As a quick aside, this website has some interest in the current US healthcare debate. Myself, as well as Chris R. are both Americans who live in the UK, and have developed some thoughts on healthcare and how it should be provided. We’re looking forward to writing about these thoughts (which I expect will be different from one another) in the coming weeks.
In the meantime… LINKS!
The American Psychological Association (APA) recently released a report opposing conversation therapy for homosexuals. The report states that “efforts to produce [a change in sexual orientation] could be harmful, inducing depression and suicidal tendencies.”
Julia Duin at the Washington Times informs us that the APA task force was stacked with gay rights activists, and that nobody with dissenting opinions was permitted on the team. The task force started with the assumption that homosexuality is a normal form of human sexuality.
Perinatal hospice offers an alternative to the trauma of aborting a disabled child
Microsoft in hot water again. This time, it’s in the US for infringing upon someone else’s patent. As a result, Microsoft is banned from selling and importing Word 2007.
An American expat’s thoughts on the NHS
Daniel Hannan (Conservative MP) has ticked off a ton of Brits for criticising the NHS.
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I appreciated the article about perinatal hospice. Not every baby is going to be born strong and healthy. Perinatal hospice give opportunity to family, friends and the medical community to accept that fact and acknowledge that a baby human doesn’t have to be perfect to deserve love and respect, to say nothing of providing a support system for the grieving parents.
Regarding the experience of the NHS, it makes sense that she would choose it. People will almost always choose greed, theft, and “rights” over personal responsibility.
Darius, at what point does one’s debt due to necessary but outrageous medical bills not being covered by the medical insurance which theoretically covers it? Is cancer one’s ‘personal responsibility’ even if it means one’s entire family becoming homeless and bankrupt?
Also, when you speak of theft, that reminds me of something. Can we argue that we shouldn’t pay into the police and fire department services provided by government since ‘personal responsibility’ is what we’re about. I think everyone should be able to extinguish a house fire or be able to pay the money directly to the fire department at the point of service. You see, I think there are at least some things the government provides which, according to your definition of ‘theft’ and ‘rights’, are exactly those things…and you support those instances of ‘theft’ and ‘rights’! I can see it now: ‘Dear Gov. XXX, Please find enclosed my taxes for 2009 minus the services I would rather pay for individually, specifically military, fire, police, education, roads, and government representation.’
The first sentence isn’t a full sentence… but I think I know what you’re getting at.
“Is cancer one’s ‘personal responsibility’ even if it means one’s entire family becoming homeless and bankrupt?”
Not necessarily, but it’s not the government’s responsibility or right to force others to pay for that family’s rough situation. Please explain how health care is suddenly, for the first time in human history, a RIGHT. And explain why positive rights like health care are good for a society.
Nevermind, your next paragraph indicates that you don’t understand the difference between negative and positive rights. A negative right, like life and liberty (something the Founders recognized), needs a State to protect it. If you have someone trying to kill you, the government’s role is to provide a police force to keep them from doing so (to the best of its ability, anyway). A police force or fire department benefits all of society, so general taxes to support those institutions are not theft. A positive right, on the other hand, entails something that someone else has to provide (like health care, donuts, or a hundred dollars). It is interesting to note that the Founders never saw these as real rights. In fact, they specifically implied that they foresaw such positive rights and deliberately avoided them when they said that it was the PURSUIT of happiness and not happiness itself that was the human right of all people. Everyone has the right to pursue happiness, but not everyone has a right TO be happy. Otherwise, the government would be responsible for ensuring that happinesss.
So, a positive right like health care sounds great until you realize that someone else has to provide for it. I have the right to a healthy heart, so someone has to be forced to provide that healthy heart by means of surgery. I have the right to clinic visits, so if I can’t afford them, the government thugs will take money from those who can at the point of a gun.
It’s really quite simple to determine what taxes are theft and which ones are not most of the time, once someone has the correct worldview and understands rights.
Well, my neighbor’s cancer certainly isn’t my fault. (Unless it actually is, in which case I should pay for treatment and punitive damages. But I’m not in the habit of running door-to-door throwing asbestos bombs.)
