@enoch, thanks for your comments. I thought it better to respond directly to your profile than on the video, about which we're no longer discussing directly. Sorry for the length of this reply, but for such a complex topic as this one, a thorough and plainly-stated response is needed.

You wrote: "the REAL question is "what is the purpose of a health care system"? NOT "which market system should we implement for health care"?"

The free market works best for any and all goods and services, regardless of their aim or purpose. Healthcare is no different from any other good or service in this respect.

(And besides, tell me why there's no money in preventative care? Do nutritionists, physical trainers/therapists, psychologists, herbalists, homeopaths, and any other manner of non-allopathic doctors not get paid and make profit in the marketplace? Would not a longer life not lead to a longer-term 'consumer' anyway? And would preventative medicine obliterate the need for all manner of medical treatment, or would there not still remain a need to diagnose, treat, and cure diseases, even in the presence of a robust preventative medical market?)

I realize that my argument is not the "popular" one (and there are certainly many reasons for this, up to and including a lot of disinformation about what constitutes a "free market" health care system). But the way to approach such things is not heuristically, but rationally, as one would approach any other economic issue.

You write "see where i am going with this? It's not so easy to answer and impose your model of the "free market" at the same time."

Yes, as a matter of fact, it is. The purpose of the healthcare system is to provide the most advanced medical service and care possible in the most efficient and affordable way possible. Only a free competitive market can do this with the necessary economic calculations in place to support its progress. No matter how you slice it, a socialized approach to healthcare invariably distorts the market (with its IP fees, undue regulations, and a lack of any accurate metrics on both the supply-side and on the demand-side which helps to determine availability, efficacy, and cost).

"you cannot have "for-profit" and "health-care" work in conjunction with any REAL health care."

Sorry, but this is just absurd. What else can I say?

"but if we use your "free market" model against a more "socialized model".which model would better serve the public?"

The free market model.

"if we take your "free market" model,which would be under the auspices of capitalism."

Redundant: "free market under the auspices of free market."

"disease is where the money is at,THAT is where the profit lies,not in preventive medicine."

Only Krugman-style Keynesians would say that illness is more profitable than health (or war more profitable than peace, or that alien invasions and broken windows are good for the economy). They, like you, aren't taking into account the One Lesson in Economics: look at how it affects every group, not just one group; look at the long term effects, not just short term ones. You're just seeing that, in the short-run, health will be less profitable for medical practitioners (or some pharmaceuticals) that are currently working in the treatment of illness. But look at every group outside that small group and at the long run and you can see that health is more profitable than illness overall. The market that profits more from illness will have to adapt, in ways that only the market knows for sure.

Do you realize that the money you put into socialized medicine (Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, etc.) is money you deplete from prevention entrepreneurship?

(As an aside, I wonder, why do so many people assume that the socialized central planners have some kind of special knowledge or wisdom that entrepreneurs do not? And why is there the belief that unlike entrepreneurs, socialist central planners are not selfishly motivated but always act in the interest of the "common good?" Could this be part of the propagandized and indoctrinated fear that's implicit in living in a socialized environment? Why do serfs (and I'm sure that, at some level, people know that's what they are) love the socialist central planners more than they love themselves? Complex questions about self-esteem and captive minds.)

If fewer people get sick, the market will then demand more practitioners to move from treating illness into other areas like prevention, being a prevention doctor or whatever. You're actually making the argument for free market here, not against it. Socialized bureaucratically dictated medicine will not adapt to the changing needs as efficiently or rapidly as a free market can and would. If more people are getting sick, then we'll need more doctors to treat them. If fewer people are getting sick because preventive medicine takes off, then we'll have more of that type of service. If a socialized healthcare is mandated, then we will invariably have a glut of allopathic doctors, with little need for their services (and we then have the kinds of problems we see amongst doctors who are coerced -- by the threat of losing their license -- to take medicaid and then lie on their reports in order to recoup their costs, e.g., see the article linked here.)

Meanwhile, there has been and will remain huge profits to be made in prevention, as the vitamin, supplements, alternative medicine, naturopathy, exercise and many other industries attest to. What are you talking about, that there's no profit in preventing illness? (In a manner of speaking, that's actually my bread and butter!) If you have a way to prevent illness, you will have more than enough people buying from you, people who don't want to get sick. (And other services for the people who do.) Open a gym. Become a naturopath. Teach stress management, meditation, yoga, zumba, whatever! And there are always those who need treatment, who are sick, and the free market will then have an accurate measure of how to allocate the right resources and number of such practitioners. This is something that the central planners (under socialized services) simply cannot possibly do (except, of course, for the omniscient ones that socialists insist exist).

