Except Obamacare is a free market. You can still have a high-deductible plan (I currently do) and you can go to an online marketplace and pick a plan you like.
There is a serious lack of reality in the anti-Obamacare crowd. After reading these articles, I frequently feel like I’ve been told the Earth is flat and we need to put up fences at the edge so people don’t fall off.
What a load of crap. There is nothing free market about Obamacare. A free market doesn’t require participation at government gunpoint. Obamacare does require participation or you are fined, sorry I mean “tax penaltied”, which is enforced by government guns.
What do you see a free market in such a situation?
Yes, Obamacare includes an individual mandate — but so does the “free market system” envisioned in the linked article. The point is that the advantages the writer touts for his system are already present in Obamacare.
You’re free to buy from a large list of products at a variety of price points.
Ok, Chris, so you don’t have a clue what a free market is. It’s a market with somewhere near the minimal amount of constraints and interference required to be a working market, sometimes with a competition threshold. Here’s how your “free” market is not free: 1) people are forced to purchase the products which the market happens to offer, 2) the products offered are heavily regulated, both the content of the products and who can offer them (for a glaring example, pre-existing conditions), and 3) there are subsidies to various parties in addition to the coercion for buying such products.
Chris,
Free markets are where willing sellers and willing buyers meet without coercion. Without coercion, willing sellers and willing buyers agree on the quality of the good and the price or they agree to walk away from one another.
The ACA’s health Insurance exchanges have none of those features. Health insurance exchanges are a state created medium where coerced buyers are forced to buy a product assembled via government edict from a cartel of sellers established by government edict. You could be partially correct if you assert that the state mandated exchange have elements of fascism, state capitalistism, or crony capitalism. But call it market based and you are almost wholly incorrect.
By coercion, I refer to the threat of violence, loss of freedom(incarceration), or involuntary loss of property(extortion) under pain of violence or the loss of freedom. Coercion is unique to state mandated activivities and organized crime. Free markets are about willing buyers and willing sellers. Forcing people into a room and telling them they have to deal or face the coercion I describe until they deal is not a market and not even a market principle.
I grow weary of this “threat of violence.” We enforce all laws, including the ones against murder and rape, by “threat of violence.” It adds nothing to the discussion.
The government does not select the vendors in the exchanges. Any insurance company that wants to join can, and many new vendors have joined.
Here’s the thing – you will need at some point health care. That is an absolute certainty. You also have no idea when you’ll need it or how much it will cost. We as a nation have three choices:
1) Make you take responsibility for your care
2) The old system, which involves some people freeloading via emergency room care
3) Letting people who can’t pay die in the street
Those are the options. This system picked door #1.
Well, then the article isn’t discussing a free market either.
You forgot option 4: you and all of your friends who just care so much about the poor that you will reach into my pocket can instead donate your own earnings to some charity who will deal with the people caught up in option 3.
No, I didn’t forget. The only way charity works is if every penny of money given to charity by anybody for any cause goes to health care. Otherwise, there simply isn’t enough charity money to go around, and we end up with people dying in the streets.
Forgot to add that I understand perfectly well that laws are enforced (except of course when Obama sees fit to unilaterally exempt some from the law and not others, but you know, details). The purpose of law however in America is supposed to be about stopping people from hurting each other and violating each other’s rights, not mandating that people help each other, which is of course defined by demagogue politicians and is a Marxist idea besides (the state deciding who will produce for the state based on their ability and giving to the state to give to those the state determines who have need). Mandating that people help each other is one sure way to destroy freedom in a country because then it is left up to men with guns to decide whether or not you are “helping” enough.
So, stopping murders is a completely different topic to mandated “marketplace” participation.
Obamacare is about stopping people from hurting each other. It prevents you from hurting my pocketbook by requiring you to take personal responsibility for your health.
The subsidy part also prevents you from hurting me. Since I’m going to be paying anyway (via emergency room) it’s in my interest for you to have a doctor and otherwise manage your inevitable illnesses at the lowest cost possible. The least-intrusive way to make that happen is for you to health insurance.
