@will-truman
Trophies should be rewards. Photos are mementos. Nothing wrong with mementos, but trophies and ribbons should usually denote achievement or success, not participation.
The idea of 'success, not participation' is absurd. If you participate in something, you have, in fact, succeeded in participating.
What you're arguing is that they haven't succeeded _enough_ to 'deserve' a piece of metal in a funny shape with words on it, their minor success only deserve a piece of paper with words on it. They don't deserve a real medal, they only deserve a _imprint_ of a medal on the paper.
It's like you've saw someone writing a thank-you note to someone who gave them a toaster, and leapt in and valiantly argued that it was wrong for them to do so, that they thanked the person in person so do not have to write a thank you note. Because, you see, writing people thank-you notes who 'don't deserve them' is 'coddling'! Yeah, thanks for that input.
This is a remarkably silly thing to care about, what two completely unrelated people are saying to each other vis vis-a-vis how much the first person respects what the second person did.
And, frankly, who the hell elected any of you God-Emperor of judging performance? Much less judging performance in some sort of strange absolute manner of what _method_ that other people should use to conveying that judgement?
It's like, ill-content with meddling with people's speech, you have now become meta-meddlers. 'I demand you not tell that person he participated in a thing via a shiny cup! You must instead use a piece of paper to tell him that thing that he already knows.'
Do any of you grasp how silly you sound?'
As I said, if there are asshole children due to coddling, it's because of their _parents_ coddling them, not the thirty minutes they sat with a participation trophy at the pizza place after losing a t-ball game. The idea that the problem is children that 'don't know how to lose' is idiotic...children rarely 'lose' in any meaningful sense _outside_ of sports in the first place. The problem is children who _always get their way_ because their parents will not say no to them.
I find this dislike of participate trophies rather surreal.
I am honestly baffled...would there be an objection here if instead of a 'trophy', it was a photo of the team? Would you guys be happier if it said 'Loser' on it?
When children do things, they are often given things to remember that by. Hell, when _everyone_ does things, they get things to remember them by.
I'm sure, when you come across someone with runner's number from a marathon, hanging on a wall, you immediately rip that down and stomp on it. How dare they remember that they attended such a competition if they didn't win!
I know someone who has a 'participation trophy' from _going to New York_. He didn't even compete in anything, but he has a little replicate of the statue of liberty he bought there! What a loser!
Children are not morons. They understand what winning is, and that they did not do it.
And they _also_ enjoy having a record of the time they spend _participating_ in the event.
And I must point out, if coddled kids are asses, I rather suspect that's almost entirely is a result of _parental_ 'coddling', and nothing to do with a sports team. But no, I'm sure it's that one damn trophy a year for participating instead of idiot parents.
And now, reading more, it does _indeed_ look like the House bill will, uh, not actually get through the House, thanks to the Tea Partiers.
You know, House Republicans, if you want to pretend that this disaster is caused by both sides, you do literally have to pass _something_ that the Senate refuses to pass, so that the pundits can pretend 'both sides failed to come to an agreement'.
If you fail to pass _anything_, it's not actually possible to pretend the other side is in the wrong.
It leaves the egg on the Republicans’ faces, and puts them on the record as having held a gun to the heads of the government so that they could secure an expansion of bureaucracy and a deficit hike, the exact opposite of the two issues they claim to be unified on opposing. I’m not surprised the Tea Party types are balking.
No, you have it backwards. The Senate proposed a plan to verify incomes, and the other change to the ACA was something about deferring reinsurance costs for a year or something. (I don't understand entirely what that is.)
The House is balking on _that_ bill.
It's the House that, instead of that reinsurance thing, threw in the repeal of the medical device tax. The Tea Party is apparently okay with this, and is going to pass this _instead_.
I.e, the House Republicans, including the Tea Party, apparently of its own free will, just proposed a deficit hike that _the Democrats didn't want or ask for_. By, yes, erasing a tax, but it's a tax that affects no actual voters, so that's a rather hard sell. (And a 2.6% sales tax sounds absurdly low to American ears.)
I mean, can’t they have you enter your SS#, cross-check it against your return, and if your prior year salary is under the threshold, you qualify.
*looks confused at Kazzy*
'They' who?
The people who actually want this law to work just decided to let people say whatever they want, and fix it at tax time the next year if they were wrong. That system works. So there's no reason for them to change anything.
The people who don't want this law to work are unlikely to agree to anything like you suggested, as that which would actually work. They are demanding we change to something that can't work at all, but it's not like that's some sort of _accident_. If they thought they could get away with demanding that everyone who got insurance subsidies show in person in Washington and run a marathon, they'd do _that_.
And note that _I_ don't understand what's going on with this Republican fight to lower their own staff's wages, which is almost 100% Republican talking point nonsense about how Congress 'exempted' themselves from the ACA. So Republicans propose a law putting Congress 'under' the ACA (by which they mean, putting in specific rules treating Congress differently) and then they point to those specific rules themselves as, themselves, an exception. It's complete gibberish, and confusing as hell.
Does anyone have some sort of documented explanation of the actual things that happened WRT this?
And, before I make a fool of myself in online debates, I am _completely_ right in that Congress literally does not need to change the ACA at all to stop themselves from subsidizing their own staff's insurance, correct? All they actually would have to do is...not subsidize their own staff's insurance. Right?
What I understand is, like you said, it was intended to be a poison pill, requiring Congress to be on the exchanges. Republicans proposed it, Democrats laughed and said 'Sure!'. (I.e, they didn't reluctantly take it, they had no problem with taking it.)
Then after all that had passed, everyone realized that there is no logical way for Congress to subsidize those plans. So Congressional staffers would be paying the full price of their health insurance.
And this is where you and my stories differ: The Obama administration had some legal people look at the law, and figured out, as the law was actually unclear, said 'You know what? Congress can just pay part of their exchange insurance. The law doesn't say that, but the law doesn't _not_ say that either. Technically, that might be subject to income taxes, but luckily the code is murky enough that I can have the IRS ignore that. So we'll just go with it.'
So Congress than proceeded to pass a law saying that they _would_ do that thing, subsidize their staff's health care purchased on the exchange. Which was not, really, part of Obamacare, it was just a 'How much we pay our staff' bill.
Republicans continued to scream bloody murder about (?) and now is demanding that Congress be barred, by law, from doing what Congress just voted to do. (I wonder if anyone's ever told them that if Congress _does_ want to subsidies their staff's health insurance, Congress can just _change the law_? Sometimes I get the feeling that House Republicans literally do not understand how the government works...the Congress cannot bar Congress from doing things.)
From what I understand, we already have an income verification system.
It's called the _income tax_ and auditing.
