Re: The Sad Case of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
That Eurozone is humming right along like a well-tuned Lambo, isn't it? Nope, no problems at all. NONE.
The Eurozone as a whole isn't doing too badly - Greece and Spain greatly skew their overall unemployment numbers, and there are far greater issues than universal health care causing their issues like trying to have a unified currency without a unified government backing it. Greece and Spain are hurting because they can't devalue their currency and the other countries don't want to bail them out. It's not unlike what would happen in, say, Mississippi if the Federal government didn't send money to it. Besides, for every Greece, Spain and Italy you have, I can point to a Norway, Germany, or Austria.
Um....I think you missed something along the way somewhere. I asked you for your solution and you consistently refuse to give one. I say I would use techniques that parents use on wayward children and you turn it into something grotesque.
If I had a teenager who ran up a credit card debt on the emergency credit card, I'd cut up the credit card in front of him and tell him he's on his own until he pays me back (in fairness, I wouldn't give a credit card to any kid not in college - so my assumption is the kid should be somewhat self-sufficient anyway). I can only assume by your analogy, you'd cut up the wasteful person's health insurance card and tell him he's on his own when it comes to health care. It was your analogy, afterall.
You still have not said how you would address this problem.
Universal health care to cover all basic medical care just like virtually every other westernized society, paid for by taxes. We already do this for the elderly, poor children, and indirectly to anyone else who shows up at an ER without the ability to pay. Might as well cover the rest of the 18-65 crowd, too, since they'd actually lower the overall per capita cost of the system. If people want to pay extra for things above and beyond what the the single payer system covers, they'd be free to do so.
My guess is that you have no answer at all, and that enrages you, and so you throw a tantrum by demonizing something reasonable by exaggerating it beyond all recognition, all to hide your [gratuitious insult, subsequently redacted].
I get annoyed at people who took Economics 101 or maybe even Intro to Microeconomics, heard "the free market rules," and then conveniently ignore the chapters on externalities, natural monopolies, imperfect markets, and market failures. As I've said on here before, the free market is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. One of the necessary conditions required for a free market to provide an optimum distribution of goods is an assumption that everyone is acting rationally. As I'm sure everyone here knows from personal experience, pretty much nobody acts rationally all of the time, and there are plenty of people who act irrationally the majority of the time. While experience tells us the free market is generally better at rationing resources for a lot of things, even the vast majority of things, that doesn't mean it's better for everything all of the time. Sometimes the market can be wrong.
You can incentivize all the choices you want (though I find it amusing you will rail against incentives found in the tax code in the very next breath), there are going to be people who don't follow them, even if it makes no logical sense. Do we simply let them slip through the cracks because it's their own **** fault? That sounds great in theory. Less so when you have to walk past them on your way to work in this imperfect real world of ours.
