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What kind of a world do we live when you can't buy a box of nails, a bunch of threaded galvanized pipe and endcaps without people looking at you funny?

Anyone with a job will be able to afford to pay into it because it isn't a comprehensive plan. It covers catastrophic medical issues only, far more people will be paying in than taking out and the market elements will reduce costs, keeping it manageable.

If someone doesn't have a job, my first question is why? If they've been laid off, make this coverage part of unemployment benefits. If they are incapable of working they're a special case not applicable to the vast bulk of the population and outside the general scope of this proposal. If they're just unwilling to work I don't much care, we can't do everything.

The government wouldn't run it, they'd just sanction it. A decree goes out that this non-profit corporation has authority to provide catastrohpic healthcare benefits with such-and-such guidelines, end of government control. 

The insurance agency wouldn't be the provider of healthcare either, merely a central, auditable source of funds to pay for that healthcare. Individual physicians and hospitals compete for the actual "providing." The individual is billed, they just submit the relevant sections to the insuring agency for payment. They pay minor medical expenses themselves, which will drive costs down.

Sometimes there isn't a simple answer. If all you want to hear is that someone will be screwed over, okay. Someone will be screwed over. But the same happens with every system currently in use. As we say in America, life isn't fair.

Arrangements for '08 are already in the works. 

Court order? Psychiatric advice? We're worried about you, dude. 

But in all seriousness, clark does have a point. Healthcare is something of a paradox, if it's for-profit the motivation to treat a patient diasppears if it loses money, yet if it's rendered as an entitled service costs balloon uncontrollably because no one believes they're really paying for it. "I only paid ten dollars at the doctor and my prescription was free, yippee. Hey, why are my taxes so high?"

So the question is how do we alleviate both problems. How do we get clark's non-profit focus on care over money and introduce market forces to keep costs from exploding?

Hey, I don't claim to know, but this idea occurs to me. What if we created a government-sanctioned (but still essentially private) national insurance company (think PBS with drugs  ) They cover the actual costs above a certain level, every worker can opt to pay into the system, or not at their discretion. You get the flu, you pay yourself. You get cancer, the program kicks in. Only cover catastrophic illness or injury. For those that do pay in, the Public Health Corp pays their medical costs much like current insurance schemes today.

The board of the PHC (or whatever it's called) is compensated according to how well they treat/cure patients as well as how well they keep costs down. Letting a cancer die because they're an expense would be criminal and subject to prosecution, but finding cheaper yet equally effective treatment would be rewarded.

So even for insurance payments, doctors have to compete. Further, they don't just send the bill off to the PHC, they give it, itemized and in its entirety to the patient. Make them give estimates beforehand, just like a mechanic. No costs are hidden and patients can go anywhere they want. Market forces come to bear on providers but a cushion exists to keep people from dying in the streets from TB.

Cover only serious illness, make providers compete, make the taxation voluntary.

And if someone opts out of the program, their call. Make the choice clear, then let people make their own decisions. Most will go in out of convenience if nothing else, especially if costs are kept down.

Not even awake yet and that's better than what the current crop of politicos can come up with. And trying to compromise with clark, what has the world come to?  :twisted:

Depending on how it's implemented. A non-profit model wouldn't help much if the underlying structure of healthcare were not fundamentally changed.

There are really three major, over-riding problems with how healthcare is organized in this country, though the third is somewhat tangential. Providers have no reason to price competitively, patients don't think they're paying for it (my insurance will cover it, the government will pay for it, etc.) and having everyone paying into a central trough, whether it be the current insurance scheme or a government "universal" healthcare plan encourages everyone to meddle in everyone elses affairs, leading to the sort of nanny-state laws we have today. If we're all paying for everyone else's health problems, we have a compulsion to forbid them from eating anything unhealthy or doing anything dangerous.

But if everyone covers their own expenses, prices come down and each individual can decide for themselves what level of risk is acceptable.  That old freedom thing again.

<traversing turret!>

We have. We don't hear much about it largely because it's going reasonably well. Still there, staying the course. 

Not the best issue to thrust to the forefront to justify war and apparently some bad intel was relied on while some other data was dismissed. But it can't ruthfully be said that we've found nothing. A few WMD items have turned up, sarin gas among other goodies, but not in the quantities expected and not as a sufficient cause for war in and of itself.

Which isn't to say that all of what was once there was gone when we invaded. Maybe it was long-since destroyed, maybe it's still hidden. Much uncertainty remains.

The rest I can't really argue with. I don't entirely agree, but it isn't wrong.

Yes, we most definately should.

I put forth that the real problem is not Wal-Mart (which is evil, BTW  ) not offering benefits to its employees, but that so many employees and employers alike buy into the benefits paradigm.

A major factor in why healthcare costs are so high is precisely because of employer-provided insurance and government subsidies to those who don't have it. The person receiving services doesn't see themselves as directly paying for it and those providing the service have no incentive to price competitively. Market forces are removed, therefore costs are high.

However, some medical procedures have never been covered by insurance. Lasik vision correction for example. It used to cost around $5000. Now it's just a few hundred bucks. While this may not be a totally applicable case across the board, the basic premise still stands. When market forces are applied to medical treatment costs come down. In the absence of those forces, they tend to rise.