What we're talking about here is the original idea of a _pre_-income verification system. Where people, before they get subsidies, somehow have to verify their income _next year_ will be below a certain amount.
This is, rather obviously, somewhat stupid, so the Obama administration just said 'Look, report what you think it is, we won't check. If you're wrong and you make more than that, however, you'll have to make up the difference in subsidies on your taxes that you shouldn't have gotten.'.
Republicans 'prefer' (1) we use the completely unworkable system of verifying _next year's_ income.
1) And by 'prefer', I mean, 'There was something trivial wrong with Obamacare and everyone realized it and fixed it, so Republicans demand we actually do it so things break.'
The Maddow blog is reporting that the Republican House, continuing their proud traditions of rejecting Democratic caves, is going to reject this.
They will instead demand that their own staff be barred from their government subsiding their health insurance (Which is a WTF on top of that...isn't Congress in charge of how much their staff is paid anyway? Why the hell would they have to fuck around inside Obamacare to bar _themselves_ from covering part of their own staff's insurance?) and demanding the medical device tax be removed.
And thus ii shall be dubbed: The 'Medical Device Tax and Congressional Staff Paycut' Default of 2013.
Aka, the time we defaulted over a $3 billion dollar a year tax that absolutely no one fucking cares about(1), and what has to be less than $10 million dollars in government employee salary which Congress could reduce anytime it wants.
1) You know, a _lot_ of those 'medical devices', things like pacemakers and hip replacements and prosthetic limbs and whatnot, are used for the _elderly_, aka, people on government insurance, or veterans, aka, people on government insurance. So I rather suspect if you actually went and asked _any_ medical device company if they'd rather leave the medical device tax intact, or have the Federal government not continuing Medicare reimburses or Medicaid grants, they'd almost certainly rather just pay the tax. Maybe I'm just being sympathetic to an industry that is annoyed they got hit with a random tax that really doesn't seem to have been that great an idea, but I'm pretty certain they aren't lunatics who want the House to break the country over them.
@shazbot9 Conservatives and libertarians may not like [the mandate] but it is good and necessary that we socialize the costs of health care and the risk of needing healthcare.
Conservatives liked it just fine. It was their idea.
Also, having the government require people to purchase things may be an overreach of government powers and/or might be a bad idea, (Not that I think so), but the one thing it really can't be called is any form of socialism.
Socialism is the exact opposite concept, where the government produces the things (Aka, operates the means of productions) that people voluntarily buy. The government saying 'You must buy X from private businesses' is, if any political ideology, in the direction of 'fascism'.
Please note that I don't think it's actually 'fascism', anymore than the I think the government building and operating a toll road is 'socialism'. I just find it really weird some people in this world have decided to call 'The government forcing the purchase of stuff from private individuals' 'socialism', when it is literally the opposite of that concept.
In 'socialized medicine', the government would be producing and selling health care, and it would be paid for by private individuals. And if the government produced it and then gave it away, that would be 'communism'. (Of course, it wouldn't actually, as those terms describe entire economic systems, not interference in individual markets...the government providing free roads to everyone, for example, does not make our entire economic system 'communism'.)
@blaisep And you’re also right, there’s no evidence it’s happening: we’re just now beginning to collect the data.
There's at least a little evidence the ACA will do that: Insurance companies seem to think the ACA will do that, hence their oddly competitive and low rates on the exchanges.
That doesn't mean they can't be wrong, of course. But insurance companies, at least ones still in business, are rarely wrong with their predictions.
@pierre-corneille Your idea sounds interesting, and I’ll need to mull it over
It's worth mentioning that this is essentially what we _already_ do, but for some reason just for 'essential' services. This has absolutely no constitutional basis whatsoever, nor is there actually any definition of 'essential' anywhere.
So I say the president should just say 'As far as I am concerned, the entire Federal government is essential. You want it to stop functioning, well, you're the legislature and you can do that. But you have to actually _do_ that, you can't just ignore-the-budget into a government shutdown.'
Actually, I think the president should go the other way, and shut down every single aspect of the government he can. That's it, it's over, everyone go home. Then we'd never do it.
Of course, I'm the sort of person who has argued in the past that, in any hostage situation, the police should give people sixty seconds, and then just shoot through the hostage or storm the bank or whatever. Sure, we'd have casualties at once, but then people would _stop taking hostages_.
Same with a government shutdown. Let's blow the place up, leave government buildings unattended for looting, no FBI, no social security, no military pay...and let's see if it _ever_ happens again.
But as that is unrealistic, I say the president should just continue to assume the same budgeting as before unless told otherwise.
4. It takes two. This is happening because neither side will yield to the other’s demands.
This is, incidentally, complete bullshit.
The Democrats have no 'demands'. They want the government to continue functioning. That is not a 'demand', that is a basic premise of lawmakers, or rather it _should_ be.
The Republicans are the ones making the demands.
You do realize how this actually breaks the country if it works, right? If any group can shut down the government until they get what they want. You do actually _understand the problem_, right?
...you know, I'm reminded of all the times that the Democrats and Republicans were fighting each other, and the Democrats would reach across the isle and say something like 'We'll get on board with your spending cuts if you will get on board with our revenue increases', and the Republicans turn around and say 'Well, we both clearly agree on tax cuts, so let's do that. We can vote on your revenue increases separately.'.
Well, now _both_ houses of Congress have passed a CR that keeps government running, and under _Republican_ logic, that means we should just agree to that part and try the Republican's 'defund Obamacare' later. (Oh, wait, you mean they already have tried it? Repeatedly? Well, sucks to be them.)
While Warren Meyer makes a lot of claims, I seriously doubt his company covers _all_ expenses at the National Parks it manages. For example, does it cover firefighting? Law enforcement?
These are not private parks he's running. They're National Parks he gets to manage, and in return he gets most of the gate fees. Which is fine if he's actually maintaining than cheaper than the government...but don't assume that he is covering _literally_ every expense of them.
Hell, at minimum there has to be someone at the National Parks Service giving him oversight. And the National Parks Service just all went home. (And even if the government's cut of the fees are paying for that person, it doesn't matter. That's _spending money_ and the government can't do that anymore.)
@zic There is an element of responsibility here; does the budgeting process begin at the level of passing legislation, or does it simply apply to the budget? This is a complex discussion, but at the end of the day simply saying it rests with budgeting seems the wrong way to think of it.
And it _certainly_ seems the wrong way to think about it when a certain party in Congress does not actually seem willing to pass a budget, or passes one that is completely unmatched to the level of spending already-passed legislation requires.
Here is what we should do:
a) Get rid of the debt limit. The entire idea of that is idiotic.
b) Have the president state that, as a matter of policy, that if Congress does not pass a budget or a continuing resolution or even a resolution saying he must stop, he will continue spending money exactly as before.
