So, when the government protects you with the police and military, it works fine, but if it tries to anything outside its "natural" function its efforts spontaneously combust?

Market failure. Look it up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure

Also there's the fact that the market's distribution of wealth is highly unequal. Do rich people have a greater right to live than poor people, simply because they happen to be able to afford quality care?

By bringing down prices. Insurance is for catastrophic needs, not standard care. If you remove standard care from the picture and boil 'insurance' down to catastrophic needs then it becomes easily affordable by anyone except for the most extreme, hard-luck, down-and-out exceptions. The needs of that tiny percentage can be handled easily without a massive, national, one-size-fits-all monstrosity. Such needs can be managed entirely with private charities, community care, or state/municipal programs.

The costs for standard care will rapidly decrease to proper market levels once the mentality of 'insurance covered' is removed. People will pay for what they need and negotiate directly with providers. Costs will lower to what the market can support - not what 'corporations' dictate. It happens every time like clockwork.

You express remarkable faith in the free market there. How are you so sure what would happen if we let the market have free reign? The economy is a highly complex system, and even professional economists have difficulty understanding it. But some guy from the internet really knows how it all works then? I for one am not willing to gamble with people's lives and health on the basis of unproven free market theory.

you seem to be embracing the "moral hazard" theory of health insurance, according to which health care costs are driven up because people with insurance purchase more health care than they otherwise would have. This theory is not universally accepted in the economics profession.

“Moral hazard is overblown,” the Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt says. “You always hear that the demand for health care is unlimited. This is just not true. People who are very well insured, who are very rich, do you see them check into the hospital because it’s free? Do people really like to go to the doctor? Do they check into the hospital instead of playing golf?”


I recommend reading this: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/08/29/050829fa_fact

Yes - but the equation has been altered by a government mandated series of insurance programs that meddle with the marketplace. HMOs only exist because of government edict. Insurance programs then had to start covering "standard" health care instead of just catastrophic care. In order to make that possible, they had to start developing new programs & rate systems that were financially (A) feasible and (B) profitable. Other GOVERNMENT laws prevented competition across state lines, and a bunch of other crap that turned 'insurance' into a hodgepodge of arcane, impenetrable 'covers everything' baloney as opposed to a simple "catastrophic care" transaction.

Um, at no point did you explain here how the market would help people with pre-existing conditions. Probably because it wouldn't. I'll grant you that our current system is probably less efficient than a free market one would be. However it doesn't follow from that that the free market is the solution to everything.

The point is that with freedom, almost everyone will be able to afford catastrophic care - and the needs of the remainder will be well within the grasp of private, municipal, & state means.

You mean you personally think that everyone will be able to afford catastrophic care, but you don't know. My point is that the freedom for rich people to buy yachts is not as important as people's basic health and well-being. So lets tax the yachts and make sure that everyone's needs are taken care of, like they should be in any civilized society.

Winstonfield: how could the market possibly help people with pre-existing conditions? The whole idea of insurance is to insure against something that hasn't happened yet. If you're already sick, then you're not going to make any money whatsoever for an insurance company.

And what good is this "freedom" of yours if you're dead because you couldn't afford quality health care?

>> ^quantumushroom:
The conservative philosophy DOES create a nation where everyone gets the best opportunity to live a fulfilling life, but it doesn't GUARANTEE a fulfilling life, and never will. Life doesn't work that way.


So someone who couldn't get insurance because they have a pre-existing condition gets sick and dies. You're telling me they really had the "best opportunity to live a fulfilling life"? What world do you live on?

The constitution hasn't meant anything since Bush overruled it and turned the presidency into a monarchy, which has the power to do whatever it wants in the name of "national defense." Guess conservatives kinda dropped the ball there eh?

And maybe we could afford to insure everyone a lot more easily were it not for Bush's massive deficit-inducing tax cuts?

