastly, the idea that Americans are groomed to be individualistic from birth is laughable. Most of us attended public schools, where we were summarily bombarded with propaganda about the "greater good." It's really more of a small libertarian thread that exists within the culture. Though they all came to America because of that thread, the majority of major libertarian thinkers in the past century were foreigners. Ayn Rand was born just before the Soviet takeover in Russia, and Ludwig Von Mises (probably the most influential libertarian economist in the last century) was born in Austria.
Strangely, Americans seem to treat education as a public good, but cannot bring themselves to view healthcare in the same way. If you ask people in a poll, "Do you think every child deserves a K-12 education provided by the public" the majority will say yes. Why not healthcare?
I attended a public school. That's all that needs to be said about this.
I agree. In fact that's exactly why a completely socialized, government funded system would be superior. You wouldn't have the thousands of different plans and payers, with people constantly switching back and forth. The bureaucracy would actually shrink, I believe significantly. The fact that we need to "think about which brand of hospital we go to" is a joke to the rest of the world.
In this argument, A doesn't equal B. Thinking that mandatory employer sponsored health insurance is bad doesn't mean that the government should just take it over. I keep hearing about how the government would shrink the healthcare beauracracy, yet no one seems to remember that there was virtually NO healthcare beauracracy before the government got involved in the 1960s. Most of the modern insurance beauracracy follows precedents imposed by MEDICARE. This includes direct to physician payments that require 10 employees filling out insurance forms. Before, people recovered from their insurance, just like car, homeowner, or any other form of insurance. No individual dealt with more than one company. It's all backwards logic. The government comes in, takes over half of the system. Destroys the other half by proxy, and then we argue that if we just let them take over the half that they destroyed, it would all be better.
Good point, although the real problem with the argument is the underlying assumption that employers should pay employee insurance costs. I do not hold that assumption. However, I do NOT feel that it is efficient for each individual to go out with their dollars and attempt to purchase "healthcare" on a free market. It's a nice fantasy, perhaps for an Ayn Rand utopia, but it just doesn't seem to be working very well down in the real world.
I'm not sure which "Ayn Rand utopia" you are talking about. We don't have a free market in healthcare. The current system is about 50% public/50% private. The mostly free market system worked remarkeably well until it was dismantled in the 60s. No one bothers to look at how that worked when these arguments are made. Meanwhile, most of the socialized systems in the world are moving back the other way. Britain is contracting out a lot to private hospitals. France has a booming private market. Canada is two steps away from undergoing a fundamental shift in thinking, manifested early by the rising presence of private imaging centers. Give it time. Comparing the closest things we have to each system, the only one that actually seemed to stay viable was the one that followed market forces.