I.e., he in no way claims a power or the power to spend _against_ the consent of Congress, but from now on, if Congress just doesn't _bother_ to give him spending levels, he will keep spending exactly as before. If they really want him to stop, they need to pass something that allocates money differently.
At which point I would argue that, constitutional, he _must_ stop spending, even if he doesn't agree with it. He can not sign it and shut down the government, or sign it and not, but he can't keep spending at old levels if Congress clearly doesn't _want_ him to do that. In fact, Congress could even pass a joint resolution saying 'You must stop spending', without a presidential signature, and he would have to stop.
I'm just saying what he should do, and announce he is going to do, is keep spending at old levels _until_ Congress makes some sort of preference known. Think of it as medical care provided to an unconscious person...doctors are allowed to assume consent for that. The president is allowed to assume old levels of spending until Congress bothers to inform him otherwise. The government must not be allowed to shut down simply because a branch of it is unconscious and not providing directions anymore.
I, as a Democrat, want a shutdown, but only because I'd much rather have the Republicans shoot the country, and themselves, in the foot, than to have them a showdown over the debt ceiling in two weeks, which would be the Republicans shooting themselves, and the country, in the head.
The difference between what _you_ asked and the left asking 'Wouldn't the right be happy to see the ACA go into effect and fail' is that the actual worse case scenario under the ACA is that...insurance rates rise and medical spending goes up. Really, the worse case scenario is that in a couple of years we find the ACA does not function well, insurance companies are going bankrupt, and we have to repeal it.
Whereas a government shutdown is an _immediate_ bad thing for everyone. And a default is, uh, really really bad.
There's a difference between 'I hope he _does_ try his magic act, then you'll see how bad he is', which is what the right should be saying if they really believed it, and 'I hope he does try his trick of juggling nitroglycerin, chainsaws, and kittens, then you'll see how bad he is', which is what the left is reluctant to let happen despite believing it will hurt the juggler.
Which is why you’ve heard “repeal” endless times, but “replace” never has any details. They’ve got nothing. They boxed themselves out of the entire acceptable solution space, and then stupidly made it a centerpiece issue.
It wasn't 'them', per se. It was the right-wing media that stabbed them in the back in 2008, creating a Tea Party to constantly attack from the right.
Granted, they _created_ the right-wing media, but this is more 'Dr. Frankenstein attacked by his own monster' than they shooting themselves in the foot.
But if not for the right-wing media, they could have pivoted and said 'Hey, we're glad you're using our idea, the idea we've always wanted it use.(1) BTW, we're the experts in that, so you better use our ideas.'
And it would have been the media reporting 'Democrats agree to Republican health care plan.'
But the 'Tea Party' went STAB STAB STAB.
1) This requires the American people to have the attention span of gnat to fail to notice the Republicans didn't do it while they were in power...but the American people do not have the attention spans of gnats, they have...this sentence is pointless, the American people can't possibly make it to a footnote.
It takes a certain brand of genius to manage that. I’m not sure anyone else has ever tried the “Let’s make a problem front and center, but not after making sure we don’t have and can never have any solution for it!”.
The phrase you are looking for is 'epic fail'. It's actually rather astonishing.
@jesse-ewiak Perhaps you should join together, in some sort of collective force, and give a person among you power to err, let’s see, bargain a better contract for all of you. I mean, I think something like that has helped worker’s before.
From a quick search of the internet, I believe what you are referring to is called COMMUNISM. (Spelled in all caps like that.)
@brandon-berg I may be wrong, but you seem to be confusing “rivalrous” with “competitive.” A rivalrous good is a good which has the property that one person’s consumption reduces the ability of others to consume it. For example, food is rivalrous. If I eat a steak, no one else can eat that same steak. Medical care is rivalrous, because a doctor can only perform one procedure at a time, and only has so many hours in a day. Intellectual property is nonrivalrous, because you can make an arbitrary number of copies at essentially zero cost.
No, that was indeed what I thought you meant by it, so that was how I was using it.
And now I completely don't understand what you mean in that a public good must be nonrivalrous. Only one person can consume any particular (polluted or non-polluted) resource at a time. That's pretty much how every single good functions. (Barring IP, but that's basically saying 'We have created artificial scarcity here, but we can violate that artificial scarcity if we want'. Well, duh.)
The entire premise of 'tragedy of the commons' is that public goods can be over-consumed and rendered unusable. It's hard to see how public goods can be 'over-consumed' if they must be 'nonrivalous'.
It doesn't even seem to include traditional 'public goods' like a village commons. It doesn't even apply to the things you brought it up in relation to! Clean water is not a public good under that definition. (Seriously, go ask Utah and New Mexico how 'nonrivalrous' water is.)
If that is what that term means in economics, it's nearly completely useless, and I have no idea why you brought it into this discussion.
Other than that, and maybe a few other corner cases, you’re simply wrong to say that medical care is a public good.
I'm pretty certain you're the one who brought up public goods at all, and started talking about "public goods" vs. public goods. Patrick just said it was extremely inelastic, not a 'public good', and KatherineMW pointed out that other extremely inelastic services were provided by the government, again not using that term.
No one has claimed it's a literal public good.
I'm the only one beside you even using that term, and I said it _wasn't_ a public good, because, as I pointed out, it is not non-excludable. It is trivially easy to exclude people from 99% of health care.
I just pointed out that we probably should _treat it_ as if it's a public good if we are going to demand that everyone has access to it. (Which is not the same as saying we should treat it as a public good because 'I like it and want the government to provide it.'.)
Although if 'public good' means what you're saying, that makes very little sense, because then nothing the government provides is a 'public good' except maybe weather reports and street lights.
So I guess I mean the government should treat health care just like they treat roads and postal service and clean water and other very inelastic things that people can't possible afford to produce themselves.
We can't stay here in the middle, where we, as society, demand we spend ten of thousands of dollars to stabilize a poor heart attack victim in an ER, but won't give someone with bronchitis $50 worth of antibiotics. (We will, however, spend a lot of money if they come in a week later with full-blown pneumonia.)
@michael-cain One-half of lifetime expenditures during senior years (?65); one-third of lifetime expenditures during middle age; one-sixth for childhood and young adult years.
When I said 'I’m not _entirely_ sure that premiums would be quite as low as you think.', I was talking about the mentioned hypothetical 6x difference cap on based on age, and how the law settled on 3x.
I wasn't trying to argue that there were _no_ differences, I was trying to argue that I actually don't think the differences are as high as Will Truman was thinking they are, or even as high as the _law_ thinking they were. Also, we weren't actually talking about people over 65, who are covered by Medicare.