You wrote "cancer,anxiety,obesity,drug addiction.
all are huge profit generators and all could be dealt with so much more productively and successfully with preventive care,diet and exercise and early diagnosis."

But they won't as long as you have centrally planned (socialized) medicine. The free market forces practitioners to respond to the market's demands. Socialized medicine does not. Entrepreneurs will (as they already have) exploit openings for profit in prevention (without the advantage of regulations which distort the markets) and take the business away from treatment doctors. If anything, doctors prevent preventative medicine from getting more widespread by using government regulations to limit what the preventive practitioners do. In fact, preventive medicine is so profitable that it has many in the medical profession lobbying to curtail it. They are losing much business to alternative/preventive practitioners. They lobby to, for example, prevent herb providers from stating the medical/preventive benefits of their herbs. They even prevent strawberry farmers to tout the health benefits of strawberries! It is the state that is slowing down preventive medicine, not the free market! In Puerto Rico, for example, once the Medical Association lost a bit to prohibit naturopathy, they effectively outlawed acupuncture by successfully getting a law passed that requires all acupuncturists to be medical doctors. Insanity.

If you think there is no profit in preventative care or exercise, think GNC and Richard Simmons, and Pilates, and bodywork, and my own practice of psychotherapy. Many of the successful corporations (I'm thinking of Google and Pixar and SalesForce and Oracle, etc.) see the profit and value in preventative care, which is why they have these "stay healthy" programs for their employees. There's more money in health than illness. No doubt.

Or how about the health food/nutrition business? Or organic farming, or whole foods! The free market could maybe call for fewer oncologists and for more Whole Foods or even better natural food stores. Of course, we don't know the specifics, but that's actually the point. Only the free market knows (and the omniscient socialist central planners) what needs to happen and how.

Imagination! We need to get people to use it more.

You wrote: "but when we consider that the 4th and 5th largest lobbyists are the health insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry is it any wonder that america has the most fucked up,backwards health care system on the planet."

You're actually making my point here. In a free market, pharmaceutical companies cannot monopolize what "drugs" people can or cannot take, sell or not sell, and cannot prevent natural alternatives from being promoted. Only with state intervention (by way of IP regulations, and so forth) can they do so.

Free market is not corporatism. Free market is not crony capitalism. (More disinformation that needs to be lifted.)

So you're not countering my free market position, you're countering the crony capitalist position. This is a straw man argument, even if in this case you might not have understood my position in the first place. You, like so many others, equate "capitalism" with cronyism or corporatism. Many cannot conceive of a free market that is free from regulation. So folks then argue against their own interests, either for or against "fascist" vs. "socialist" medicine. The free market is, in fact, outside these two positions.

You wrote: "IF we made medicare available to ALL american citizens we would see a shift from latter stage care to a more aggressive preventive care and early diagnosis. the savings in money (and lives) would be staggering."

I won't go into medicare right now (It is a disaster, and so is the current non-free-market insurance industry. See the article linked in my comment above.)

You wrote "this would create a huge paradigm shift here in america and we would see results almost instantly but more so in the coming decades."

I don't want to be a naysayer but, socialism is nothing new. It has been tried (and failed) many times before. The USSR had socialized medicine. So does Cuba (but then you may believe the Michael Moore fairytale about medicine in Cuba). It's probably better to go see in person how Cubans live and how they have no access to the places that Moore visited.

You wrote: "i feel very strongly that health should be a communal effort.a civilized society should take care of each other."

Really, then why try to force me (or anyone) into your idea of "good" medicine? The free market is a communal effort. In fact, it is nothing else (and nothing else is as communal as the free market). Central planning, socialized, top-down decision-making, is not. Never has been. Never will be.

Voluntary interactions is "taking care of each other." Coercion is not. Socialism is coercion. It cannot "work" any other way. A free market is voluntary cooperation.

Economic calculation is necessary to avoid chaos, whatever the purpose of a service. This is economic law. Unless the purpose is to create chaos, you need real prices and efficiency that only the free market can provide.

I hope this helps to clarify (and not confuse) what I wrote on @eric3579's profile.

