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Post by jdd2 on Jun 3, 2015 5:39:42 GMT -5
That film is one my early memories. (earliest?)
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Post by Russell Letson on Jun 3, 2015 11:01:38 GMT -5
The debate over single payer was lost decades ago when the idea that people pay for their own care started being considered evil. Oddly enough, I remember when the evil idea was that the government pay for anyone's health care. (Outside, perhaps, of the VA.) That was the position of, for example, of the AMA in regard to Medicare. That kind of opposition has characterized the public discussion for my entire lifetime, and since the rise of the Tea Party it has become as deeply embedded in that part of our political culture as overenthusiasm for the Second Amendment.
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Post by millring on Jun 3, 2015 11:13:40 GMT -5
Both representing (imo) overstatements that miss the point. Health care -- like anything else that must be provided for by someone else -- cannot be a right. It might be a privileged we all wish to bestow upon ourselves, but it can't be a right. It's not evil for people to pay for their own health care, and it's not evil to wish to find a way to band together and collectively pay IF we can find a way to do it that doesn't enslave one sector of our society in service to another, if it can be done without altering the cost of goods and services in that sector (is that possible?), and if it results in the best system for all.
The latter was the most distasteful lie used in selling us Obamacare. The assertion was made over and over and over again that we Americans had the worst health care in the industrialized world (since that assumed that the third world already had even worse, that made our health care the worst in the world. And given that we've never proved life elsewhere in the universe, it's likely that the USA had the worst health care in the entire universe).
As hard as one would think that premise was to sell -- given that we have the best hospitals and medical schools in the world, we nevertheless either bought the lie or were excoriated publically for doubting it.
But in reality we had the best health care in the world. It just cost more. The best usually does. And the way we paid for that best finally started to overtake us. We wanted to fix it.
So now we've determined that it's "good enough". The things that being the best brought us have maybe passed the point of return on investment. Now we seem to be satisfied if we just get "good enough" and try to make it as free as possible.
But we're still lying to each other.
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