Democrats Fast-Track Bill To Override Hobby Lobby Decision

[Quantum Windbag]

You're free to drink sewer water if you want.

And as much of Obama's shit as you eat, you'd probably like sewer water.

You missed my point.

The government- in this case the DuPage County Water reclamation district - spends a lot of money making sure that the water I get to drink is safe.

Not a "private company" making a profit, but a government agency run by people who are damned good at their jobs.

And you know what, this isn't "Communism" and it doesn't make me less free because they do it.

I can't think of a single valid reason why we shouldn't run health care the same way.

And your sputtering about "Freedom" and "Communism" probably won't make much of an impression in that regard.

You mean the way where you get a bill monthly based on your water usage?

(I'm assuming that's the way it works where you live because that is the way it works everywhere I am aware of.)

In San Francisco they raise your rates for not using water, after the raise them for using it.

 

[JoeB131]

[

Like a DNC talking point memo. Yeah, we've heard all of these claims before. In fact, we heard them back in 1999. We heard the same thing in 2010.

Usually I tend to hear these lame excuses from the left, being loudly proclaimed all over the place, just before a landslide loss. It's no prediction, but thus far the fortune telling ability of the left has a lousy track record.

Except you lost the popular vote and the Senate in 2000. And if Bush's buddies on the court hadn't ignored common sense, you'd have lost the Presidency, too.

Here's the problem... you guys are barely ahead in states you should be winning easily, where Romney won by 20+ points.

Ten years, the GOP is a regional party if it doesn't get its head out of its ass.

 

[JoeB131]

[

You mean the way where you get a bill monthly based on your water usage?

(I'm assuming that's the way it works where you live because that is the way it works everywhere I am aware of.)

Right now I pay into a condo association fee and that pays for the water. (as well as sewer, etc.) So there's a private agency handing the messy parts.

But here's the thing, that water wouldn't be getting to my house just based on my usage fee. Someone had to build and maintain all the pipes and infrastructure to get it here to start with.

 

[Rikurzhen]

Okay, let's bottom line it. Is health care a public service or a consumer good?

There's no debate, health care is a private good. National defense, border control, air traffic control, national parks, public highways, etc are public goods. Your consumption of national defense, that is, living in a society protected by an Army does no exclude me from enjoying the same benefit, same with you living in a city with a Fire Department or Police Department - you and I can both enjoy the benefits which derive from firemen conducting building inspections, from maintaining fire codes, from putting out fires and from police driving around and showing their presence, from enforcing traffic laws and thus scaring people into obeying speed limits, etc - the benefits we derive arise independent of our needing to have personal interactions with the fireman or the policeman.

When you get liposuction on your neck no one else but you benefits, just like when you eat an ice cream cone on a hot summer day only you get to enjoy the benefit of that particular ice cream cone.

Most of the rest of the world already had this conversation and decided it was a public service. As a result, they spend less and have better results.

This is simply an argument which mothers across time have battled when their children were caught succumbing to peer pressure - "If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do so too?"

Look, we all understand that getting free stuff paid for by someone else is a very popular position, so it should be no surprise that lots of people favor such a position. I'd have no problem with sticking you with my annual gasoline costs to run my car, so why don't we socialize gas consumption - we all pay some annual ObamaGas fee and get to fill our cars with all the gas we want? How is that any different than socialized medicine?

As for spending less, that has nothing to do with socializing the costs (which actually put upward pressure on health expenditures because price discipline has been divorced from the consumer) and more to do with rationing. As for better results, that's hogwash, for what we see in the international comparisons is sloppy research design in that they don't control for racial variation. If the question is "What health outcome effects arise from socializing medical care" then researchers comparing Japanese healthcare to American healthcare are not telling us anything we want to know when they're comparing the health outcomes of Japanese citizens (combining both Japanese genetic and cultural patterns) against American citizens or multiple races.

Health care is already a collective. It's just a collective run by a private agency (insurance bought through employers) rather than a government.

Not really. There are plenty of people who CHOOSE to spend their money on other goods than health insurance. Some go completely without, others choose to self-finance regular physician visits and only insure against catastrophic events.

Most importantly, when one is unhappy with one health insurer then one can take up coverage from another and you can't do this when Uncle Sam is the only game in town.

Final point. The thing is, the current awful system you are already paying for. Because we spend 17% of our GDP on health care, spread out through the rest of the economy, it makes our goods and services less competitive than countries like Germany or Japan that have single payer and are only spending 8% of GDP and getting far better results.