The subsidy part also prevents you from hurting me. Since I’m going to be paying anyway (via emergency room) it’s in my interest for you to have a doctor and otherwise manage your inevitable illnesses at the lowest cost possible. The least-intrusive way to make that happen is for you to health insurance.
No, the least intrusive way is to not have mandated free health care in the first place. You’ve slide down a slope from a high moral point, “let’s not let people die in the streets of treatable injuries and illnesses” to the morass, “let’s destroy a free society of hundreds of millions of people because my belief system is too stupid to figure out a way to achieve my moral goals without ridiculously excessive force.”
Obamacare is about stopping people from hurting each other. It prevents you from hurting my pocketbook by requiring you to take personal responsibility for your health.
You are the one who supports your property being forcibly taken from yourself to fund others. You can’t at that point look at me and say I am not taking responsibility when it is you who have chosen to support your property being taken for those purposes.
If you want to say I should be personally responsible, then you remove public funding for health care and create charities to deal with those who can’t afford it.
As to your other post where you say charities can’t do it… What you are saying is that you and your friends aren’t generous enough, so you support the government being generous for you with your stuff and also coming after me to make sure I am generous enough (of course “generous” as defined by demagogue politicians who have the power of the state). That is not any definition of generosity that makes any sense. Generosity is a voluntary condition, not an enforced condition. What you are really saying is that you recognize your own non-generosity and are willing to curtail the liberty of others so that the government will at gunpoint make you be generous enough to satisfy your own conscience, because you know you wouldn’t do it otherwise.
You know that people using the emergency room as primary care and then not paying is an incredibly small cost in comparrisson to the total money spent on healthcare every year. And if that is the problem Obamacare is intended to fix, there are a million other methods to solve the problem that don’t require a government take over of the entire industry.
Also, there are more options than the 3 crappy ones you listed.
Only Chris (“No syllogisms for me, please–I’m a Christian liberal!”) Gerrib would think of Obamacare as part of the free market.
I think the concept of liberty should be applied to health care this way. If you think your neighbor needs health care, and he can’t afford it, you pay for it. Put your stupid irrational altruism where your wallet is. This is sort of analogous to Joseph Sobran’s response to “liberal” (i.e., statist) concerns about homelessness and hunger: Sobran suggested that instead of its coercive redistributionism, the State should simply issue vouchers or chits to all the homeless and hungry, and they would read something like, “Good for one meal when presented to any liberal.” We could have, say, “Good for one doctor’s visit, payable by Chris Gerrib,” or whoever.
Well, not just Gerrib. After all, admirals don’t make THAT much money. But imagine if all the affluent “liberals,” from middle-class to super-rich, just tithed their income to a fund that would buy health insurance, medicine, etc, for the needy. The Hollywood Left , thge Park Avenue Pinks, the Kennedys, Darth Soros, et al, would easily be able to handle that. AND THEN JUST KEEP THEIR @#$*iING HANDS OUT OF EVERONE ELSE’S POCKETS. But (as John Belushi used to say) noooooo….
,et
Here’s a first person account of why “catastrophic” health insurance is inadequate: 25 year old develops Type 1 diabetes. It’s also why we needed to get away from the “pre-existing conditions” exclusions on health insurance.
Why aren’t you helping this poor guy out, Chris?
I am – I voted for Obama and support Obamacare. That person will now be able to help there self.
Funny, but I think you know what the question was really asking.
If you care so much, why aren’t you of your own free will getting yourself and your friends together and donating to a charity to help this guy out?
I of my own free will raised $30,000 for charity last year and personally donated several thousand dollars.
All of that money would just cover the deductible for this one person.
I personally just spent less than a day in the hospital and my insurance was handed a bill for $16,000.
Personal charity is NOT ENOUGH. If we rely on personal charity, we will end up with people dying in the streets.
Therefore, we need to impose a system such that everybody who can pay for health insurance does so (the individual mandate) and those that can’t pay get help in the form of subsidies.
And so then I applaud you for your personal charity.
But, you say charity isn’t enough. Set aside the philosophical first-principles problems I have with government mandated insurance. How much, exactly, is “enough”? What is the final price tag at which afterwards the government takes too much?
