The Gaming Den

Count_Arioch_the_28th wrote:

Crissa wrote:Yeah, maybe it pisses you off, Maxus. Do something about it.

That would end up with him getting killed. Ignorant people will kill to remain ignorant.

I'm working on achieving Heaven/Elysium/Nirvana/Grace/Some-Kind-of-Good-Afterlife by not strangling the loonies I encounter and instead waiting for God to call them home or whatever they want to call it.

Hopefully, the admittedly poor diet around here should get God to call their name a little faster.

I think that's one of the Enlightenments of the Sohei. Well done.

Koumei wrote:I think that's one of the Enlightenments of the Sohei. Well done.

Ironically, I'm normally pretty mellow. But the Healthcare War is shaking that every time I read something new about it. I have a constant feeling of irritation when I think about it.

But, still. To adjust a line from Ursula Vernon that I've found useful in repeating:

I am stillness. I am water. I am stone. I am nothingness.

I am calm.

I am calm.

I will continue calmly.

I am not going to calmly wring some wingnut's goddamn neck…

tzor wrote:The big wig fat cats are trying to constantly cut service to rural places but congress won't let them.

So the system works then? Unless you think a private company is going to deliver to unprofitable places. Congress has less hold over them too so its harder to mandate it.

Draco_Argentum wrote:So the system works then? Unless you think a private company is going to deliver to unprofitable places. Congress has less hold over them too so its harder to mandate it.

If you pay them they will. Someone will find a way to make it profitable. In any case, no matter what you do, someone is going to have to pay. You can't get around that. What you can get around is the extra cost and non added value of government bureaucracy. The post office cannot be efficient; the bureaucracy prevents that.

The post office isn't supposed to be profitable. It costs the same to send mail from New York to Boston as it does to the Alaska Wilderness because that's the design goal, and profitability was sacrificed for it.

The post office does exactly what it's supposed to do. A private company, left to its own devices, would drop the Alaska Wilderness trip (or price it in accordance with its costs) to cut costs on its NY-Boston route, and that would leave the people living in the Alaska Wilderness without affordable postal services. Since the goal of having a government post office is to ensure that everyone gets affordable postal services, doing that is the wrong decision.

tzor wrote:If you pay them they will. Someone will find a way to make it profitable. In any case, no matter what you do, someone is going to have to pay. You can't get around that. What you can get around is the extra cost and non added value of government bureaucracy. The post office cannot be efficient; the bureaucracy prevents that.

You appear to believe that a for-profit version wouldn't support a mssive Corporate bureaucracy. I believe differently - every corporation has a "head office" filled with mostly indolent paper pushers. Is this not a bureaucracy?

Heath Robinson wrote:You appear to believe that a for-profit version wouldn't support a mssive Corporate bureaucracy. I believe differently - every corporation has a "head office" filled with mostly indolent paper pushers. Is this not a bureaucracy?

First of all, I don’t really see this as a for-profit / not for-profit thing. Most companies are run as a “for my paycheck” thing anyway (at least as far as the CEO is concerned). Bureaucracy (a system of administration marked by constant striving for increased functions and power, by lack of initiative and flexibility, by indifference to human needs or public opinion, and by a tendency to defer decisions to superiors or to impede action with red tape) certainly happens in large corporations as well as in large governments. But large companies that have too much of it simply fail over time.

I see this more of a monopoly / free market thing. Monopolies, by their very nature, do not strive to be efficient, nor do they strive to innovate (there are exceptions; Bell Labs of AT&T were innovative because they had unlimited funds from the monopoly) and as a result become ineffective over time. They cannot respond to competition. In the case of the Post Office, the real “competition” to them is email; converting bill payment to email and electronic transfer of the payment has cost the post office significant revenues.

Simply put, without innovation, snail mail is as doomed as the telegraph. This innovation cannot come from a monopoly or a bureaucracy but from small companies that live, fail and die until one of them doesn’t fail and doesn’t die. They succeed and grow bigger and eventually some other company gets better and takes over the “king of the hill” in the niche of the business.

The same is true for health insurance.

this is a somewhat amusing scare video about a "national list" or some such coming about because of the healthcare thing.

