Socialized Medicine

eye95 · Mar 20, 2011

WhatTimeIsIt? said:
Nobody can have a right to another person's labor. If you mean that the government cannot prevent a person from obtaining health care, okay. But I suspect you mean that health care should be provided to you. At who's expense? It is never acceptable to use force to make someone provide you with services.

Almost these exact words ran through my mind when I saw someone else quoted this bit of idiocy* that you quoted!

Does this lady think she has a right to food too? Shelter? These ain't rights. They are necessities for survival. They are things that we labor to achieve. With the advent of society, we trade labor to achieve them. With the advent of a social conscience, we try to help others achieve these when they cannot do so on their own.

However, the theft of one man's labor to give to another, no matter the altruism of the motive, is a violation of rights, not the protection of them!

*The idiocy was the claim that health care is a right.

Socialist thinking is upside down thinking.

ldsgeek · Mar 20, 2011

snip
The question is whether someone with a disability should be considered a protected class. Just as race is a protected class
snip

And therein lies one of the problems with our current system of government. There should not be "protected classes", because then the protected classes get to be, in the words of George Orwell, "more equal". The only protected class we need is Human, not gender, race, physical (dis)ability, religion or any other qualifier, and definitely not animals.

Mas49.56 · Mar 20, 2011

ldsgeek said:
snip
The question is whether someone with a disability should be considered a protected class. Just as race is a protected class
snip

And therein lies one of the problems with our current system of government. There should not be "protected classes", because then the protected classes get to be, in the words of George Orwell, "more equal". The only protected class we need is Human, not gender, race, physical (dis)ability, religion or any other qualifier, and definitely not animals.

The way things are now, if your kidneys fail, you are a protected class, right? You automatically get care. No insurance company in the United States will pay for you to get dialysis the rest of your life. Every little bump in the road city has at least 50 to 100 dialysis patients. So what is that 100,000+ over the whole country? Medicare/Medicaid (We the taxpayers) will pay the hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep you alive for the rest of your life(unless you win the slim chance transplant lottery). No politician IMHO will ever condem 100,000+ Americans(plus illegal aliens, we do them too) to death. You will die in about a month without dialysis. There are no easy answers, dialysis is unaffordable to 99.9% of us. Do you guys think this makes them a defacto protected class?

ldsgeek · Mar 20, 2011

I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm saying it shouldn't. My son (23) has a similar problem with the concept of "fair", he gets upset when something doesn't meet his definition of fair.

The Declaration of Independence says we are all entitled to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", not that any of these are guaranteed, for anyone. If I need specialized care, first it is my responsibility to arrange payment, either on my own or with my insurance company, and second, the Government has no business either telling me I don't qualify or telling the doctor/hospital they have to do it. Socialized medicine brings both of those. Rationing is a fact of life with socialized medicine and is mentioned, although not by name, in the 2000+ pages of Obamacare. We don't need that here.

eye95 · Mar 20, 2011

As a teacher, I used to tell my students that "fair is a place where they judge pigs and give ribbons."

Folks interested in "fairness" usually use the words "not fair" to refer to something they don't like when they cannot identify exactly why others should see the something as wrong. That is why you hear the words from children all the time, but almost never from most adults. We mature out of the thinking that something must be wrong simply because we don't like the effect it has on us.

Mas49.56 · Mar 20, 2011

If or when true socialized medicine comes to the USA, I hope everyone is happy with the level of technology that year. Progress will grind to a halt, all the fancy modern stuff we get to use, dissolvable drug emitting stents, new kyphoplasty kits, more effective thrombectomy devices, etc.., technology that gives people much better odds of survival, will stagnate. A hospital that must treat everyone and perform every elective procedure will have to do it with finite resources. Money for that new MRI or CT scanner will not be there. A hospital that used to upgrade equipment every five years will only be able to afford every 12-25 years. If Hospitals do this then GE, Siemens, and Phillips stop dumping billions into imaging systems. No new scanners are developed. Drug companies and device manufactures are not going to do R&D for nothing. Someone has to pay to insure everyone or it all stops. Bottom line is if everyone gets the right to free healthcare progress stops IMHO. After a few decades of this most people will probably die around 50-60 years old, but that might be the plan to save social security!

Citizen · Mar 21, 2011

Mas49.56 said:
SNIP...but that might be the plan to save social security!

More likely the plan to save their political positions.

slowfiveoh · Mar 21, 2011

Mas49.56 said:
If or when true socialized medicine comes to the USA, I hope everyone is happy with the level of technology that year. Progress will grind to a halt, all the fancy modern stuff we get to use, dissolvable drug emitting stents, new kyphoplasty kits, more effective thrombectomy devices, etc.., technology that gives people much better odds of survival, will stagnate. A hospital that must treat everyone and perform every elective procedure will have to do it with finite resources. Money for that new MRI or CT scanner will not be there. A hospital that used to upgrade equipment every five years will only be able to afford every 12-25 years. If Hospitals do this then GE, Siemens, and Phillips stop dumping billions into imaging systems. No new scanners are developed. Drug companies and device manufactures are not going to do R&D for nothing. Someone has to pay to insure everyone or it all stops. Bottom line is if everyone gets the right to free healthcare progress stops IMHO. After a few decades of this most people will probably die around 50-60 years old, but that might be the plan to save social security!