I halso ear this “people will die in the streets” line a lot. Were people dying in the streets prior to government-mandated insurance?
Or, is it like now with the government shut down, where we are finding out how we can actually get along just fine without some government thug telling you at every junction how to make every decision in your life? Oh, yes, and also then expecting some portion of your salary for the privilege of that thug telling you what to do. For the record, yes, police and military and courts are necessary for law breakers. But, we have moved so far beyond that point.
I admire those who tried to set Gerrib straight. But seriously, if Gerrib thinks Obamacare is a free market; do you really think he has the ability for you to reason with him? Gerrib is the same guy that looked at a fuzzy picture and came to the conclusion that George Zimmerman, the police at the scene, and the paramedic that treated him all lied about Zimmerman’s injury. Now Gerrib is proclaiming a government run market with thousands of pages of regulation is free. That’s profound stupidity, and you can’t fix stupid.
“I admire those who tried to set Gerrib straight. But seriously, if Gerrib thinks Obamacare is a free market; do you really think he has the ability for you to reason with him? Gerrib is the same guy that looked at a fuzzy picture and came to the conclusion that George Zimmerman, the police at the scene, and the paramedic that treated him all lied about Zimmerman’s injury. Now Gerrib is proclaiming a government run market with thousands of pages of regulation is free. That’s profound stupidity, and you can’t fix stupid.”
Indeed, Leland. As Voltaire said, you can’t reason someone out of a belief they haven’t been reasoned into. He pretty much ignores logical questions he can’t answer (which would be most of them). Note that he doesn’t try to address why Soros and all other wealthy “liberals” won’t pool their resources and voluntarily help the people they claim to be so concerned about. Darth Soros alone could probably buy health insurance for everyone in the US who couldn’t afford it. But then statist “liberalism” isn’t about amelioration; it’s about power. Don’t even bother asking the Admiral why he has the right to impose his altruism on others: you’ll just get the parable of the Good Shepherd or some other fairy tale in response.
Except Obamacare is a free market. You can still have a high-deductible plan (I currently do) and you can go to an online marketplace and pick a plan you like.
There is a serious lack of reality in the anti-Obamacare crowd. After reading these articles, I frequently feel like I’ve been told the Earth is flat and we need to put up fences at the edge so people don’t fall off.
What a load of crap. There is nothing free market about Obamacare. A free market doesn’t require participation at government gunpoint. Obamacare does require participation or you are fined, sorry I mean “tax penaltied”, which is enforced by government guns.
What do you see a free market in such a situation?
Yes, Obamacare includes an individual mandate — but so does the “free market system” envisioned in the linked article. The point is that the advantages the writer touts for his system are already present in Obamacare.
You’re free to buy from a large list of products at a variety of price points.
Ok, Chris, so you don’t have a clue what a free market is. It’s a market with somewhere near the minimal amount of constraints and interference required to be a working market, sometimes with a competition threshold. Here’s how your “free” market is not free: 1) people are forced to purchase the products which the market happens to offer, 2) the products offered are heavily regulated, both the content of the products and who can offer them (for a glaring example, pre-existing conditions), and 3) there are subsidies to various parties in addition to the coercion for buying such products.
Chris,
Free markets are where willing sellers and willing buyers meet without coercion. Without coercion, willing sellers and willing buyers agree on the quality of the good and the price or they agree to walk away from one another.
The ACA’s health Insurance exchanges have none of those features. Health insurance exchanges are a state created medium where coerced buyers are forced to buy a product assembled via government edict from a cartel of sellers established by government edict. You could be partially correct if you assert that the state mandated exchange have elements of fascism, state capitalistism, or crony capitalism. But call it market based and you are almost wholly incorrect.
By coercion, I refer to the threat of violence, loss of freedom(incarceration), or involuntary loss of property(extortion) under pain of violence or the loss of freedom. Coercion is unique to state mandated activivities and organized crime. Free markets are about willing buyers and willing sellers. Forcing people into a room and telling them they have to deal or face the coercion I describe until they deal is not a market and not even a market principle.