While this document is incredibly confusing and hence completely useless to actually try to figure anything from, the chart seems to imply that 20 year olds_cost $1,448, 40 year-olds cost $2,601, and 65 year-olds cost $10,245. Per year, per capita.
That looks like it's about a 7x difference between 20 and 65...which logically means that the average difference for (hypothetical) age bands between 20-29 and 55-64 are less than that. Because a 29 year-old is halfway to 40, so logically they should cost around $2000, and a 55 year-old is 2/5th the way to 40, so they should cost around $5500. So the average for 20-29 should be around $1700, and the average for 55-64 should be $7200, which is only 4.2x difference.
And that 4.2x is assuming that the cost progression from 40-65 is linear, which I suspect it is not. And it's also pretending that it's a 64 year-old that costs $10,245, not a 65 year-old. Fixing either of those in the calculation would make that 4.2x even lower. I'd be startled if it was really as high as 4x.
I suspect the only way to get get an age band that is 6x times the lowest age band would be if insurance companies made an age band that was 60-64 or something. Or if they decided to rate each year separately. It's really the very trailing minority of ages where costs explode...which is exactly why we _have_ Medicare, and why we should drop the entire age band cap thing and just fricking expand Medicare down five years or a decade.
@brandon-berg Yup. Any day now that 45-year trend is going to turn right around.
Yeah, it will. Look at the link you provided. Specifically, look at what happened to the 45-54 year old income. Or click on 'Peak Earning Age Group'.
We weren't talking about 65 or older, those are on Medicare. (And on Social Security, which is why their income hasn't gone down.)
We were talking about pre-Medicare, whose income has managed to recently drop down to a level last seen in 1985 (Everyone else's just dropped to the mid-90s...except young people, which I also mentioned in my post.)...and remember, back then, people had pensions they could live on after they retire, _and_ health care was a lot cheaper.
And it's not so much that their income has dropped, it's that because of that they've been eating into their retirement money the entire last decade. This is the time they're _supposed_ to be funneling money directly into retirement, their peak earning time, and instead it's 1985 for them.
Of course, the 55-64 seem to be okay, not dropping as much...until you realize that what probably happening there is that _less people retired_ during that time than they used to. Probably because less of them _could_ retire without social security.
If you hadn’t noticed, traditional pensions are in pretty lousy shape. Not surprisingly, since they’re invested in broadly the same underlying assets as 401(k)s.
Well, that's a fair enough point. I wasn't really arguing we should go back to traditional pensions, those wouldn't work in today's society anyway. (Not to mention corporations robbing them blind.) 401k failed, but pensions would also have failed...if any of them existed anymore.
@brandon-berg Health care is both rivalrous and excludable. It’s a “public good,” not a public good.
While health care is mostly _technically_ excludable, we, as a society, have decided that it is not. We have decided that we will refuse to exclude people from a certain level of it. And certain aspects of it aren't excludable at all, aka, fighting contagious diseases.
It is mostly rivalous, although I would argue it is not so in emergency situations, and a lot of that is an illusion, as regional healthcare is often very very consolidated. I'm not entirely sure this is a legitimate objection to something not being a public good. Even clean air _technically_ has alternatives. (People could walk around with breath masks.) Health care is often the same way...you can either go to the heart specialist who covers your town and the three nearby towns, or drive 45 minutes to another one. Health care is not rivalous in the same way that most goods and services are.
Anyway, my point is, there's a difference between 'I would like the government to provide this, so I will call it a public good', and 'We as a society have made it illegal, for decades, for people to be denied this thing.' While neither may _technically_ be a public good, if we're going to keep treating something as a thing that can't be denied, we need to pass laws _as if_ it's a public good.
For an example...providing restroom facilities is not technically a public good. We'd be okay if the government didn't provide those...but it does, simply because we, as society have sorta unconsciously decided it _is_ a public good. And we've passed laws where certain businesses must provide them for free, and keep them clean and whatnot, despite the fact there's no reason the free market couldn't provide those at a cost. No reason except society said 'No. We're not going to pay to pee.'.
At some point, we have to say 'If we are going to say that people cannot be kept from a thing...we need to actually start treating it as a public good under the law. It makes no sense to do things in this half-assed manner, where people just get stabilized and then thrown out the door again despite the fact they need real treatment.'.
Either we should attempt to distribute health care in some sort of reasonable manner where most people can get most of the care they need...or we should change our mind and say that people should be left to die if they can't pay for treatment. We really have to pick a side, because the current system is utterly stupid. (People can, of course, disagree with any specific proposal to do the first.)
Of course, there's a rather large difference between 'health care' and 'health insurance'. Health insurance is both rivalrous and excludable, and utterly unneeded in any sane system of health care.
Will, it's perhaps worth pointing out that the elderly are about to start getting a _lot_ poorer, thanks to the completely failed experiment of replacing pensions with 401ks. And note that a lot of those pensions used to include some sort of health care. While the elderly still tend to have more assets than the young, and little debt, they aren't going to have anywhere near the retirement money people 20 years ago did. dand mentioned this, but it's easy to overlook. It's the exact age we're talking about, 50+, that is the result of this little 'experiment' of blindly handing our retirement money over to the market, which then proceeds to lose it.
Of course, perhaps that is canceled out by the fact that young people are now all unemployed and deep in debt, so the money gap is still there. (It's the new way to not increase inequality of ages...make everyone poorer by the same amount!)
But, anyway, Will, I think everyone agrees with you, the current situation is not ideal. It basically was made this way so the AARP would not fight the law.
Incidentally, I'm not _entirely_ sure that premiums would be quite as low as you think. The young tend to healthier in general, but they can have some _really_ expensive things happen to them, and spend four decades fighting it. Whereas the elderly, even if something expensive does happen, they tend to just live a few years and then die from it.
And of course, it's the young people who get pregnant, and the young people who get in car accidents, and the young people who get in fights, and the young people who skydive, etc. When I look at my own family, I have myself, with a pre-existing heart condition, and my brothers, one of which shattered his kneecap while kayaking, and another who was seriously injured in a car accident, all of which were rather expensive, and all which cost tens of thousands of dollars in medical expenses before we were thirty.
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On “Then Have A Mercy Rule”
@will-truman
Trophies should be rewards. Photos are mementos. Nothing wrong with mementos, but trophies and ribbons should usually denote achievement or success, not participation.
The idea of 'success, not participation' is absurd. If you participate in something, you have, in fact, succeeded in participating.
What you're arguing is that they haven't succeeded _enough_ to 'deserve' a piece of metal in a funny shape with words on it, their minor success only deserve a piece of paper with words on it. They don't deserve a real medal, they only deserve a _imprint_ of a medal on the paper.
