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[MrRoboto75]

The government wasted money keeping grandpa alive?  Wasn't the big outcry over Obamacare about "death panels" of bigwigs deciding who lives and dies?  Does big G want grandpa to live or not?

Not to mention, if you have ongoing prescriptions for pills, your private insurance can just decide to no longer cover your pills at any point in time.  Then you pay the full, several hundred dollar price.  Those pills you need to live or something.

[Maximum Spin]

They don't? Most  ?! Most argue that if the governement could use it's position to negotiate prices that ressemble the rest of the world... If that were the case you still got a lot of money to waste before paying more for the same service.

Read back, then; it's been argued multiple times in this actual thread. Any time I suggested that prices for care would drop, meaning that doctors and nurses get less money per unit of work, leading to labor movement out of the healthcare sector as it becomes less rewarding, I was told that this was ridiculous. Meanwhile, repeated reference has been made to the scurrilous health insurance companies rationing care and refusing to pay as much as the government would.

Of course, when it comes to negotiating prices in line with the rest of the world... well, multiple analyses including the OECD find that US healthcare prices are already in line with the rest of the world and right on trend, and that US healthcare spending is greater because the US buys more healthcare than any other country. Insurance companies already negotiate prices well below sticker, by the way.

Not to mention, if you have ongoing prescriptions for pills, your private insurance can just decide to no longer cover your pills at any point in time.  Then you pay the full, several hundred dollar price.  Those pills you need to live or something.

So can the government; or if it can't, then the government coverage is less efficient than the private coverage because other people, taxpayers, are being forced to pay for the pills when the insurance company decided they weren't worth the money. Insurance doesn't generate money from nowhere - with private insurance, it comes from premiums, while with government coverage it comes from taxes. So in both cases, someone's paying for it, and if it isn't worth the price for one, it isn't worth the price for the other.
By the way, health insurance companies are already regulated so they can't just drop coverage for life-saving medications, so this example actually doesn't matter in the first place.

[McTraveller]

I mean at some point, yes, you can't spend infinite resources to keep people alive. There's a point where you have to call it.

I think personally we're past the point of meaningful returns on some other government mandates, especially in automotive safety.  The amount of money society spends per year on some safety equipment is far more than the cost of the harm they prevent.  My favorite is the now mandated backup cameras: Something like more than $20 million per accident avoided.  And most of those accidents do not accrue anywhere near $20 million of lifetime cost in medical or other expenses.  I think the tire pressure monitoring system also falls into this category.

[Maximum Spin]

I think personally we're past the point of meaningful returns on some other government mandates, especially in automotive safety.  The amount of money society spends per year on some safety equipment is far more than the cost of the harm they prevent.  My favorite is the now mandated backup cameras: Something like more than $20 million per accident avoided.  And most of those accidents do not accrue anywhere near $20 million of lifetime cost in medical or other expenses.  I think the tire pressure monitoring system also falls into this category.

Strongly agree. Unfortunately, it's the tendency of an incredibly wealthy society - especially the wealthiest in human history - to become careless with money chasing increasingly tiny benefits.

[Frumple]

Couldn't you just write a law that says, "if you don't pass a new budget, then you by default get last year's budget, scaled by the ratio of tax revenue this year to last year"?

"What could go wrong"? 

Didn't the US actually have that as the federal level law for budgets at some point? Or something very similar to it.

[Lord Shonus]

Yes, from 1979-1995.

[ChairmanPoo]

Couldn't you just write a law that says, "if you don't pass a new budget, then you by default get last year's budget, scaled by the ratio of tax revenue this year to last year"?

"What could go wrong"? 

(Notwithstanding that last line...)

Some US states and other countries do this. On the plus side no government shutdowns, on the negative side you sometimes go years (I think in one case decades?) without passing a new budget/appropriations bill, which can cause a lot of problems since you don't have fresh prioritizations or other forms of responsiveness to changing times & circumstances.