I grow weary of this “threat of violence.” We enforce all laws, including the ones against murder and rape, by “threat of violence.” It adds nothing to the discussion.
The government does not select the vendors in the exchanges. Any insurance company that wants to join can, and many new vendors have joined.
Here’s the thing – you will need at some point health care. That is an absolute certainty. You also have no idea when you’ll need it or how much it will cost. We as a nation have three choices:
1) Make you take responsibility for your care
2) The old system, which involves some people freeloading via emergency room care
3) Letting people who can’t pay die in the street
Those are the options. This system picked door #1.
Well, then the article isn’t discussing a free market either.
You forgot option 4: you and all of your friends who just care so much about the poor that you will reach into my pocket can instead donate your own earnings to some charity who will deal with the people caught up in option 3.
No, I didn’t forget. The only way charity works is if every penny of money given to charity by anybody for any cause goes to health care. Otherwise, there simply isn’t enough charity money to go around, and we end up with people dying in the streets.
Forgot to add that I understand perfectly well that laws are enforced (except of course when Obama sees fit to unilaterally exempt some from the law and not others, but you know, details). The purpose of law however in America is supposed to be about stopping people from hurting each other and violating each other’s rights, not mandating that people help each other, which is of course defined by demagogue politicians and is a Marxist idea besides (the state deciding who will produce for the state based on their ability and giving to the state to give to those the state determines who have need). Mandating that people help each other is one sure way to destroy freedom in a country because then it is left up to men with guns to decide whether or not you are “helping” enough.
So, stopping murders is a completely different topic to mandated “marketplace” participation.
Obamacare is about stopping people from hurting each other. It prevents you from hurting my pocketbook by requiring you to take personal responsibility for your health.
The subsidy part also prevents you from hurting me. Since I’m going to be paying anyway (via emergency room) it’s in my interest for you to have a doctor and otherwise manage your inevitable illnesses at the lowest cost possible. The least-intrusive way to make that happen is for you to health insurance.
The subsidy part also prevents you from hurting me. Since I’m going to be paying anyway (via emergency room) it’s in my interest for you to have a doctor and otherwise manage your inevitable illnesses at the lowest cost possible. The least-intrusive way to make that happen is for you to health insurance.
No, the least intrusive way is to not have mandated free health care in the first place. You’ve slide down a slope from a high moral point, “let’s not let people die in the streets of treatable injuries and illnesses” to the morass, “let’s destroy a free society of hundreds of millions of people because my belief system is too stupid to figure out a way to achieve my moral goals without ridiculously excessive force.”
Obamacare is about stopping people from hurting each other. It prevents you from hurting my pocketbook by requiring you to take personal responsibility for your health.
You are the one who supports your property being forcibly taken from yourself to fund others. You can’t at that point look at me and say I am not taking responsibility when it is you who have chosen to support your property being taken for those purposes.
If you want to say I should be personally responsible, then you remove public funding for health care and create charities to deal with those who can’t afford it.
As to your other post where you say charities can’t do it… What you are saying is that you and your friends aren’t generous enough, so you support the government being generous for you with your stuff and also coming after me to make sure I am generous enough (of course “generous” as defined by demagogue politicians who have the power of the state). That is not any definition of generosity that makes any sense. Generosity is a voluntary condition, not an enforced condition. What you are really saying is that you recognize your own non-generosity and are willing to curtail the liberty of others so that the government will at gunpoint make you be generous enough to satisfy your own conscience, because you know you wouldn’t do it otherwise.
You know that people using the emergency room as primary care and then not paying is an incredibly small cost in comparrisson to the total money spent on healthcare every year. And if that is the problem Obamacare is intended to fix, there are a million other methods to solve the problem that don’t require a government take over of the entire industry.
Also, there are more options than the 3 crappy ones you listed.
Only Chris (“No syllogisms for me, please–I’m a Christian liberal!”) Gerrib would think of Obamacare as part of the free market.