We pay so much for healthcare because healthcare is what economists call a superior good, that is, the richer we become the more of it we consume, kind of like nice housing and luxury cars. Look at how much of your monthly budget is taken up by home-cooked food and compare to the percent of the monthly budget home-cooked food represents for a family in Ethiopia. Now compare food budget spent on eating out (a superior good) and you'll see that Americans eat-out at restaurant far more than do Ethiopians.

Germany is filled mostly with Germans, Japan with Japanese - they don't have vast black and Hispanic underclasses which have poorer health outcomes associated with race, not income.

 

[JoeB131]

Okay, let's bottom line it. Is health care a public service or a consumer good?

There's no debate, health care is a private good. National defense, border control, air traffic control, national parks, public highways, etc are public goods. Your consumption of national defense, that is, living in a society protected by an Army does no exclude me from enjoying the same benefit, same with you living in a city with a Fire Department or Police Department - you and I can both enjoy the benefits which derive from firemen conducting building inspections, from maintaining fire codes, from putting out fires and from police driving around and showing their presence, from enforcing traffic laws and thus scaring people into obeying speed limits, etc - the benefits we derive arise independent of our needing to have personal interactions with the fireman or the policeman.

But here's the thing. Most fire departments also have EMTs. So that would go back to the notion of health care being a public good.

Another point. a lot of people don't use the national parks or the museums. It's a public good we are subsidizing only a fraction of the population utilizes. So shouldn't that be a consumer good? Sadly, some on the right say yes.

When you get liposuction on your neck no one else but you benefits, just like when you eat an ice cream cone on a hot summer day only you get to enjoy the benefit of that particular ice cream cone.

Liposuction would probably be considered an elective. So let's talk about the necessary. I'm a minimum wage Fast Food worker and I have some kind of serious virus. My boss is an asshole and won't send me home. (I actually had this happen to me back in the 1970's) Because i am not getting that virus treated, I am probably spreading it to thousands of people I interact with directly or through their food.

Most of the rest of the world already had this conversation and decided it was a public service. As a result, they spend less and have better results.

This is simply an argument which mothers across time have battled when their children were caught succumbing to peer pressure - "If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do so too?"

No but if my friends all studied three hours a night and got good grades while i played video games and got "D"'s, you bet sure as hell mom would point to that as an example and make me do my homework for three hours.

Look, we all understand that getting free stuff paid for by someone else is a very popular position, so it should be no surprise that lots of people favor such a position. I'd have no problem with sticking you with my annual gasoline costs to run my car, so why don't we socialize gas consumption - we all pay some annual ObamaGas fee and get to fill our cars with all the gas we want? How is that any different than socialized medicine?

I'd argue we are already subsidizing gasoline by sending over young men to keep the Straights of Hormuz open. Not to mention all the other breaks and deals the Oil Companies get from Government, Crony Capitalism/corporate welfare at its very finest.

As for spending less, that has nothing to do with socializing the costs (which actually put upward pressure on health expenditures because price discipline has been divorced from the consumer) and more to do with rationing. As for better results, that's hogwash, for what we see in the international comparisons is sloppy research design in that they don't control for racial variation. If the question is "What health outcome effects arise from socializing medical care" then researchers comparing Japanese healthcare to American healthcare are not telling us anything we want to know when they're comparing the health outcomes of Japanese citizens (combining both Japanese genetic and cultural patterns) against American citizens or multiple races.

Dude, you're getting seriously close to StormFront material here. Your argument would make sense if different races actually worked diffrently on a biological level (they don't) and if we were only comparing to Japan. The thing is, we come in behind EVERY nation that has single payer.

Health care is already a collective. It's just a collective run by a private agency (insurance bought through employers) rather than a government.

Not really. There are plenty of people who CHOOSE to spend their money on other goods than health insurance. Some go completely without, others choose to self-finance regular physician visits and only insure against catastrophic events.

Yes, good thing ObamaCare got rid of that kind of craziness and made everyone play.

Most importantly, when one is unhappy with one health insurer then one can take up coverage from another and you can't do this when Uncle Sam is the only game in town.

Yeah, right. 100 million of us get it through our employers. It's what the employer wants, and he usually wants to pay as little to cover the wage slaves as possible. So that's not an argument. You haven't lived until you try to get an insurance company to pay for really expensive treatments.

Final point. The thing is, the current awful system you are already paying for. Because we spend 17% of our GDP on health care, spread out through the rest of the economy, it makes our goods and services less competitive than countries like Germany or Japan that have single payer and are only spending 8% of GDP and getting far better results.