On the other hand, my neighbor’s needs are my Christian responsibility.
Exactly, Jew. And as a part of the Body of Christ, you should work to help alleviate your neighbor’s poverty, but not just his material poverty. The government is the least productive method of any type of poverty alleviation.
I’m reading a great book on this very subject called When Helping Hurts: Alleviating Poverty Without Hurting the Poor… and Ourselves. I recommend it to anyone who wants to truly help others.
There is a minimum of healthcare that benefits all of society by providing people the health necessary to pursue happiness, unless you want to argue that a bankrupt person on the street with cancer is one who is able to pursue happiness. You’re arguing that because a right wasn’t around 200 years ago, it shouldn’t be one now…let’s try telling that to people who were once marginalised because they had no rights 200 years ago (e.g. women, blacks, etc). We have a bad history of marginalising people because they’re not (insert current definition of a free person).
@Jew: We’ve seen how well ‘Christian responsibility’ has acted in the greater scheme of things to people that are on the streets because of their inability to pay necessary medical bills. The Body of Christ, like any other corporate body, has a bad history of not helping others (and, at times, abusing such inequalities).
@Darius (I wanted to address the above first). What evidence do you have that government is the least productive method for alleviating poverty? In my travels through ‘socialist’ nations, I’ve found that the poor can be fairly well off. Are they poor? Sure, but they have the same healthcare that everyone else has as well as a place to live and food to eat. Christianity has been around for nearly 2000 years and there’s not a lot of history of it actually helping people. There’s a ton of history of it exploiting people. Perhaps in some future world, charity will actually work and then I’ll agree with you. Until then, I’d rather give that job to someone that I have some way of controlling (by voting, etc).
You can talk about rights all you want, but who pays for it? Really, that’s what it comes down to. Healthcare costs money. Somebody has to pay for it. It’s not comparable to the right to vote or the right to not be enslaved. Those things aren’t subsidized through taxes. Public healthcare is.
There is a minimum of healthcare that benefits all of society by providing people the health necessary to pursue happiness, unless you want to argue that a bankrupt person on the street with cancer is one who is able to pursue happiness.
The pursuit of happiness is a phrase that means the right to property. “Life, liberty, and property” is the classic form of the phrase. In the US Declaration of Independence it was changed to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” but it still means the same thing (just slightly broader.) At first it may seem that providing healthcare as a right will promote the pursuit of happiness, but if you think about it, it actually violates the pursuit of happiness. Providing healthcare to everyone requires taxation, which infringes upon the property rights of citizens. Because the right to property is the right to the pursuit of happiness, socialized healthcare by definition must be in opposition to the pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of happiness only exists where private property rights are strongly protected.
Darius has already discussed the difference between healthcare and the military and the police, so I won’t get into that. As a libertarian, I’m usually against taxation even to support the military or the police, but even I can see a difference between those and healthcare.
“Christianity has been around for nearly 2000 years and there’s not a lot of history of it actually helping people.”
As always, you have a pretty low view of the work of Christ in the world, but it’s not historically accurate. The Church, while always needing to do more and having its ups and downs, has been the ONLY consistent provider for the poor in the history of the world. As one Roman Caesar once put it, the Christians shamed the Roman government by not only providing for their own poor but the needs of the poor at large as well. America is far and away the most privately charitable country in the world (not to mention that it provides federal funding and military support as well to the rest of the world) because Americans still believe in a Judeo-Christian ethic and more of them truly profess Christ than any other Western country.
Also, you seem stuck on material poverty, whereas that is only one subset of human poverty, and definitely not the worst or most important. When a government takes away (or hampers) accountability and personal responsibility via socialistic programs that steal from one group to give to another (thus creating further enmity between classes), it deepens the spiritual and social poverty of its population. Most times, material poverty is merely a symptom of other forms of poverty.