But you can't have small, innovative postal service, or long-distance rail lines, or a lot of other things that are by their own nature inefficient and large-scale.

tzor wrote:Simply put, without innovation, snail mail is as doomed as the telegraph. This innovation cannot come from a monopoly or a bureaucracy but from small companies that live, fail and die until one of them doesn’t fail and doesn’t die. They succeed and grow bigger and eventually some other company gets better and takes over the “king of the hill” in the niche of the business.

The same is true for health insurance.

I don't believe that being a monopoly precludes innovation.

Equally, the division of a universal concern amongst numerous small entities is a tragedy because no single entity has enough involvement to invest in projects with positive externalities. In fact, businesses often have a disincentive to enrich the environment for strategic reasons.

You can see this most readily in the pay of CEOs, where shareholders have little to no motivation to extract a parasitic CEO because their investment in the company is less than 1% of shares and, therefore, less than 1% of the dividends. Any excessive remuneration of the CEO will not motivate shareholders to respond because each, individually, does not experience a cost that would justify expenditure of much time and effort.


You can make a similar argument for health insurance - synergy exists between health care for you and health care for the poor because the poor will act as a vector and breeding ground for further infection. Univerally provided healthcare will prevent these things from establishing a beachhead in the first place, and increasing the size of markets for new drugs will spur additional innovation by increasing the returns on investing in new drugs. "Make the pie higher", to use a Bushism.

tzor wrote:In the case of the Post Office, the real “competition” to them is email; converting bill payment to email and electronic transfer of the payment has cost the post office significant revenues.

Oh looky here. Tzor is still measuring success in terms of money gained instead of services rendered.

Seriously. It's a Service. It's not about making money. It's about doing something that is not profitable and taking money from people to make sure it gets done, because we've decided that a world with a post office is better than a world without one.

Just like healthcare. Healthcare is not better nationalized because the government can make more money than private companies supplying health coverage.

It's because we have a goal "Everyone is healthy." That people agree is a really good thing, so good that we decide it's totally worth taking peoples money away from them, and using it make sure everyone is healthy, instead of just them.

Rich people could afford to pay for post to Alaska, poor people can't. Rich people can afford healthcare. Poor people can't. Government run services are not there to make money, they are there to insure equal access to the service.

The fact that total costs are already paid by the government thanks to public hospitals and ER mandatory care laws, and this process would drastically lower total costs is just a bonus. The main point is that poor people deserve to be healthy too, and if they can't because it costs money because someone is trying to make a profit, we've decided that's not a good enough justification for screwing some over.

Just to play devil's advocate so it isn't just tzor bringing up arguments against healthcare I shall throw out some concerns of mine about it.

1) Abusing the system. I would hope there are measures to prevent abuse of the system, people using it to get prescription drugs, drug/health related companies over charging the government for their overpriced treatment/drugs. People intentionally hurting themselves just to receive medical care.

2) Handling lost causes. how long will they keep someone up on life support? What will be the deciding factor on pulling the plug? How many times will it cover the guy who keeps getting himself hurt (whether its intentional or not)

Moving on there's a big point that I'm surprised no one is mentioning. The boom the bill will give to the economy. Health care for everyone means more people seeking medical help which means a greater demand for doctors, nurses, etc which means more jobs which means more medical facilities being built which means even more jobs which puts the economy in motion. I am surprised that this isn't being used as a selling point on the bill.

MGuy wrote:Just to play devil's advocate so it isn't just tzor bringing up arguments against healthcare I shall throw out some concerns of mine about it.

1) Abusing the system. I would hope there are measure to prevent abuse of the system, people using it to get prescription drugs, drug/health related companies over charging the government for their overpriced treatment/drugs. People intentionally hurting themselves just to receive medical care.

2) Handling lost causes. how long will they keep someone up on life support? What will be the deciding factor on pulling the plug?

How is that different from the current system?

Murtak wrote:

MGuy wrote:Just to play devil's advocate so it isn't just tzor bringing up arguments against healthcare I shall throw out some concerns of mine about it.

1) Abusing the system. I would hope there are measure to prevent abuse of the system, people using it to get prescription drugs, drug/health related companies over charging the government for their overpriced treatment/drugs. People intentionally hurting themselves just to receive medical care.

2) Handling lost causes. how long will they keep someone up on life support? What will be the deciding factor on pulling the plug?

How is that different from the current system?

