Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[KaelGotDwarves]

I like how you have not posted a single link, source, reference, and have literally paid not one iota of attention to my argument.  You haven't even linked to the WHO report you claim "proves me wrong" (though it has not a single connection to any of my arguments so far).

This also deserves it's own reply:

Singapore was ranked 6th in the World Health Organization's ranking of the world's health systems in the year 2000.[1]
Singapore has a non-modified universal healthcare system where the government ensures affordability of healthcare within the public health system, largely through a system of compulsory savings, subsidies and price controls.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Singapore
EDIT- part of this posted earlier ^^^

They force you to set aside a large portion of your wages for retirement and future healthcare needs.

One of the most socalised and regulated countries in the world, ranked 6th in healthcare by WHO.

So let's look at the other winners...

1: France = extremely socialist (one of universal health care largely financed by government national health insurance. In its 2000 assessment of world health care systems, the World Health Organization found that France provided the "close to best overall health care" in the world.[1])

2: Italy = 75% socalised Healthcare is provided to all citizens and residents by a mixed public-private system.

3: San Marino = highly socalist San Marino has a high standard of compulsory, state-funded healthcare and medical staff are highly qualified

4: Andorra = extremely socialist Healthcare in Andorra is provided to all employed persons and their families by the government-run social security system, CASS (Caixa Andorrana de Seguretat Social), which is funded by employer and employee contributions in respect of salaries.[47] The cost of healthcare is covered by CASS at rates of 75% for out-patient expenses such as medicines and hospital visits, 90% for hospitalisation, and 100% for work-related accidents. The remainder of the costs may be covered by private health insurance. Other residents and tourists require full private health insurance

5: Malta = Free healthcare socialism Malta has a long history of providing publicly funded health care. The first hospital recorded in the country was already functioning by 1372.[119] Today, Malta has both a public healthcare system, known as the government healthcare service, where healthcare is free at the point of delivery, and a private healthcare system.

Are you starting to notice a pattern about how successful socalised healthcare is?

Source: http://www.who.int/whr/2000/en/whr00_en.pdf
The World Health Organisation: The World Health Report (last ranked year 2000)

Note: this was in response to your statement in the Progressive thread about socialised and European health care not being effective. It is.

Also, someone PMed me about your 'Libertarian' exploits in Simrepublic.

Truly a relevant topic worth expansion upon in the American Election Megathread

It proves that you are either a troll or have no idea what you are doing.

[KaelGotDwarves]

bay12'ers played a political strategy game together (simRepublic), where we settled as Libya. and we tried to help GreatJustice out by giving him a communally-built glass factory to run (a government grant basically). He didn't manage to construct anything by himself.

He then declared he had mandated ownership of all the sand (used for glassmaking) in Libya. sand was just random stuff lying around on the maps that anyone can pick up.  when other people collected and used the sand themselves ("it's a free world dude"),  he threw a royal hissy-fit and proceeded to sabotage everyone else's work, and conspired with the governments of countries hostile to Bay12's Libya.

Funny how people's "deeply felt" ideologies suddenly collapse in these sort of simulations. I would've thought that a "libertarian" would have accepted that if a declared property right could not be enforced, it didn't exist.

Nice example of 'socialism' on the glass there buddy.

[scriver]

Corporations do not have the Eminent domain power. It is a power of the government. The fact that it is usually used for the sole benefit of corporations at their behest does not change that. If the government decided to eliminate the IRS and delegate tax collection to a company which then used taxation to line their own pockets, it would be still abuse of government power, because the government alone has the power of taxation.

Let me reiterate this, because you are the one that seems to be dense.

EMINENT DOMAIN IS A POWER OF THE GOVERNMENT, NO MATTER WHO IS BENEFITING FROM IT.

This times 100.

If the government does something bad on behalf of a corporation, it is not suddenly the corporation doing the bad action, it is the government (which has that power in the first place).

It's a corp buying a service from the government. That's capitalism, dude.

[Sheb]

Well, he did do the Libertarian thing and contacted other actors to help him enforce his claim.

[GlyphGryph]

I'd argue both the government AND the corporation are doing something bad there...

And scriver, you just supported his point. He says the corporation buying it from the government is fine, but the government DOING it is bad. Similar to the way purchasing medical care is fine, but if the doctor uses organs harvested from orphan nun-scouts against their will, that is NOT fine. That the abuse is on the government end, not the corporations end for simply purchasing a potential service that is defacto legal.