It's like you've saw someone writing a thank-you note to someone who gave them a toaster, and leapt in and valiantly argued that it was wrong for them to do so, that they thanked the person in person so do not have to write a thank you note. Because, you see, writing people thank-you notes who 'don't deserve them' is 'coddling'! Yeah, thanks for that input.
This is a remarkably silly thing to care about, what two completely unrelated people are saying to each other vis vis-a-vis how much the first person respects what the second person did.
And, frankly, who the hell elected any of you God-Emperor of judging performance? Much less judging performance in some sort of strange absolute manner of what _method_ that other people should use to conveying that judgement?
It's like, ill-content with meddling with people's speech, you have now become meta-meddlers. 'I demand you not tell that person he participated in a thing via a shiny cup! You must instead use a piece of paper to tell him that thing that he already knows.'
Do any of you grasp how silly you sound?'
As I said, if there are asshole children due to coddling, it's because of their _parents_ coddling them, not the thirty minutes they sat with a participation trophy at the pizza place after losing a t-ball game. The idea that the problem is children that 'don't know how to lose' is idiotic...children rarely 'lose' in any meaningful sense _outside_ of sports in the first place. The problem is children who _always get their way_ because their parents will not say no to them.
"
I find this dislike of participate trophies rather surreal.
I am honestly baffled...would there be an objection here if instead of a 'trophy', it was a photo of the team? Would you guys be happier if it said 'Loser' on it?
When children do things, they are often given things to remember that by. Hell, when _everyone_ does things, they get things to remember them by.
I'm sure, when you come across someone with runner's number from a marathon, hanging on a wall, you immediately rip that down and stomp on it. How dare they remember that they attended such a competition if they didn't win!
I know someone who has a 'participation trophy' from _going to New York_. He didn't even compete in anything, but he has a little replicate of the statue of liberty he bought there! What a loser!
Children are not morons. They understand what winning is, and that they did not do it.
And they _also_ enjoy having a record of the time they spend _participating_ in the event.
And I must point out, if coddled kids are asses, I rather suspect that's almost entirely is a result of _parental_ 'coddling', and nothing to do with a sports team. But no, I'm sure it's that one damn trophy a year for participating instead of idiot parents.
On “Democrats need to get out of the Republicans’ way”
And now, reading more, it does _indeed_ look like the House bill will, uh, not actually get through the House, thanks to the Tea Partiers.
You know, House Republicans, if you want to pretend that this disaster is caused by both sides, you do literally have to pass _something_ that the Senate refuses to pass, so that the pundits can pretend 'both sides failed to come to an agreement'.
If you fail to pass _anything_, it's not actually possible to pretend the other side is in the wrong.
"
It leaves the egg on the Republicans’ faces, and puts them on the record as having held a gun to the heads of the government so that they could secure an expansion of bureaucracy and a deficit hike, the exact opposite of the two issues they claim to be unified on opposing. I’m not surprised the Tea Party types are balking.
No, you have it backwards. The Senate proposed a plan to verify incomes, and the other change to the ACA was something about deferring reinsurance costs for a year or something. (I don't understand entirely what that is.)
The House is balking on _that_ bill.
It's the House that, instead of that reinsurance thing, threw in the repeal of the medical device tax. The Tea Party is apparently okay with this, and is going to pass this _instead_.
I.e, the House Republicans, including the Tea Party, apparently of its own free will, just proposed a deficit hike that _the Democrats didn't want or ask for_. By, yes, erasing a tax, but it's a tax that affects no actual voters, so that's a rather hard sell. (And a 2.6% sales tax sounds absurdly low to American ears.)
At least, that's how I understand the situation.
"
I mean, can’t they have you enter your SS#, cross-check it against your return, and if your prior year salary is under the threshold, you qualify.
*looks confused at Kazzy*
'They' who?
The people who actually want this law to work just decided to let people say whatever they want, and fix it at tax time the next year if they were wrong. That system works. So there's no reason for them to change anything.
The people who don't want this law to work are unlikely to agree to anything like you suggested, as that which would actually work. They are demanding we change to something that can't work at all, but it's not like that's some sort of _accident_. If they thought they could get away with demanding that everyone who got insurance subsidies show in person in Washington and run a marathon, they'd do _that_.
"
And note that _I_ don't understand what's going on with this Republican fight to lower their own staff's wages, which is almost 100% Republican talking point nonsense about how Congress 'exempted' themselves from the ACA. So Republicans propose a law putting Congress 'under' the ACA (by which they mean, putting in specific rules treating Congress differently) and then they point to those specific rules themselves as, themselves, an exception. It's complete gibberish, and confusing as hell.
Does anyone have some sort of documented explanation of the actual things that happened WRT this?
And, before I make a fool of myself in online debates, I am _completely_ right in that Congress literally does not need to change the ACA at all to stop themselves from subsidizing their own staff's insurance, correct? All they actually would have to do is...not subsidize their own staff's insurance. Right?
"
I'm not entirely certain that's completely right.
What I understand is, like you said, it was intended to be a poison pill, requiring Congress to be on the exchanges. Republicans proposed it, Democrats laughed and said 'Sure!'. (I.e, they didn't reluctantly take it, they had no problem with taking it.)
Then after all that had passed, everyone realized that there is no logical way for Congress to subsidize those plans. So Congressional staffers would be paying the full price of their health insurance.
And this is where you and my stories differ: The Obama administration had some legal people look at the law, and figured out, as the law was actually unclear, said 'You know what? Congress can just pay part of their exchange insurance. The law doesn't say that, but the law doesn't _not_ say that either. Technically, that might be subject to income taxes, but luckily the code is murky enough that I can have the IRS ignore that. So we'll just go with it.'
So Congress than proceeded to pass a law saying that they _would_ do that thing, subsidize their staff's health care purchased on the exchange. Which was not, really, part of Obamacare, it was just a 'How much we pay our staff' bill.
Republicans continued to scream bloody murder about (?) and now is demanding that Congress be barred, by law, from doing what Congress just voted to do. (I wonder if anyone's ever told them that if Congress _does_ want to subsidies their staff's health insurance, Congress can just _change the law_? Sometimes I get the feeling that House Republicans literally do not understand how the government works...the Congress cannot bar Congress from doing things.)
"
From what I understand, we already have an income verification system.
It's called the _income tax_ and auditing.
What we're talking about here is the original idea of a _pre_-income verification system. Where people, before they get subsidies, somehow have to verify their income _next year_ will be below a certain amount.
This is, rather obviously, somewhat stupid, so the Obama administration just said 'Look, report what you think it is, we won't check. If you're wrong and you make more than that, however, you'll have to make up the difference in subsidies on your taxes that you shouldn't have gotten.'.
