DoubleH wrote:
Do you guys think that country wide healthcare coverage is the way to go or do you think that maybe they could do an old school Govt hospital thing cheaper? Paying doctors instead of paying insurance companys to pay doctors. I'm not a big fan of middle men : {
Governments should pay for primary care out of tax revenues. Simple as that.
You choose your physician and the government pays for service according to a fixed schedule. Because the system would be demand-driven, doctors would go where they could find patients.
Prescriptions would be paid for by the government according to a schedule worked out by bargaining between federations of co-op state medical boards and pharmaceutical corps. All medication patents would expire in 40 years. (This would also incentivize the creation of silver-bullet vaccines that would become useless by the expiry of the patent because by then the disease would be wiped out).
Medical personnel sitting on co-op federation boards would be tenured with exclusive, "binding-for-life" contracts, and therefore have no incentive to be sympathetic to the corps. Chairs would be elected by the general population and committee members would be elected by licensed physicians in each region, ensuring a balance between democratic governance and professional expertise. Local democracy and federal unity of purpose would create an incentive for aggressive but constructive bargaining against the corps, ensuring that the American people get a good deal and the corps get a fair price for useful products.
Hospitals would be fully funded by the federal government and deployed by local governments, according to a fixed schedule based on headcount and adjusted for demographics. Local governments would take federal money and build what they think is appropriate for their region, choosing between templates for facilities and programs designed by federal agencies for implementation according to state discretion. Basically the same as Wal-Mart, the USPS or the DMV. Or a game of Starcraft, if you want to look at it another way.
Realistically, most people are not hypochondriacs, do not particularly enjoy going to the doctor, and would still go no more than necessary. The rich would still get better care because most physicians prefer to live and work in affluent neighborhoods, but the lower classes would be guaranteed at least basic care because again, the system would be demand-driven.
Anyone object to such a system? If so, why?
DoubleH wrote:
Several of my brothers friends have shit jobs and have managed to save enough money for down payments on cheap houses
Ah, the American Dream - 9-5 and the 40-year mortgage. It used to work well enough.
Then millions of people got hosed when they lost their jobs or stagflation destroyed their savings. Go look at Detroit - certainly not due to people living beyond their means.
The bottom line is, in capitalism today, for most people, there is no economic traction. Certainly not for those now entering the labor market.
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I think even you know that your answers are kind of non-answers and far from satisfactory - perhaps this is because you are tired or perhaps it is because you are not accustomed to impartially critical responses.
That FUBU is probably the most original, broadly representative and impartially critical politics board on the entire Internet - and yes, it probably quite literally is - a testament to the utterly pathetic state of American political thought.
I would make a distinction in what you describe, Chuba - between what is necessary and what is useful. It may be necessary to work hard to get by in a world that sucks, but whether you're working 10 hours a day or on military welfare it adds up to the same thing which is that one is playing a game one knows is completely broken. And perhaps the trends we see in video gaming - inane but necessary grinds in broken games - are a sort of microcosm...a twisted reflection of the world outside.
One deserves kudos for looking out for oneself, but that does not mean that someone is actually "contributing" to society or doing any more good than someone who chooses to not play the game because it's broken. As we agree, the world does not, factually, need more ditch-diggers or shelf-stockers, and spending 10 hours a day doing those things doesn't mean one is creating more wealth or doing more good for the world than someone like me that sits on their ass all day, although it does mean that Xeoni can claim to be made of tougher stuff. I don't mind giving him or anyone else that much credit.
But the bottom line, the "synthesis" that can be distilled from what you have to say, is that it seems that the capitalist system is simply no longer functioning well in a world where no one really need want for anything. I think you would agree on this point? In this age, we have the technology to pretty much give everybody everything they want. That is not to say that we can all have three cars, a suburban house, a yacht, a helicopter, five children - although then again maybe that would be economically possible, with full employment.
The problem appears to be that capitalism is scarcity and growth based, and it breaks down when those factors become moot. As you point out, one guy with a super tractor can feed every mouth on the planet. Or a single ironworks in China can produce all the steel the world needs; a single iPhone factory can produce enough iPhones to put one in everyone's purse. Chinese peasants work themselves to suicide making them, and everyone else is bored and unemployed.
So what is really needed is radical new thinking. 50-100 years ago, progressive intellectuals believed that capitalism needed to be phased out in favor of socialism, not through violent revolution, but through farsighted policies aimed at transitioning the society into a more responsible form of democracy-based economic administration. After the legacy of Stalinism, McCarthyism, Nazism and the Holocaust, people kind of adopted the "red cloth in front of a bull" mentality when it came to creative political ideas, especially since the world wound up being ruled by Americans, who are probably the least politically imaginative people to have ever walked the earth.
After all, we were handed our political ideas by a couple dozen self-appointed white guys, and have continued to carry those ideas forward according to our interpretation, with religious fervor, ever since. No different than Lycurgus or Romulus or Moses telling their people what to think and how to live. We didn't create those ideas as a community - they were given to us.
So what I'm saying boils down to this. If by all evidence the capitalist system just isn't working because the game has changed...because scarcity and growth are no longer our foremost concerns, because efficiency is no longer more important than ensuring that the the knife butters the entire toast - bringing our economy closer to full employment and ensuring everyone's minds and energies can be utilized even when the capitalist system is declining into stasis - why should we continue to be terrified of new ideas? Why should we continue to blame ourselves for the failure of an obsolete system?
My conclusion here is aimed not at Chuba but at everyone else :
Why don't we try learning from experience and coming up with new ideas, rather than trying to pretend that nothing has really changed?The question is an honest one. Is there a reason why not? I'd like to hear responses from some critical people.
just as much as I wanted to play with there Snes's and gameboys. But yea 90% of my things prior to me working came from yard sales(HeMan / G.I. Joes were the best toys ever) or my cousins and it wasn't because my folks were in love with the idea of used stuff it was because they were in love with the idea of having food to eat and having the electricity stay on(I will say we would have been better off but my eldest brother had bad OCD and my dad spent every penny he could muster getting him into a private school).