(I'm not actually buying this - without ethics and moral expectations, capitalism and the free market fall apart, and the corps here are definitely violating those)

[mainiac]

I like how you have not posted a single link, source, reference, and have literally paid not one iota of attention to my argument.

When people acknowledge your arguments you accuse them of strawmanning you sooner or later.

Either everyone else on the forums has a problem or you do.  Which do you think it is, bub?

[KaelGotDwarves]

Well, he did do the Libertarian thing and contacted other actors to help him enforce his claim.

And apparently throwing a fit and sabotaging your own country is the hip Libertarian thing to do when things don't work out your way. 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

It's a corp buying a service from the government. That's capitalism, dude.

It's actually worse:

The U.S. Supreme Court has largely given the public use requirement an expansive interpretation and has allowed takings of private property for reconveyance to other private parties, or in some cases by private parties directly, on the theory that the new owners will put the taken land to more lucrative uses that are likely to generate more tax revenues. This is known as "economic redevelopment." It uses eminent domain to enable acquitre[sic] and then convey land to commercial development or redevelopment to increase tax revenues.

http://www.ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Eminent_domain

So, you see, it's the ability for private [usually corporate] entities to go directly through a process that is akin to actual eminent domain seizures that's helped lead to the fucked up situation GJ so helpfully linked to earlier, that booklet full of corporate domain seizures.

I honestly didn't feel like arguing with the children who refuse to understand that there can be differences in applied meaning of what is called 'eminent domain' in situations [and who fail to realize 'the guvvment' isn't one big hivemind, it's state and local eminent domain seizures that get cited as abuses most often, not federal eminent domain seizures (you know, the ones for those railroads/highways the free market requires to exist).. so...], so I apologize if this isn't necessarily a response to what you said, heh. I just didn't feel like leaving their idiocy behind without responding.

It just seems off that the state's rights advocates don't understand that it's states that are usually the ones violating people's rights.

[scriver]

I'd argue both the government AND the corporation are doing something bad there...

And scriver, you just supported his point. He says the corporation buying it from the government is fine, but the government DOING it is bad. Similar to the way purchasing medical care is fine, but if the doctor uses organs harvested from orphan nun-scouts against their will, that is NOT fine. That the abuse is on the government end, not the corporations end for simply purchasing a potential service that is defacto legal.

(I'm not actually buying this - without ethics and moral expectations, capitalism and the free market fall apart, and the corps here are definitely violating those)

The service that the corps bought was the rewriting of the law into it's abuseable form.

[GreatJustice]

The WHO's healthcare report, Singapore, etc

All of which I replied to earlier when Reelya brought it up. Singapore has far more controls and direct government intervention than the US does, but it also has a far less messy regulatory system than the US. For example, medical licensing, insurance incentives (subsidies/tax incentives), insurance mandates (depending on the state), mandates as to what insurance HAS to cover (again, depending on the state), government ownership of nearly all the hospitals despite nominally being in a "market" system, FDA licensing (Which is almost exclusively favourable to the most gigantic of pharmaceutical companies), Medicare, Medicaid, the Veteran/Indian Health Service, etc etc etc

The same applies to most of the countries brought up, really. Even France has a significantly more streamlined system than the US does. Now, onto the next argument, I may as well open with a quote from a different discussion:

No country in the world has a fully private healthcare system (and that would be including the USA), so showing off how highly rated non-private healthcare systems are is a bit like a mid 17th century demographer coming to the conclusion that, because almost all of the richest/most successful countries are presently controlled by emperors or kings, the only way a country can be successful is to be ruled by an emperor or king.

No country in the world has a free market in healthcare. Do you understand? Not one. Some are closer than others, and you can directly compare one country to another to see which is closer to having a free market (for example, Germany vs Sweden), but to claim that it's superiority is proven because Socialized Healthcare System A is better than Socialized Healthcare System B is rather silly.

Now anyway, back to the WHO survey, one reason it's biased is that it ranks "fairness" right beside "responsiveness" (How good the quality of the system is actually considered to be, which the US actually came first in) and "effectiveness" (which is a statistical measure of mortality rates, etc). Keep in mind, "fairness" is actually measured multiple times, so it happens to be heavily weighed compared to the other factors.

