I haven't been posting as much because I, as I said before, have been working. It also gets annoying when rsr shits on every thread in existence and very few people here seem to be able to have an argument without referring to the evil liberals who seem to embody every evil in existence merely because of their ideological view. But, since you seem to be so insistent, here you go.
Of course I'm insistent. Mainly because it is extremely rare on this board to have discussion with anyone, left or right, that doesn't degenerate into name calling.
The US spends vastly more than any other country does.
Is spending on technology a bad thing?
That is Congressional approval ratings. Make it a completely independent body and it will do much better.
Possibly, but again given our government who do you think would be put on such a committee. The best and brightest physicians, economists, etc. or congressinoal cronies? Again, I beleive one of the biggiest impedements to success of this program is not that socialized medicine in of itself couldn't work ('work' in my case being provide all with healthcare without a sacrafice to quality) it's the current way in which our government operates. i think it would be far more prudent to fix that first.
There are truly brilliant minds out there in all fields, one example is Thomas Friedman. He's sort of a global economist/foreign affairs guy. He does op-ed pieces from time to time and has written a couple of books and he is about as objective as they come, yet we don't see smart guys like that with cabinet positions.
I am not an economist. There are many who say that debt is good, and many who say it is bad. I reserve judgement considering I haven't studied the economy nor do I have an education in economics like these folks do.
Some is, yes. I would think though are government is past the 'some' that could be considered good.
Actually its a perfectly logical justification of slavery. If you believe that principle you ought to believe slavery is acceptable.
I guess you would first have to show that we are worse off because we can't have slaves. that would be the technical argument, but I don't really think it's a question of worse off. It may be less convenient, awful as that sounds, but I don't see that our lives are measurably worse because we don't have slavery anymore.
Secondly, this isn't really comparable to what I said because it is part of a whole other debate about whether a human can be owned. that doesn't really apply to this. We aren't talking about dominion over another. We're talking about is it right to make the majority worse off for the sake of the minority.
If you don't recall I quoted Spock before. And while fictitious the context was that he had to make a choice as to whether one would die so the rest could live.
Err if the quality for the 85% doesn't improve, it doesn't matter. What matters is if it goes down, and how much it goes down.
that's half right. it also depends on whether the improvement of the few is enough to justify the decline for the many.
You never know exactly how a reform will work or not. Thats life.
Not exactley no, but again why just run head long not knowing. We have plenty of information available to us right now that can legitimately be used to give us an idea of whether this will work or not.
This is true if and only if each number has the same probability of happening, which I don't think is the case.
Correct, I gave an example of that as well in the paragraph following the one you quoted. that is a more realistic representation of what would happen in real life.
I think its been pretty well established by now that zero is a number.
It is a number that represents null or nothing. It is not measurable.
Again the point was your definition of quality. Quality is a judgement of whether something like a product or service is good or bad. I took your surgeon example and asked a question; Again essentially what you are stating is that even if something is very good, like the surgeon you used, he's the best there is because there are operations that only he can do, your argument would have to be that because he is so expensive that some can't afford him he is therefore a bad surgeon under your definition of quality. Doesn't that sound a little off?
How much the health improves/decreases for various groups is not a random probability, it is something that happens as a result of actions.
right and one of the actions that has been shown to happen is that in a socialized system there is less money to spend on technology and resources.
The lack of information about how much things will increase/decrease does not justify you acting as if its random. Its not. It has to do with a variety of factors.
I haven't stated it would be random. Far from random. I believe there are several factors that eliminate such randomness in a way that would make it extremely difficult for your goal to come true.