Government itself is taxation. The right to not be enslaved is only protected by military and police force, paid for by taxation. Everything government does is subsidised through taxes. The irony is that while you say healthcare costs money and that somebody has to pay for it, you don’t seem to realise that insurance companies by default take the money you pay into it to pay for everyone’s expenses (doubly from employers because they pay a healthy percentage of the premium for their employees–as required by law already). It’s a risk pool and that is what makes it successful. I don’t see why people are against government setting up its own risk pool that people can choose not to accept provided that they their own way of mitigating the risk of healthcare (either by another insurance plan or whatever). Also, I don’t follow your interpretative license in reading ‘pursuit of happiness’ as ‘property’. If they meant property, they would have written that. The fact that they deliberately chose a different phrase implies that they meant something differently than simple ‘property’.
But then, even your reasoning against that level of taxation is misguided because property taxes are not something the federal government does. You’re compiling all the government hands involved as one, which isn’t currently related to the issue at hand at all. It’s like suggesting that because sodomy is against the law in Louisiana, the tax on tea in China should be decreased. The latter doesn’t follow from the former.
Meanwhile, Canada wants to privatize some of its broken health care system. http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5jbjzPEY0Y3bvRD335rGu_Z3KXoQw
Darius, then why, according to this Gallup poll do Brits and Canadians give just as much as Americans? Britain has some of the most socialist institutions, yet it differs very little from the US in terms of people in poverty. You’re argument here conveniently takes things that are immeasurable and provides some assumptions that don’t look likely to be verified. Regarding Christian history, I’ve read quite a bit of it. I did not say it has never helped others, but that it has a history of not (the Crusades, Avignon papacy, witch trials and inquisitions, etc). That’s because the Church is an institution made up of humans who are still human after they ‘get saved’.
Darius, Canada wants to privatise some of its system…and that’s only a portion of Canada. Some disagree with that. However, nowhere in any article does it say that Canada wants to ditch its entire system and move the the American system. This has never been a question of A OR B, but a matter of how much of each. Both extremes, in my eyes, have severe failings.
“I don’t see why people are against government setting up its own risk pool”
There are lots of reasons. One big reason is that the government will probably have to accept everybody into the pool, which means that a lot of high-risk people will opt into the government program, making it tremendously expensive. The current proposals that I’m hearing attempt to mitigate that by requiring every citizen to buy medical insurance, either through the government plan or through a private plan. That infringes on my rights. If I want to take my chances, that’s my choice to make.
In one sense it’s reasonable. If emergency rooms are required by law to treat all comers regardless of their ability to pay, then it makes sense to require some form of emergency medical insurance to pay for that treatment. To be truly fair, emergency rooms shouldn’t be required to provide service to those who can’t pay. I expect nobody would stand for that, however, not even most conservatives. That’s why conservatives are slowly but inexorably moving toward supporting socialized healthcare–as long as the proposed changes aren’t quite as drastic as what the evil socialist Democrats want. Huh. It’s only us deranged libertarians who remain opposed.
“The irony is that while you say healthcare costs money and that somebody has to pay for it, you don’t seem to realise that insurance companies by default take the money you pay into it to pay for everyone’s expenses”
No, I do realize that. But the difference here is that with private insurance companies, I have the CHOICE and FREEDOM to not pay them that money. I don’t get that with a government-run system.
“I don’t see why people are against government setting up its own risk pool that people can choose not to accept provided that they their own way of mitigating the risk of healthcare…”
That sounds nice, but it doesn’t fit the facts. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t have the option of opting out of the NHS plan in the UK, do you? What’s more important to this conversation, the current bill(s) for the American health care system would also ultimately give you little choice but to accept the government program. This is because governments cheat. They aren’t fair competition. If they lose money, they change the rules to make it easier for them to compete (which in turn makes it more difficult for their private competitors). For example, if UPS or Fed Ex were allowed to deliver any type of mail, how long would the Post Office last?
“To be truly fair, emergency rooms shouldn’t be required to provide service to those who can’t pay.”
Amen to that.
cchrisr, that Gallup poll intrigues me. Every other poll or statistic I’ve seen shows that Americans far outgive Europeans per capita. Like twice as much.
Uhh, Chris, that Gallup poll doesn’t say anything about how much giving they do, just what percentage of the people give. Sure, it’s possible that Brits or Canucks may give relatively at the same rate as Americans, but Americans give significantly more per capita.