Effectiveness is ranked by a nation's mortality rate increase of decrease over the years. However, this doesn't take into account non-healthcare factors, such as increases in wealth, murders, car accidents, smoking, etc etc etc that are not directly affected by healthcare systems.

Fairness is measured in that it expects citizens to pay the same amount of money in proportion to how much they have for their healthcare, regardless of sociopolitical status (so, say, the billionaire and the poor man both pay 10% of their income for healthcare). Yet this (A) doesn't reflect the actual quality of healthcare in any meaningful sense (again, France was rated quite low in terms of "responsiveness", yet because everyone pays the same amount they were boosted by this statistic) and (B) obviously favours the more socialized systems, because the more socialized systems would be FUNDED through a tax system rather than case by case!

Responsiveness, the remaining measure (though again, the other measures are effectively variations on "fairness", which constitute over half of the rating IIRC) the actual measurement of quality and satisfaction on the part of patients, the US actually comes first. Meanwhile, countries such as France and Italy fall quite a ways behind here.

Oh, and this was taken in 2000, so it's somewhat out of date. For example, Greece was originally in 14th place, quite respectable going by the survey. Yet as of 2012, Greek pharmacists can't even  get aspirin.  Considering the present Eurozone Crisis, I'd imagine that if the WHO made a 2012 survey, even with the old ratings, a lot of those top countries would have fallen quite a ways.

It proves that you are either a troll or have no idea what you are doing.

And why would you need to "prove" that I'm a troll if you weren't more interested in attacking me than attacking my arguments?

I'd argue both the government AND the corporation are doing something bad there...

And scriver, you just supported his point. He says the corporation buying it from the government is fine, but the government DOING it is bad. Similar to the way purchasing medical care is fine, but if the doctor uses organs harvested from orphan nun-scouts against their will, that is NOT fine. That the abuse is on the government end, not the corporations end for simply purchasing a potential service that is defacto legal.

(I'm not actually buying this - without ethics and moral expectations, capitalism and the free market fall apart, and the corps here are definitely violating those)

The corporations are hardly innocent of any wrongdoing, it's just silly to say that they are the root of the problem when their powers and benefits are derived from government support.

Nice example of 'socialism' on the glass there buddy.

I think we all know who the "anonymous source" is here. Besides that, that still isn't relevant to the argument at hand unless you prefer personal attacks over actual arguments.

Besides that, the "anonymous source" neglects to mention that a certain individual made a personal profit scamming other Bay 12ers, and basically trolled the people he didn't like out of the game (the results of which you can find yourself in the SimRepublic thread if you're honestly interested and not simply interested in trolling, which I'm beginning to doubt). However, again, this is the American Election Megathread, not the "Calling people stupid" thread, so I'm not seeing the point of it coming up.

[Sheb]

So basically, we have no exemple of why a private system would work. So what are we debating on?

[GoombaGeek]

No country in the world has a fully private healthcare system (and that would be including the USA)

No country in the world has a free market in healthcare. Do you understand? Not one.

Maybe I'm stupid, but doesn't that mean roughly the same thing?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

[Sidelined Snarky Comment About How The Thread Is Going Down In Flames]

[Sarcastic Hypothesizing About What Aqizzar Will Do When He Sees This]

[Backhanded Statement Of Departure]

[GreatJustice]

No country in the world has a fully private healthcare system (and that would be including the USA)

No country in the world has a free market in healthcare. Do you understand? Not one.

Maybe I'm stupid, but doesn't that mean roughly the same thing?

It's a point worth repeating.

So basically, we have no exemple of why a private system would work. So what are we debating on?

There are examples, but most of them are in the past to varying degrees.

[Sidelined Snarky Comment About How The Thread Is Going Down In Flames]

[Sarcastic Hypothesizing About What Aqizzar Will Do When He Sees This]

[Backhanded Statement Of Departure]

Personally, I'd advise we presently completely forget about every argument up to this point and come up with something else before the thread becomes unsalvageable.

So Mitt Romney's pretty dumb, eh?

[GoombaGeek]

No country in the world has a fully private healthcare system (and that would be including the USA)

No country in the world has a free market in healthcare. Do you understand? Not one.

Maybe I'm stupid, but doesn't that mean roughly the same thing?

It's a point worth repeating.

Ah, so it was your quote!

I guess that's how to make someone remember a point, repeat it.

You should repeat your points to make other people remember them

DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT YOU SHOULD REPEAT WHAT YOU SAY A LOT YET