Republicans 'prefer' (1) we use the completely unworkable system of verifying _next year's_ income.
1) And by 'prefer', I mean, 'There was something trivial wrong with Obamacare and everyone realized it and fixed it, so Republicans demand we actually do it so things break.'
"
The Maddow blog is reporting that the Republican House, continuing their proud traditions of rejecting Democratic caves, is going to reject this.
They will instead demand that their own staff be barred from their government subsiding their health insurance (Which is a WTF on top of that...isn't Congress in charge of how much their staff is paid anyway? Why the hell would they have to fuck around inside Obamacare to bar _themselves_ from covering part of their own staff's insurance?) and demanding the medical device tax be removed.
And thus ii shall be dubbed: The 'Medical Device Tax and Congressional Staff Paycut' Default of 2013.
Aka, the time we defaulted over a $3 billion dollar a year tax that absolutely no one fucking cares about(1), and what has to be less than $10 million dollars in government employee salary which Congress could reduce anytime it wants.
1) You know, a _lot_ of those 'medical devices', things like pacemakers and hip replacements and prosthetic limbs and whatnot, are used for the _elderly_, aka, people on government insurance, or veterans, aka, people on government insurance. So I rather suspect if you actually went and asked _any_ medical device company if they'd rather leave the medical device tax intact, or have the Federal government not continuing Medicare reimburses or Medicaid grants, they'd almost certainly rather just pay the tax. Maybe I'm just being sympathetic to an industry that is annoyed they got hit with a random tax that really doesn't seem to have been that great an idea, but I'm pretty certain they aren't lunatics who want the House to break the country over them.
On “Just Stop”
I'm having trouble figuring out the intersection of 'stamps' and 'children' myself. How are children ever going to see stamps?
Is this some sort of new ironic thing with children, them purchasing stamps? What do they _do_ with them? Stick them on their phone?
On “What’s in a Maiden Name?”
Didn't calling them 'Professor X' get confusing? Unless you actually went to Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. ;)
Hey, wait a second. Shouldn't Professor X's name actually be Doctor X? I'm pretty certain he has _several_ doctorates.
On “Honest Questions about Obamacare”
@shazbot9
Conservatives and libertarians may not like [the mandate] but it is good and necessary that we socialize the costs of health care and the risk of needing healthcare.
Conservatives liked it just fine. It was their idea.
Also, having the government require people to purchase things may be an overreach of government powers and/or might be a bad idea, (Not that I think so), but the one thing it really can't be called is any form of socialism.
Socialism is the exact opposite concept, where the government produces the things (Aka, operates the means of productions) that people voluntarily buy. The government saying 'You must buy X from private businesses' is, if any political ideology, in the direction of 'fascism'.
Please note that I don't think it's actually 'fascism', anymore than the I think the government building and operating a toll road is 'socialism'. I just find it really weird some people in this world have decided to call 'The government forcing the purchase of stuff from private individuals' 'socialism', when it is literally the opposite of that concept.
In 'socialized medicine', the government would be producing and selling health care, and it would be paid for by private individuals. And if the government produced it and then gave it away, that would be 'communism'. (Of course, it wouldn't actually, as those terms describe entire economic systems, not interference in individual markets...the government providing free roads to everyone, for example, does not make our entire economic system 'communism'.)
On “On Obamacare and the Real U.S. Healthcare Crisis, Part I: A Look In The Rearview Mirror”
@blaisep
And you’re also right, there’s no evidence it’s happening: we’re just now beginning to collect the data.
There's at least a little evidence the ACA will do that: Insurance companies seem to think the ACA will do that, hence their oddly competitive and low rates on the exchanges.
That doesn't mean they can't be wrong, of course. But insurance companies, at least ones still in business, are rarely wrong with their predictions.
On “Shutdown Open Thread”
@pierre-corneille
Your idea sounds interesting, and I’ll need to mull it over
It's worth mentioning that this is essentially what we _already_ do, but for some reason just for 'essential' services. This has absolutely no constitutional basis whatsoever, nor is there actually any definition of 'essential' anywhere.
So I say the president should just say 'As far as I am concerned, the entire Federal government is essential. You want it to stop functioning, well, you're the legislature and you can do that. But you have to actually _do_ that, you can't just ignore-the-budget into a government shutdown.'
Actually, I think the president should go the other way, and shut down every single aspect of the government he can. That's it, it's over, everyone go home. Then we'd never do it.
Of course, I'm the sort of person who has argued in the past that, in any hostage situation, the police should give people sixty seconds, and then just shoot through the hostage or storm the bank or whatever. Sure, we'd have casualties at once, but then people would _stop taking hostages_.
Same with a government shutdown. Let's blow the place up, leave government buildings unattended for looting, no FBI, no social security, no military pay...and let's see if it _ever_ happens again.
But as that is unrealistic, I say the president should just continue to assume the same budgeting as before unless told otherwise.
"
4. It takes two. This is happening because neither side will yield to the other’s demands.
This is, incidentally, complete bullshit.
The Democrats have no 'demands'. They want the government to continue functioning. That is not a 'demand', that is a basic premise of lawmakers, or rather it _should_ be.
The Republicans are the ones making the demands.
You do realize how this actually breaks the country if it works, right? If any group can shut down the government until they get what they want. You do actually _understand the problem_, right?
...you know, I'm reminded of all the times that the Democrats and Republicans were fighting each other, and the Democrats would reach across the isle and say something like 'We'll get on board with your spending cuts if you will get on board with our revenue increases', and the Republicans turn around and say 'Well, we both clearly agree on tax cuts, so let's do that. We can vote on your revenue increases separately.'.
Well, now _both_ houses of Congress have passed a CR that keeps government running, and under _Republican_ logic, that means we should just agree to that part and try the Republican's 'defund Obamacare' later. (Oh, wait, you mean they already have tried it? Repeatedly? Well, sucks to be them.)
"
While Warren Meyer makes a lot of claims, I seriously doubt his company covers _all_ expenses at the National Parks it manages. For example, does it cover firefighting? Law enforcement?
These are not private parks he's running. They're National Parks he gets to manage, and in return he gets most of the gate fees. Which is fine if he's actually maintaining than cheaper than the government...but don't assume that he is covering _literally_ every expense of them.
Hell, at minimum there has to be someone at the National Parks Service giving him oversight. And the National Parks Service just all went home. (And even if the government's cut of the fees are paying for that person, it doesn't matter. That's _spending money_ and the government can't do that anymore.)
"
@zic
There is an element of responsibility here; does the budgeting process begin at the level of passing legislation, or does it simply apply to the budget? This is a complex discussion, but at the end of the day simply saying it rests with budgeting seems the wrong way to think of it.