I think the concept of liberty should be applied to health care this way. If you think your neighbor needs health care, and he can’t afford it, you pay for it. Put your stupid irrational altruism where your wallet is. This is sort of analogous to Joseph Sobran’s response to “liberal” (i.e., statist) concerns about homelessness and hunger: Sobran suggested that instead of its coercive redistributionism, the State should simply issue vouchers or chits to all the homeless and hungry, and they would read something like, “Good for one meal when presented to any liberal.” We could have, say, “Good for one doctor’s visit, payable by Chris Gerrib,” or whoever.
Well, not just Gerrib. After all, admirals don’t make THAT much money. But imagine if all the affluent “liberals,” from middle-class to super-rich, just tithed their income to a fund that would buy health insurance, medicine, etc, for the needy. The Hollywood Left , thge Park Avenue Pinks, the Kennedys, Darth Soros, et al, would easily be able to handle that. AND THEN JUST KEEP THEIR @#$*iING HANDS OUT OF EVERONE ELSE’S POCKETS. But (as John Belushi used to say) noooooo….
,et
Here’s a first person account of why “catastrophic” health insurance is inadequate: 25 year old develops Type 1 diabetes. It’s also why we needed to get away from the “pre-existing conditions” exclusions on health insurance.
Why aren’t you helping this poor guy out, Chris?
I am – I voted for Obama and support Obamacare. That person will now be able to help there self.
Funny, but I think you know what the question was really asking.
If you care so much, why aren’t you of your own free will getting yourself and your friends together and donating to a charity to help this guy out?
I of my own free will raised $30,000 for charity last year and personally donated several thousand dollars.
All of that money would just cover the deductible for this one person.
I personally just spent less than a day in the hospital and my insurance was handed a bill for $16,000.
Personal charity is NOT ENOUGH. If we rely on personal charity, we will end up with people dying in the streets.
Therefore, we need to impose a system such that everybody who can pay for health insurance does so (the individual mandate) and those that can’t pay get help in the form of subsidies.
And so then I applaud you for your personal charity.
But, you say charity isn’t enough. Set aside the philosophical first-principles problems I have with government mandated insurance. How much, exactly, is “enough”? What is the final price tag at which afterwards the government takes too much?
I halso ear this “people will die in the streets” line a lot. Were people dying in the streets prior to government-mandated insurance?
Or, is it like now with the government shut down, where we are finding out how we can actually get along just fine without some government thug telling you at every junction how to make every decision in your life? Oh, yes, and also then expecting some portion of your salary for the privilege of that thug telling you what to do. For the record, yes, police and military and courts are necessary for law breakers. But, we have moved so far beyond that point.
I admire those who tried to set Gerrib straight. But seriously, if Gerrib thinks Obamacare is a free market; do you really think he has the ability for you to reason with him? Gerrib is the same guy that looked at a fuzzy picture and came to the conclusion that George Zimmerman, the police at the scene, and the paramedic that treated him all lied about Zimmerman’s injury. Now Gerrib is proclaiming a government run market with thousands of pages of regulation is free. That’s profound stupidity, and you can’t fix stupid.
“I admire those who tried to set Gerrib straight. But seriously, if Gerrib thinks Obamacare is a free market; do you really think he has the ability for you to reason with him? Gerrib is the same guy that looked at a fuzzy picture and came to the conclusion that George Zimmerman, the police at the scene, and the paramedic that treated him all lied about Zimmerman’s injury. Now Gerrib is proclaiming a government run market with thousands of pages of regulation is free. That’s profound stupidity, and you can’t fix stupid.”
Indeed, Leland. As Voltaire said, you can’t reason someone out of a belief they haven’t been reasoned into. He pretty much ignores logical questions he can’t answer (which would be most of them). Note that he doesn’t try to address why Soros and all other wealthy “liberals” won’t pool their resources and voluntarily help the people they claim to be so concerned about. Darth Soros alone could probably buy health insurance for everyone in the US who couldn’t afford it. But then statist “liberalism” isn’t about amelioration; it’s about power. Don’t even bother asking the Admiral why he has the right to impose his altruism on others: you’ll just get the parable of the Good Shepherd or some other fairy tale in response.