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I'm not reading all that, what happened? Did someone get Aestu'd?

I would agree with you if we had an actual free market for healthcare, but we don't. The market--and not just the one for healthcare--is a convoluted mess. A big part of that problem is that people who think the way you do look at government intervention the way a 12 year old looks at ketchup: here sets a perfectly good steak, but wouldn't it be better with 8 oz. of Heinz drenching it?

Government is a necessary evil. If government at any level fulfilled its obligation to properly enforce contracts, people wouldn't be getting screwed over by their insurance companies. The insurance industry might not be so quick to shirk its obligations for an easy dollar if not for the cost of regulation and red tape eating into profit margins. Some rules are necessary in order for the system to work, but we're currently saddled with a group of people in DC who write laws to favor themselves, their associates, and/or anyone who tosses enough into their election coffers.

Our "free market" isn't free, it's a warped reflection of an Ayn Rand novel.

Your Pal,
Jubber

AKA "The Gun"
AKA "ROFeraL"

World Renowned Mexican Forklift Artiste

The "free market" is a contradiction in terms.

Markets do some things well - especially consumer goods. This is so because consumer goods offer the consumer absolute choice, including no choice.

Markets do healthcare poorly. This is so because barriers to entry and unequal choice are inherent in the practice of medicine. Government does healthcare well, something proven by countries that let the state run their healthcare programs.

Take WoW for example. I can buy WoW, or I can not buy WoW. If I decide not to buy WoW, I don't have to buy another MMO if I feel they all blow anyway. I can get some fresh air and hope my pallid skin doesn't ignite like tissue on a lightbulb, while I wait for the market to crash out and new options to emerge. I could also go buy some old retro video games.

By contrast, I don't have the luxury of deferring my purchase of healthcare or food, water, shelter, telecom or electricity or any other such staple. And my options for all those things are inherently more limited than my options as to ways to amuse myself.



What you don't grasp is that the status quo is the inevitable result of Ayn Rand's pseudo-philosophy.

It's no coincidence that Ayn Rand chose completely fictional settings for her novels, and predicated their plots on unreal deus machinas. This is so because what she advocates is completely incompatible with how reality actually works.

She exclusively preferred the format of dramatic novels rather than historical/science fiction or dialectics because the former is an inherently less rigorous format: less demand for internal consistency, appeals to sentimentality rather than reason.

Ayn Rand's format and setting allowed her to ignore issues like the reality of limited resources, environmental degradation, speculation, bigotry, classism, and the sex economy. She makes unrealistic assumptions about human nature - how people will behave with power unchecked by law or social convention, and how people will behave when they are desperate.

The bureaucratic and corporate refuse clogging up the medical system exists because it is inevitable that people will organize to mutual advantage. The most basic example is the street gang. Free choice won't prevent the emergence of powerful self-interested multinational organizations any more than it does the emergence of street gangs because they both exist for the same reasons.

The only way to stop gangs is to change things so people don't have a reason to join them. The same is true of multinational corporations and that is why a public solution is the only option.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Yet we arguably have the best healthcare available on the planet in this country, our big issue is how to make it available to more people. People make fun of us for being fat, but nobody ever made fun of our teeth while the English have cradle-to-grave care and jokes about their grills are legendary. You might have to wait a few hours after triage for treatment in a US emergency room, but you won't waiting be on a weeks-to-months long waiting list for diagnostic care like you would in Canadia. The US system needs some fixes, but none of those fixes are "let's be more like Europe."

USA! USA! USA!

Your Pal,
Jubber

AKA "The Gun"
AKA "ROFeraL"

World Renowned Mexican Forklift Artiste

Bad teeth are due to lack of brushing. Nothing to do with healthcare. If you brush your teeth or live in a region with fluoridated water, you are essentially immune to tooth decay.

What you describe about Canadian healthcare is a myth, simple as that. Other Western countries are reasonably content with their healthcare systems and we are not. If you doubt this then I encourage you to talk to more foreigners or to at least read foreign newspapers. Healthcare isn't a political issue in other countries for the same reason that food riots aren't an issue here. What they have, works.

And you are incorrect about American healthcare being the best in the world. North Korean healthcare is far superior to American healthcare. Unfortunately, it is available to even fewer people.

Markets inevitably create very few winners and many losers. This cold reality is why "everyone a winner" has gradually changed the American Dream into a national delusion that pervades media and culture and created a society of small and emotionally vulnerable people.

To give everyone "the best care" you would have to make everyone a winner, and that is fundamentally at odds with how markets work. The best resources will follow the biggest money. The status quo exists because we have tried to fight that reality by pumping more money into the market. The result is that the winners still take all, but now that 'all' is bigger and more costly. Same with education.

If you doubt this, play a simple game of Risk or Monopoly. Or Alpha Centauri, something that more people really should play especially since it's free and way more fun than anything else out there. For even more fun, try playing SMAC as Democratic/Free Market/Wealth.

Winners get bigger and bigger and losers are forced off the board. And sure enough efforts to fight that reality, by pumping 'value' into the system, turn the game into crap - see WoW, with efforts making everyone a winner result in top guilds still blowing through everything, and everyone else having a bag full of worthless welfare epics. Same basic forces at work.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Point of interest: I take public transportation every day. People in the USA have fucking atrocious teeth.

If destruction exists, we must destroy everything.
Shuruppak Yuratuhl
Slaad Shrpk Breizh