And it _certainly_ seems the wrong way to think about it when a certain party in Congress does not actually seem willing to pass a budget, or passes one that is completely unmatched to the level of spending already-passed legislation requires.
Here is what we should do:
a) Get rid of the debt limit. The entire idea of that is idiotic.
b) Have the president state that, as a matter of policy, that if Congress does not pass a budget or a continuing resolution or even a resolution saying he must stop, he will continue spending money exactly as before.
I.e., he in no way claims a power or the power to spend _against_ the consent of Congress, but from now on, if Congress just doesn't _bother_ to give him spending levels, he will keep spending exactly as before. If they really want him to stop, they need to pass something that allocates money differently.
At which point I would argue that, constitutional, he _must_ stop spending, even if he doesn't agree with it. He can not sign it and shut down the government, or sign it and not, but he can't keep spending at old levels if Congress clearly doesn't _want_ him to do that. In fact, Congress could even pass a joint resolution saying 'You must stop spending', without a presidential signature, and he would have to stop.
I'm just saying what he should do, and announce he is going to do, is keep spending at old levels _until_ Congress makes some sort of preference known. Think of it as medical care provided to an unconscious person...doctors are allowed to assume consent for that. The president is allowed to assume old levels of spending until Congress bothers to inform him otherwise. The government must not be allowed to shut down simply because a branch of it is unconscious and not providing directions anymore.
"
I, as a Democrat, want a shutdown, but only because I'd much rather have the Republicans shoot the country, and themselves, in the foot, than to have them a showdown over the debt ceiling in two weeks, which would be the Republicans shooting themselves, and the country, in the head.
The difference between what _you_ asked and the left asking 'Wouldn't the right be happy to see the ACA go into effect and fail' is that the actual worse case scenario under the ACA is that...insurance rates rise and medical spending goes up. Really, the worse case scenario is that in a couple of years we find the ACA does not function well, insurance companies are going bankrupt, and we have to repeal it.
Whereas a government shutdown is an _immediate_ bad thing for everyone. And a default is, uh, really really bad.
There's a difference between 'I hope he _does_ try his magic act, then you'll see how bad he is', which is what the right should be saying if they really believed it, and 'I hope he does try his trick of juggling nitroglycerin, chainsaws, and kittens, then you'll see how bad he is', which is what the left is reluctant to let happen despite believing it will hurt the juggler.
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Which is why you’ve heard “repeal” endless times, but “replace” never has any details. They’ve got nothing. They boxed themselves out of the entire acceptable solution space, and then stupidly made it a centerpiece issue.
It wasn't 'them', per se. It was the right-wing media that stabbed them in the back in 2008, creating a Tea Party to constantly attack from the right.
Granted, they _created_ the right-wing media, but this is more 'Dr. Frankenstein attacked by his own monster' than they shooting themselves in the foot.
But if not for the right-wing media, they could have pivoted and said 'Hey, we're glad you're using our idea, the idea we've always wanted it use.(1) BTW, we're the experts in that, so you better use our ideas.'
And it would have been the media reporting 'Democrats agree to Republican health care plan.'
But the 'Tea Party' went STAB STAB STAB.
1) This requires the American people to have the attention span of gnat to fail to notice the Republicans didn't do it while they were in power...but the American people do not have the attention spans of gnats, they have...this sentence is pointless, the American people can't possibly make it to a footnote.
It takes a certain brand of genius to manage that. I’m not sure anyone else has ever tried the “Let’s make a problem front and center, but not after making sure we don’t have and can never have any solution for it!”.
The phrase you are looking for is 'epic fail'. It's actually rather astonishing.
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@jesse-ewiak
Perhaps you should join together, in some sort of collective force, and give a person among you power to err, let’s see, bargain a better contract for all of you. I mean, I think something like that has helped worker’s before.
From a quick search of the internet, I believe what you are referring to is called COMMUNISM. (Spelled in all caps like that.)
On “It’s Time to Unbundle Health Insurance and Health Care”
@brandon-berg
I may be wrong, but you seem to be confusing “rivalrous” with “competitive.” A rivalrous good is a good which has the property that one person’s consumption reduces the ability of others to consume it. For example, food is rivalrous. If I eat a steak, no one else can eat that same steak. Medical care is rivalrous, because a doctor can only perform one procedure at a time, and only has so many hours in a day. Intellectual property is nonrivalrous, because you can make an arbitrary number of copies at essentially zero cost.
No, that was indeed what I thought you meant by it, so that was how I was using it.
And now I completely don't understand what you mean in that a public good must be nonrivalrous. Only one person can consume any particular (polluted or non-polluted) resource at a time. That's pretty much how every single good functions. (Barring IP, but that's basically saying 'We have created artificial scarcity here, but we can violate that artificial scarcity if we want'. Well, duh.)
The entire premise of 'tragedy of the commons' is that public goods can be over-consumed and rendered unusable. It's hard to see how public goods can be 'over-consumed' if they must be 'nonrivalous'.
It doesn't even seem to include traditional 'public goods' like a village commons. It doesn't even apply to the things you brought it up in relation to! Clean water is not a public good under that definition. (Seriously, go ask Utah and New Mexico how 'nonrivalrous' water is.)
If that is what that term means in economics, it's nearly completely useless, and I have no idea why you brought it into this discussion.
Other than that, and maybe a few other corner cases, you’re simply wrong to say that medical care is a public good.
I'm pretty certain you're the one who brought up public goods at all, and started talking about "public goods" vs. public goods. Patrick just said it was extremely inelastic, not a 'public good', and KatherineMW pointed out that other extremely inelastic services were provided by the government, again not using that term.
No one has claimed it's a literal public good.
I'm the only one beside you even using that term, and I said it _wasn't_ a public good, because, as I pointed out, it is not non-excludable. It is trivially easy to exclude people from 99% of health care.
I just pointed out that we probably should _treat it_ as if it's a public good if we are going to demand that everyone has access to it. (Which is not the same as saying we should treat it as a public good because 'I like it and want the government to provide it.'.)
Although if 'public good' means what you're saying, that makes very little sense, because then nothing the government provides is a 'public good' except maybe weather reports and street lights.
So I guess I mean the government should treat health care just like they treat roads and postal service and clean water and other very inelastic things that people can't possible afford to produce themselves.
We can't stay here in the middle, where we, as society, demand we spend ten of thousands of dollars to stabilize a poor heart attack victim in an ER, but won't give someone with bronchitis $50 worth of antibiotics. (We will, however, spend a lot of money if they come in a week later with full-blown pneumonia.)