I'm reasonably sure "crisis" such as this one are baked into the American System by our Founding Fathers. It's painful, but it's part of the process of checks and balances.
I tend to defer to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, since they so recently rebelled from an autocratic regime when they drafted the Constitution, unlike us soft modern-day Americans who really don't know shit, up to and including our so-called "leaders".

The federal government and federal budget were really tiny and relatively minor until roughly WW1, pretty much. Most of the policies surrounding the federal budget are under 20th-century law as opposed to the constitution itself. Congress could easily pass legislation amending the budget, appropriations, and debt ceiling process in all sorts of ways, but 'chooses' not to because they don't have the votes. Government shutdowns over appropriations and government defaults (and/or global economic trashfires) over the debt ceiling make for good hostages and legislative vehicles in a system that, partly (I'd argue mostly) due to non-constitutional aspects makes it really hard to pass legislation.

Spain does this. IIRC we had the 2016 budget until somewhere in the 2020s. It was a convenient excuse for the labor party not to do shit ("unfortunately we are stuck with the conservative govermenr's budget due to a lack of a deal")

No goverment shutdowns are a plus I guess tho

[Dostoevsky]

I mean at some point, yes, you can't spend infinite resources to keep people alive. There's a point where you have to call it.

I think personally we're past the point of meaningful returns on some other government mandates, especially in automotive safety.  The amount of money society spends per year on some safety equipment is far more than the cost of the harm they prevent.  My favorite is the now mandated backup cameras: Something like more than $20 million per accident avoided.  And most of those accidents do not accrue anywhere near $20 million of lifetime cost in medical or other expenses.  I think the tire pressure monitoring system also falls into this category.

For whatever it's worth, the backup camera thing is a statutory mandate that the agency in question dragged its feet about for close to a decade before implementing. And the main opponent to the mandate, the auto industry, wasn't because it was expensive so much as because they couldn't market it as an upgrade.

(I could also get into a very bland discussion about the flaws in US governmental cost-benefit analysis, but I'll refrain from that and save everybody some time.)

[Starver]

(It just clicked, maybe because I originally didn't read the earlier mention properly and wasn't already familiar with the whole issue. "Backup camera"=>"reverse-view monitoring system", right? Not, as I previously thought, a spare (forward-facing?) camera, which I presumed was to double-up the already common 'dashcam' footage in case of some issue with the main one if power fails/storage fills/firmware freezes (or perhaps debris/dirt/too-many-discarded-snack-packages obscures the view) thus invalidating some Insurance Broker insistence upon all this black-box-like tech to post-mortem any dings or prangs in return for lower premiums. Well, I think the other interpretation is more logical, though you can never have enough cameras, I expect!)

[Dostoevsky]

Yeah, cameras that let you see to the rear while you're reversing a car. There was a handful of high-profile cases of parents running over their children which led to congress passing a law requiring the development of regulations that require reverse cameras on cars.

[MrRoboto75]

tbf reverse cameras are largely due to other crash safety regulations causing car designs to have bigger visual blind spots (thicker roof pillars for example)

[dragdeler]

Rear camera apologist {topic}

[nenjin]

NGL, I fucking love my backup camera.

[Dostoevsky]

I do too, I think of it as a great addition to car tech. I think there is a valid debate as to whether or not it should be legally required, though personally I think the overall benefit to drivers is worth it - it's worth a lot more than simply lives saved, and there are certainly enough drivers out there that benefit themselves (and the people they might fender-bender!) from having the extra vision and proximity warnings.

[jipehog]

Reverse-view camera with drawn guides are amazing, especially when you swapping cars trying to fit into a really tight spot in a new place.

Btw now days the 360 camera setups become more common (which is essentially the same + 3 cameras) this is really new drivers friendly and can be useful in many situations. Also AI drivers use similar multi camera setups allowing them to observe all threats all the time without any blind spots which can be useful.