The authoriuty for the nsa warrentless wiretapping was given by executive order,,by bush...in 2001. 12 fucking years ago. The patriot act was signed by bush 41 days after 9/11...The ACLU sued over these policies in 2003. Michael moore devoted 10 minutes of his movie to it in 2004. It was WIDELY REPORTED in 2005 that the nsa was monitoring domestic phone calls and collecting and reading email and phone records. 9 fucking years ago..The nsa has been building billion dollar data centers, they are not fucking invisible buildings that only wonder woman can see. NONE OF THIS HAS EVER BEEN A FUCKING SECRET. Obama and congress just reauthorized all these OLD FUCKING BILLS. It took 12 fucking years for the mindless fox news fucking morons to catch up to what liberals have been saying since at least 2004. here is the ny times, from two thousnd..fucking..five.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&

I like Michael Moore much better when he's having a giggle fit.

Oh look, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_O%27Keefe

James Keefe is at it again. Yeah, that's one reliable source.
If you somehow are jaded enough to believe that this guy is not fishing and that this is all legit- look for the "interview" with a fake bono.
Apparently it needs 6 months from media-fallout to reestablishment of old patterns.
If you believe Michael Moore is borderline, you will absolutely love this guy.

Michael Moore made the claim that Canadians have more guns in Bowling for Columbine. Since then I've heard both that it's true and false. A quick search shows nothing to support it, and a lot to refute it. Still, the idea that Canadians don't use guns is wrong. We're still #12 in the world per capita, if Wikipedia can be trusted.>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

Wait, give up your guns? I thought Canada had the highest guns per capita than the US? Any Canucks attest to the "gun loven, but not in anger" ways or was that thing I heard on the internet once wrong?!

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Hopefully this gets more airtime. Michael Moore releases sicko demanding public health care, because the current status quo is all about helping corporations

A few years pass.

Obama sacrifices his status as one of the most popular political figures in the country to pass a bill providing a much higher level of public health care.

Michael Moore is back again, and now it's time to roast Obama's bill for not doing enough and for helping corporations.

Hopefully this brings Michael Moore's true mindset to light for a few more people. I doubt it though. This is apparently 2 years old and is the first I've come across it. Maybe Moore wisely decided it was bad press to keep on chirping about this.

Go away, Michael Moore.

@Yogi No, you kind of are supposed to look at the logic if you are the Supreme Court. The result is really Congress' worry.

@GenjiKilpatrick The issue is how do you constitutionally keep Michael Moore (or some union) from running political content simply because he has the means to do so without allowing the government to stop the New York Times from running political content. A photo of Barack Obama on the front page could easily be construed as a "campaign contribution." It's certainly donated capital of some sort depending on the nature of the coverage. Currently there is no cleanly legislated delineation there. So yea, Yogi, they were worried about results. They were worried about the negative liberties result more so than the positive liberties result. This is one of those instances where I get that viewpoint.

Regardless, I'd like to see data that electoral success is a linear correlate with campaign spending regardless of absolute levels. I suspect there is an asymptote at some point. It might all be moot anyway.

@bareboards2 Sorry, being the grassroots viewpoint means working from the grassroots. Besides, the way to fight this is to just not be dumb, and convince a few others not to fall for baseless political pandering. Drop a pamphlet about how the world works out the window and you'd be doing it far more good than squandering what few resources you have on an action like this.

Michael Moore and I'd say MOST of who represents the Occupy movement are not "Hard Leftists" they're centrist if anything.

I have a hard time listening to science when it's presented by pop culture figureheads like this guy, Michael Moore, Rosie O'Donnell, et al. I keep expecting him to say "really? really?" at the end of every mind-blowing statistic.

>> ^kymbos:

I don't know. Leaping onto the anti-Invisible Children bandwagon seems as hasty as hopping onto the Kony 2012 one.
I didn't see anything in that clip that confirms what they're doing is wrong. It's just not how I would go about it. A slick campaign was developed by happy-clappy marketing christians? Plenty of aid organisations have religious roots. It'll be a good thing if it improves things on the ground, and that can happen a number of ways.


Like I said if it gets smarter people out there to raise awareness it's a good thing. I'd rather though it be done right and propagated the FIRST fucking time...you lose a lot of people to outrage of lies when this stuff gets hyped and then disproven in a week.

I equate it to my experience with Michael Moore. I wasn't very political when I was younger...read some Michael Moore and got more political. It turned out he was kind of simplistic and misrepresentative some of the time, I could of just got angry and dropped it. Instead Moore turned me on to Noam Chomsky...and I've read dozens of his books now and because of that have become more informed and passionate about current events.