We pay so much for healthcare because healthcare is what economists call a superior good, that is, the richer we become the more of it we consume, kind of like nice housing and luxury cars. Look at how much of your monthly budget is taken up by home-cooked food and compare to the percent of the monthly budget home-cooked food represents for a family in Ethiopia. Now compare food budget spent on eating out (a superior good) and you'll see that Americans eat-out at restaurant far more than do Ethiopians.

Guy, I wasn't making a comparison to Ethiopia. I was comparing to Germany and Japan and Canada and England, countries as technologically advanced and economically affulent as we are.

Germany is filled mostly with Germans, Japan with Japanese - they don't have vast black and Hispanic underclasses which have poorer health outcomes associated with race, not income.

And you went full Stormfront Retard on me. Hey, guy, the only reason why minorities have poorer health is because we live in a racist country that keeps them as an underclass.

Which is going to kind of suck for white people when they are in the majority at some point.

 

[Rikurzhen]

I'd argue we are already subsidizing gasoline by sending over young men to keep the Straights of Hormuz open. Not to mention all the other breaks and deals the Oil Companies get from Government, Crony Capitalism/corporate welfare at its very finest.

Yes, there is a military subsidy embedded within oil prices but that's beside the point. The scenario focuses on a complete socialization of the gasoline market. We all pay one set fee per year and we get to use all the gasoline we want, just like with socialized medical care. What could go wrong? Think of all of the cost reduction benefits which would arise from eliminating all of the attendents and no more payment processing and fire all of the marketing and accounting people and so on.

Dude, you're getting seriously close to StormFront material here. Your argument would make sense if different races actually worked diffrently on a biological level (they don't) and if we were only comparing to Japan. The thing is, we come in behind EVERY nation that has single payer.

Dude, if you're going to make pronouncements meant to clarify and settle issues, then get a clue and actually know something about the topic. This is the internet after all and you never know who is on the other end of the conversation and what they know, so ignorant bluffing is not a good tactic to deploy.

Just one example from many - breast cancers. Two types - estrogen receptor positive versus negative.

If a tumor is estrogen-receptor positive (ER-positive), it is more likely to grow in a high-estrogen environment. ER-negative tumors are usually not affected by the levels of estrogen and progesterone in your body. This is one time when hearing the word "positive" may really mean something good.

As ER-positive cancers are more likely to respond to anti-estrogen therapies. If you have an ER-positive cancer, you may respond well to tamoxifen (Nolvadex), a drug that works by blocking the estrogen receptors on the breast tissue cells and slowing their estrogen-fuelled growth.​

Racial variation seen in breast cancers:

A study found that African American women are 3 times more likely than white or Hispanic women to be diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer.

Triple-negative breast cancer is:

estrogen-receptor-negative
progesterone-receptor-negative
HER2-negative​

Triple-negative breast cancers are usually more aggressive, harder to treat, and more likely to come back (recur) than cancers that are hormone-receptor-positive or HER2-positive. Triple-negative breast cancers don't usually respond to hormonal therapy medicines or the targeted therapies Herceptin (chemical name: trastuzumab) and Tykerb (chemical name: lapatinib).

Researchers looked at the medical records of 415 women of various races who had been diagnosed with breast cancer and noted certain characteristics of each cancer:

11% to 13% of the breast cancers diagnosed in non-African American women were triple-negative; most of these women were white or Hispanic
30% of the breast cancers diagnosed in African American women were triple-negative​

If you desire a more authoritative source, look here:

ERN was correlated with premenopausal disease, black race, and poor prognostic factor groups, whereas ERP was associated with postmenopausal disease, white race, and favorable tumor characteristics.​

So back to my point - the proper way to account for racial confounding in these international studies designed to look at outcomes which arise from how medical systems are structured is to compare black-Japanese citizens to black-American citizens, etc.

 

[JoeB131]

Psuedo-Science from Stormfront. Nice.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

[

You mean the way where you get a bill monthly based on your water usage?

(I'm assuming that's the way it works where you live because that is the way it works everywhere I am aware of.)

Right now I pay into a condo association fee and that pays for the water. (as well as sewer, etc.) So there's a private agency handing the messy parts.

But here's the thing, that water wouldn't be getting to my house just based on my usage fee. Someone had to build and maintain all the pipes and infrastructure to get it here to start with.

Yeah, the developer who built the condo paid for, and installed, the infrastructure, and then the government stole it.