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@michael-cain
One-half of lifetime expenditures during senior years (?65); one-third of lifetime expenditures during middle age; one-sixth for childhood and young adult years.
When I said 'I’m not _entirely_ sure that premiums would be quite as low as you think.', I was talking about the mentioned hypothetical 6x difference cap on based on age, and how the law settled on 3x.
I wasn't trying to argue that there were _no_ differences, I was trying to argue that I actually don't think the differences are as high as Will Truman was thinking they are, or even as high as the _law_ thinking they were. Also, we weren't actually talking about people over 65, who are covered by Medicare.
While this document is incredibly confusing and hence completely useless to actually try to figure anything from, the chart seems to imply that 20 year olds_cost $1,448, 40 year-olds cost $2,601, and 65 year-olds cost $10,245. Per year, per capita.
That looks like it's about a 7x difference between 20 and 65...which logically means that the average difference for (hypothetical) age bands between 20-29 and 55-64 are less than that. Because a 29 year-old is halfway to 40, so logically they should cost around $2000, and a 55 year-old is 2/5th the way to 40, so they should cost around $5500. So the average for 20-29 should be around $1700, and the average for 55-64 should be $7200, which is only 4.2x difference.
And that 4.2x is assuming that the cost progression from 40-65 is linear, which I suspect it is not. And it's also pretending that it's a 64 year-old that costs $10,245, not a 65 year-old. Fixing either of those in the calculation would make that 4.2x even lower. I'd be startled if it was really as high as 4x.
I suspect the only way to get get an age band that is 6x times the lowest age band would be if insurance companies made an age band that was 60-64 or something. Or if they decided to rate each year separately. It's really the very trailing minority of ages where costs explode...which is exactly why we _have_ Medicare, and why we should drop the entire age band cap thing and just fricking expand Medicare down five years or a decade.
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@brandon-berg
Yup. Any day now that 45-year trend is going to turn right around.
Yeah, it will. Look at the link you provided. Specifically, look at what happened to the 45-54 year old income. Or click on 'Peak Earning Age Group'.
We weren't talking about 65 or older, those are on Medicare. (And on Social Security, which is why their income hasn't gone down.)
We were talking about pre-Medicare, whose income has managed to recently drop down to a level last seen in 1985 (Everyone else's just dropped to the mid-90s...except young people, which I also mentioned in my post.)...and remember, back then, people had pensions they could live on after they retire, _and_ health care was a lot cheaper.
And it's not so much that their income has dropped, it's that because of that they've been eating into their retirement money the entire last decade. This is the time they're _supposed_ to be funneling money directly into retirement, their peak earning time, and instead it's 1985 for them.
Of course, the 55-64 seem to be okay, not dropping as much...until you realize that what probably happening there is that _less people retired_ during that time than they used to. Probably because less of them _could_ retire without social security.
If you hadn’t noticed, traditional pensions are in pretty lousy shape. Not surprisingly, since they’re invested in broadly the same underlying assets as 401(k)s.
Well, that's a fair enough point. I wasn't really arguing we should go back to traditional pensions, those wouldn't work in today's society anyway. (Not to mention corporations robbing them blind.) 401k failed, but pensions would also have failed...if any of them existed anymore.
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@brandon-berg
Health care is both rivalrous and excludable. It’s a “public good,” not a public good.
While health care is mostly _technically_ excludable, we, as a society, have decided that it is not. We have decided that we will refuse to exclude people from a certain level of it. And certain aspects of it aren't excludable at all, aka, fighting contagious diseases.
It is mostly rivalous, although I would argue it is not so in emergency situations, and a lot of that is an illusion, as regional healthcare is often very very consolidated. I'm not entirely sure this is a legitimate objection to something not being a public good. Even clean air _technically_ has alternatives. (People could walk around with breath masks.) Health care is often the same way...you can either go to the heart specialist who covers your town and the three nearby towns, or drive 45 minutes to another one. Health care is not rivalous in the same way that most goods and services are.
Anyway, my point is, there's a difference between 'I would like the government to provide this, so I will call it a public good', and 'We as a society have made it illegal, for decades, for people to be denied this thing.' While neither may _technically_ be a public good, if we're going to keep treating something as a thing that can't be denied, we need to pass laws _as if_ it's a public good.
For an example...providing restroom facilities is not technically a public good. We'd be okay if the government didn't provide those...but it does, simply because we, as society have sorta unconsciously decided it _is_ a public good. And we've passed laws where certain businesses must provide them for free, and keep them clean and whatnot, despite the fact there's no reason the free market couldn't provide those at a cost. No reason except society said 'No. We're not going to pay to pee.'.
At some point, we have to say 'If we are going to say that people cannot be kept from a thing...we need to actually start treating it as a public good under the law. It makes no sense to do things in this half-assed manner, where people just get stabilized and then thrown out the door again despite the fact they need real treatment.'.
Either we should attempt to distribute health care in some sort of reasonable manner where most people can get most of the care they need...or we should change our mind and say that people should be left to die if they can't pay for treatment. We really have to pick a side, because the current system is utterly stupid. (People can, of course, disagree with any specific proposal to do the first.)
Of course, there's a rather large difference between 'health care' and 'health insurance'. Health insurance is both rivalrous and excludable, and utterly unneeded in any sane system of health care.
"
Will, it's perhaps worth pointing out that the elderly are about to start getting a _lot_ poorer, thanks to the completely failed experiment of replacing pensions with 401ks. And note that a lot of those pensions used to include some sort of health care. While the elderly still tend to have more assets than the young, and little debt, they aren't going to have anywhere near the retirement money people 20 years ago did. dand mentioned this, but it's easy to overlook. It's the exact age we're talking about, 50+, that is the result of this little 'experiment' of blindly handing our retirement money over to the market, which then proceeds to lose it.
Of course, perhaps that is canceled out by the fact that young people are now all unemployed and deep in debt, so the money gap is still there. (It's the new way to not increase inequality of ages...make everyone poorer by the same amount!)
But, anyway, Will, I think everyone agrees with you, the current situation is not ideal. It basically was made this way so the AARP would not fight the law.
Incidentally, I'm not _entirely_ sure that premiums would be quite as low as you think. The young tend to healthier in general, but they can have some _really_ expensive things happen to them, and spend four decades fighting it. Whereas the elderly, even if something expensive does happen, they tend to just live a few years and then die from it.
And of course, it's the young people who get pregnant, and the young people who get in car accidents, and the young people who get in fights, and the young people who skydive, etc. When I look at my own family, I have myself, with a pre-existing heart condition, and my brothers, one of which shattered his kneecap while kayaking, and another who was seriously injured in a car accident, all of which were rather expensive, and all which cost tens of thousands of dollars in medical expenses before we were thirty.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.