Point being, all the people that complain about Wal-Mart not offering benefits would do better to focus on all the corporations that do offer them. They're the real problem here.

Just dump it all. No health insurance, no pensions, no Social Security, no Medicaid. Just pay people right up front. Costs will come down, government will be less invasive, most people will be better off and more of those who aren't will be so directly because of their own actions, and nothing motivates one to change their behaviors than clearly visible consequences, both good and bad.

Freedom and responsibility, it's a wonderful thing. 

There's a number of things to say about this. First, do we do anything about it? If so, if it's our responsibility to keep one foreign group from attacking another how can anyone argue against any American intervention anywhere?

"Because we broke Iraq" I hear burbling through the Force. Okay, fair enough. What about the killing of non-communists in Vietnam after we pulled out? What about Somalia? What about Sudan (we did bomb a pharmaceutical plant there)  and Kosovo?

The problem with this "we broke it, it's all our responsibility now" reasoning is that far from some mythical call for moderation it leads logically to either isolationism or Empire. Either of which I can accept on their respective merits. Fact is, no action comes without negative consequences. We're better off looking long-term at total good vs. ill rather than nitpicking individual problems.

So in short, let the Turks deal with Kurdish terrorists. If we're going to start agonizing about every problem that results from something we did than we better start building up some forces to straighten out everything that got screwed up when the Soviet Union fell.

That said, again, the current policy is flawed, mistakes continue to be made, yadda yadda, flogging the horse, damn Bush, Vietnam. 

"Oh yeah, great plan! We're in some real pretty shit now!" the technician called out, dabbing the blood that steadily flowed from his forehead.

"Quiet," I shouted back, trying to get communications back online. Out of twelve people on our lander, ten were deceased and in various states of presentability after the inexplicable crash. The temptation to make it eleven was building with every word.

"We're crashed on fucking Mars, do you understand that you jarhead fuck? We're dead meat."

"Silence!" Whether it was the tone or the subtlely revealed sidearm, he hushed up and regained some measure of composure. Another moment of work revealed that the communciations array was FUBAR. "Now, let's start this again. What's your name?"

"Johnson, sir. Richard."

"What kind of parent names their kid Dick Johnson?" I asked, hoping to either get a laugh or piss him off enough to leave me alone. He shrugged dismissively, nervously glancing around the dark and dying lander's interior.

"Wolfe?" he asked. I nodded as I ripped the velcro nametape from my flightsuit.

"And don't call me jarhead." He didn't need to know that I was privately contracted for this program and he certainly didn't need to know the details. "According to diagnostics the rover hasn't been compromised. If we can get the outer doors open we should be able to reach the Olympus station in a few days and call for pickup."

"We should stay at the crash site, someone will be looking for us."

"Suit yourself, but I've still got a job to do."

"What job? Look around, the mission is over."

An hour later the doors had been wedged open and I drove the rover into the Martian desert. Johnson decided to come along after all. It may have had something to do with my proposal for divvying up the provisions. At least he can keep working on trying to raise one of the other landers on the radio, though so far with no luck. Damn peculiar.

Rest assured it is on the list of things to do and I agree with every one of your points of critique.

Time and mood permitting, I'll develop it further.

So that's where you've been. Cavorting around Las Vegas. . .   

Hold off the coffee for a moment. . .

A virtual toast, to endless human expansion into the cosmos with a Western bent.

Eventually.

Modern medicine is far more primitive than we like to think. Often treating symptoms rather than causes, brute-force fix for everything. Pills for high blood pressure that give you gout, pills for that that give you splitting headaches, pills for that. . . At the end of the day you're sometimes sicker than you started and having visions on top of it. 

Or chemotherapy, which I've even heard some doctors agree is the modern equivalent of bloodletting.

We've got a loooooong way to go before we crawl out of the medical dark ages. Making increasing progress, but still mired.

For what it's worth, I think I understand their feelings on the matter. They were right there in the middle of a war against a relentless enemy that attacked their country and no doubt killed several friends and comrades of theirs during the ensuing fighting. They also knew that the only alternative would be to invade the islands, leading to even more friends and comrades dying as well as more Japanese women and children, though it's doubtful that was a first-tier concern at the time. Likely they viewed the Japanese people (not entirely without reason) as a fairly monolithic block in support of the war and its goals. If one holds that perception, there are no "innocents" on the other side.

Imperial Japan was kind of a strange case, a layer of recently acquired (not developed, which has profound social implications) modern industrial technology glazed over a very old and extremely militaristic culture. Everyone was a part of that machine, the idea of "innocent Japanese civilians" could understandably seem a bit foreign to those fighting the war.

I can't say for certain, but I believe that if I were in that position I too would carry out the mission with no reservations about what must be done and probably a certain amount of pride in having played a role in ending the killing and misery swiftly. Sure, I'd have moments of doubt and guilt that would never go away, but like the crew of the Enola Gay I'd never talk about them.

Which might be the entire point. We used to do what must be done and move on instead of worrying about "feelings", ours, theirs, uninvolved third parties.

But then I'm on record as questioning whether two nukes on Japan were enough to really end the whole war, so I'm a little out of the mainstream on this one.