To everyone defending the chick-grinders: are you really sure you're not just trying to protect your peace of mind? The fact is, you like meat. You want to continue to eat meat - a lot of it probably - and you don't want to pay too much for it. Human minds are great at producing justifications for their desires. We're very good at deceiving ourselves into thinking we came to a conclusion through logic and reason, when really, we are motivated by the need to justify. So you should always be suspicious of a justification that conveniently happens to justify behavior that otherwise might be considered immoral. In your mind, try to separate the chick-grinding from the meat-eating you want to justify. Watch the video again, and instead of thinking of chicken nuggets dipped in honey mustard, think of a brand new form of life being brought into this world, only to snuffed out before even getting a chance. It doesn't matter if chicks can't feel or experience life like an adult human can - neither can human babies. Yet I'm sure you'd object to throwing them in grinders. This isn't about animal cruelty so much as a fundamental respect for conscious beings.

I have a degree in economics, and I agree with Feynman 100% (at least with regards to economics). Beyond the simple operation of supply and demand, economics is complete bullshit. It imitates the rigor of real science, with the math and everything, but it starts from fundamentally wrong assumptions about human behavior. It actually assumes away all psychology, biology, circumstance, tradition, institutions, politics, physics, sociology - until all you're left with is an optimizing machine bearing no resemblance to any human being. Economics is a branch of math - it is not a science. In fact, calling it "science" gives science a bad name.

In my opinion, psychology is the most scientific of the social sciences. Even though they cannot come up with laws of human behavior, they at least do actual experiments where they try to discover statistical regularities of human behavior. If economics were based on psychology, while incorporating insights from other disciplines, it might actually be a science.

Orwell's vision is coming true. How else can you explain why stating the completely obvious is considered "controversial"? Next on Fox News: "the Sun: the liberal media says it is a burning ball of hydrogen and helium. What do they have against gods who ride across the sky in glowing chariots?"

Yeah that's a Nietzsche quote. I'm thinking the video is about how differently little kids see the world - to them the world is completely bizarre and foreign. They don't understand the reasons behind anything. So what to us looks like a normal kids show, to them looks like an acid trip. Everything is a source of fear except the mother - the one source of security in the kid's world. But the mother doesn't really understand this - she's so used to the world that she forgot what it looked like when she was a little kid herself.

My ass its not about race. The guy was shot in the back. Clearly, the police officer who shot him was thinking (consciously or subconsciously) gun plus black person = dead black person. How can anyone seriously assert the police officer was "merely following procedures" when the guy was shot in the back? What procedures allow that? The guy they interviewed said he heard "police! police!" and "started" to turn. Yeah, but he was still shot in the back. Was he about to drop the weapon? Well if he was I doubt he was given the chance.

I'm not saying the police officer was a card carrying member of the KKK. But racism can become institutionalized and accepted even among fundamentally good people. It can become standard policy to "shoot first, ask questions later" when dealing with a black person with a gun - not officially of course, but in practice. People have all sorts of ways to justify things like that in their minds. And I think this incident (along with other similiar incididents) suggests there is a problem. That's why we need an independent investigation.

Also, we need to not take the police's word at face value when it comes to issues like this. If you've seen other examples of police abuse, haven't you noticed a pattern? Deny, deny, deny, deny. The police want to protect their own. Its our responsibility to make sure they're doing their job right - we can't always defer to their judgement.

HenningKO: that's true, my justification for "I could care less" would imply there's some default level of caring - but why are you so sure there isn't such a thing? In fact I'm pretty sure the default isn't zero. How many things are there in the world are capable of being so utterly uninteresting that - if you rated your caring for them on a scale of 0 to 10 - could not even score a 0.000000000000....00001 (where the ... represents an infinity of zeros)? And wouldn't it be exceedingly difficult to reduce the amount you care below that, considering there's already an infinity of zeros there?

So saying "I could care less" doesn't necessarily imply "I really don't care." As brycewi said, you could care so much that you could care less and still care a lot. But all I'm saying is that you COULD mean "I really don't care" without being grammatically incorrect. You could be making a very general statement that you don't care to adjust your level of caring. You just go with whatever comes naturally.

Actually saying "I could care less" is justified, if you think about it. You want to say "I don't care" right? But what if you care so little that you don't even care to care less? Then it would be accurate to say "I could care less." You could care less - but you don't, because that's how much you don't fucking care.

Actually that would be the symmetric property - and probably not.