I'm not saying it is diifferent but the health care system will be offering itself to more people. So naturally I am concerned with what measures (if there are any) that will be taken to solve these issues.

MGuy:

1) It's harder to abuse the system when the system is singular. Currently it's very easy to abuse 'the system' because no one shares records, and you can often get your prescription filled (if you have money) from multiple doctors and pharmacists, and they don't talk to each other to find this out. Which is dangerous to the end-user.

2) The right-wing wrote in a section requiring a living will before providing medicaid/medicare. That was softened down to voluntarily paying for. And the right-wing turned it into mandatory death-panels ala Sarah Palin.

3) We have a thread about healthcare, post more there. This is for new news; if you want to discuss it in depth, well, that's what threads are for ^-^

-Crissa

Why thank you I didn't know/look for it since it becae such a big deal in this thread.

Via Washington Monthly,

[url=http://thinkprogress.org/2009/08/17/muslim-actor-arrested/ wrote:ThinkProgress[/url]]Shah Rukh Khan, one of Bollywood's most recognizable movie stars, was in the United States to promote his new film about the racial profiling of Muslims. Khan, a Muslim star in a largely Hindu country, was, ironically, recently detained at Newark's airport for no apparent reason. He was released after two hours of questioning.

I weep.

-Crissa

tzor wrote:

Draco_Argentum wrote:So the system works then? Unless you think a private company is going to deliver to unprofitable places. Congress has less hold over them too so its harder to mandate it.

If you pay them they will. Someone will find a way to make it profitable. In any case, no matter what you do, someone is going to have to pay. You can't get around that. What you can get around is the extra cost and non added value of government bureaucracy. The post office cannot be efficient; the bureaucracy prevents that.

When things get privatized, only one thing happens: The people living out of the big cities do without and prices get jacked up. That has happened every time something is allowed privatization.

Texas public schools are legally mandated to teach the Bible
Suffice it to say that I'm a touch annoyed with Texas right now.

Honestly, Tzor talks about monopolies like they're always evil.

I remember in high school Economics where the teacher explained that some monopolies are more or less allowed because having a competing system would be too much of a mess.

The examples he gave...

1) Power companies are generally monopolies, because having more than one grid would be...an unholy mess.

2) The USPS, which moves the mail around to the profit of all society.

And, to my delight, he brought up the confusopoly (something from a Scott Adams book I'd read).

The idea that when competing companies provide pretty much the same service (banking, telephones, health insurance, etc.), they don't compete by providing better services or cheaper prices; they compete by confusing the hell out of customers so that way who goes to them is more or less random, assuring survival for all.

I remember in the first part of this decade, with the cell phone companies all having radio ads breaking down their minutes.

The best one--and the one that made me cry inside--was one which quoted a competitor's number of minutes and then broke them down until it was proven that you had one minute an hour ("What can you talk about in one minute?")

So, yeah, competition isn't exactly the crucible that burns away the weak and leaves the good ones. Thanks to the ordinary person being too dumb/not willing to examine the details with a fine-toothed comb to find out exactly who's charging how much for what.

Everyone cannot be required to be an expert on everything. It's just an unreasonable expectation of time.

What we can do, however, is require competing companies to label their products in such a way that they can be compared. Something which is seriously lacking in the health insurance industry and the wireless telecom industry.

-Crissa

But that would be government meddling!

EEEEEVIIIILLL, EEEEEEEEVIIIIIIL

Which is what the opposition would say.

And, really, the same thing applies to the current political situation. If you use the right tone of voice, people will believe what you say, nevermind the actual words.

So we've got Palin firing people up by claiming there's going to be 'death panels' weeding out underprivileged people for the crime of being underprivileged.

...while the insurance companies who ARE doing that snicker in the background.

Maxus wrote:1) Power companies are generally monopolies, because having more than one grid would be...an unholy mess.

Here in Germany there are a couple dozen power companies. Anyone who owns a grid is basically forced to carry other providers power at prices fixed by the state. The same goes for phone and internet services.

That said I firmly believed basic infrastructure should be provided by the state. If the private industry wants to provide some sort of premium model for the rich, let them, but the basics should be done by the state and in most cases be insanely cheap. Society as a whole can only benefit from well repaired roads, public transport for dimes, renewable energy and heat at the community level, broadband for everyone, cheap health care, etc.