Nobody ever thinks of these things.

I have appreciated your perspective on these posts btw.

Now a question for you:

What would you change to create a more comprehensive, free, effective medical insurance industry?

HandyHamlet · Mar 21, 2011

Mas49.56 said:
If or when true socialized medicine comes to the USA, I hope everyone is happy with the level of technology that year.

Soooo, our main fighter is the Sopwith Camel. Because U.S. fighter production is purchased and produced via Government contract?

Drug companies [snip] are not going to do R&D for nothing.

I will give you this one. Drug companies will do R&D for a fraction of the costs they claim to pay. Then secure a monopoly through the FDA and charge 1000 times the market value for yet another useless drug. Because hey man, it's just business.

eye95 · Mar 21, 2011

HandyHamlet said:
Soooo, our main fighter is the Sopwith Camel. Because U.S. fighter production is purchased and produced via Government contract?...

What a specious argument! Aircraft developments flourish because there are multiple providers, competitive contracts, contracts specifying capabilities that do not exist, civilian aircraft purchases, international competition, military need...

If you don't believe that R&D will be horribly impacted by socialized medicine, don't take our word for it! This proponent of government-run health-care will tell you this (and a few other choice things).

[video=youtube;IT7Y0TOBuG4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT7Y0TOBuG4[/video]

HandyHamlet · Mar 21, 2011

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Womens...ture-births-skyrockets-drug/story?id=13104588

Price of Preventing Premature Births Skyrockets
KV Pharma Gains Sole Rights to Drug, Ups Price by 10K Percent

By COURTNEY HUTCHISON, ABC News Medical Unit
March 10, 2011

Preventing preterm births just got 150 times more expensive, now that KV Pharmaceuticals has gained exclusive rights to produce a progesterone shot used to prevent premature births in high-risk mothers.

Although the shot has been available in unregulated form from specialty compounding pharmacies for years for $10 a pop, the Food and Drug Administration recently granted KV Pharmaceuticals sole rights to produce the drug, which will be marketed as Makena and cost $1,500 per dose -- an estimated $30,000 in total per pregnancy.

...

And because FDA laws prohibit compounding pharmacies from making FDA-approved products, doctors will be legally obligated to stop using the cheaper version of this drug, a representative for the company told ABC News.

marshaul · Mar 21, 2011

HandyHamlet said:
I will give you this one. Drug companies will do R&D for a fraction of the costs they claim to pay. Then secure a monopoly through the FDA and charge 1000 times the market value for yet another useless drug. Because hey man, it's just business.

This.

While I'm not going to defend the socializing of medicine, I do believe for other reasons that it is important to recognize that R&D would still continue with sharply reduced (or eliminated) monopolies for drug companies and other medical innovators.

marshaul · Mar 21, 2011

eye95 said:
What a specious argument! Aircraft developments flourish because there are multiple providers, competitive contracts, contracts specifying capabilities that do not exist, civilian aircraft purchases, international competition, military need...

Theoretically, the same could be true in some future for medicine as well. Just sayin'...

Although military demand would be rather... limiting.

HandyHamlet · Mar 21, 2011

marshaul said:
This.

While I'm not going to defend the socializing of medicine...

Be hard pressed to find anyone who would.

But the gradual perversion over the last 50 years of Medicine into the Health Care Industry/Insurance farce we have today is not sustainable either.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/152741.php

Medical Reasons Lie Behind 60 Per Cent Of US Bankruptcies, Study

Article Date: 05 Jun 2009 - 1:00 PST

A new study suggests that over 60 per cent of all bankruptcies in the US are down to medical reasons, with most victims being health-insured middle class people of good education.

The study was the work of researchers from Cambridge Hospital (a Harvard Medical School teaching affiliate), Harvard Law School and Ohio University and is to appear in the August 2009 issue of the American Journal of Medicine.

First author Dr David U. Himmelstein, who practices and teaches medicine at Cambridge Hospital, said:

"The US health care financing system is broken, and not only for the poor and uninsured."

"Middle class families frequently collapse under the strain of a health care system that treats physical wounds, but often inflicts fiscal ones," he added.

Analysing data of a first-ever national random-sample survey of bankruptcy filers, the researchers found that in 2007, over 60 per cent of bankruptcies filed in the US were driven by medical incidents, with an American family filing for bankruptcy following a bout of illness every 90 seconds. 75 per cent of them had health insurance.

Socialized Medicine

eye95

Well-known member

ldsgeek

Regular Member

Mas49.56

Regular Member

ldsgeek

Regular Member

eye95

Well-known member

Mas49.56

Regular Member

Citizen

Founder's Club Member

slowfiveoh

Regular Member

HandyHamlet

Regular Member

eye95

Well-known member

HandyHamlet

Regular Member

marshaul

Campaign Veteran

marshaul

Campaign Veteran

HandyHamlet

Regular Member