“Your argument here conveniently takes things that are immeasurable and provides some assumptions that don’t look likely to be verified.”
I assume you’re referring to my discussion of other forms of poverty. These are pretty easily verified. Look at the underclasses of either the UK or the USA. They both are relatively well-off materially (most have multiple TVs, cars, and cell phones, to say the least) thanks to those government social programs. But they’re also the most likely to be socially bankrupt, with most families lacking a “dad” but having multiple fathers. Meanwhile, the middle and upper class are socially impoverished in other ways by divorce rates and rampant materialism. If Christians want change, they won’t throw money at people. They’ll preach Christ and a Biblical worldview, which will have a much more lasting effect than any billions of dollars ever could.
Jew, that poll is easily explained. 73% of Brits give $1 each month. Meanwhile, 64% of Americans give $3 each month. Sure, it may be more likely to find a Brit who gives than an American (I still wonder about the veracity of this since, as you pointed out, every other poll has always shown the opposite), but the average American gives more than the Brit.
Jew, Darius is correct that Americans give more money, which is why the numbers you have differ from these numbers. What’s interesting, though, is that hALF of the American money comes from the upper 10% (source). I interpret those statistics together as more average Brits give money compared to Americans but more wealthy American give more. I further suggest that this evidence speaks against Darius’s statement about ‘social poverty’. It’s no different in either country. Regarding ERs treating on the basis of ability to pay, I don’t agree with that kind of social Darwinism.
Darius, if you’d rather wait for my summary of HR 3200, please do. However, you should be interested to know that the bill has always had in it clauses allowing other plans to continue on. While it is mandatory for the plans to meet requirements, those requirements are already met by most insurance plans, even the crappy ones offered by colleges and universities. Your examples also fail miserably. While everyone must pay into NHS, there are still private insurance companies that provide services for cheap (I know of a few plans by the major companies here that run under £40 a month, and I’ve also heard of private sector companies giving employees that insurance as part of their benefits). The NHS contributions are taken out along with taxes with the average total taxes and NI running around 30% for the average person (neither taxes kick in until one has earned £4500 for the year). Also, Royal Mail here is the default for sending mail and letters. FedEx and UPS are very rare because the Post Office has an amazing delivery time. One of the car shows (Top Gear) did a challenge racing a package in a high-powered Porsche (start here). Unlike the USPS, the Royal Mail is amazingly efficient and can pretty much guarantee any First Class mail being delivered anywhere in the UK on the next day (for a letter, that’s a difference between 39p and £20!). In other words, even if FedEx and UPS were allowed to deliver mail*, nobody here in the UK would pay that much for it because the Post Office does just fine.
*NB: Some companies do use FedEx to deliver all of their mail. I have seen secretaries drop off 5 carrier boxes (totaling over 600 pieces) for delivery. The sad part there is that all of the mail was local mail (I could understand if it was out-of-state). Reason for this is that FedEx gives bulk rate discounts to companies that use FedEx for most of their mailing.
A large part of the greater American charitable giving is money to churches, the great majority of which goes to pay pastors and for buildings and is useless from a true charity standpoint.
This is a really read-worthy debate here. Well done guys for getting to the heart of things and keeping it about issues and not namecalling/stereotyping.
Jasen, I’ve never known a pastor who didn’t spend time ministering to people, both in and outside of the church. I mean tangible ministry that isn’t purely religious–counseling, visiting the sick, comforting, and helping with yardwork–not just preaching on Sundays and leading Bible studies.
You make a good point though. How much of the giving difference is explained by America’s religious nature, and how much can we credit to America’s less socialist government?
Jew, my point, though, has nothing to do with the religious vs nonreligious motivations for giving. Put simply, the UK really isn’t much different from the US in respect to charitable giving and other measures of ‘poverty’ with the one exception being that a much smaller percentage of Brits that practice religion.
Oh, I was responding on Jasen’s comment. I wasn’t really referring to your points anymore.
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/life-expectancy-health-2529244-say-good