President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

I am sure you realize that I can agree that 1) Many people spend what amounts to a lot of money in the U.S. on guns and weapons, idiotically in my opinion too, for what it is worth. And at the same time, I can also disagree with you that 2) it's fair for others to coerce me (or anyone else) to hand over my property or take my labor, etc. to benefit someone else in an exclusionary way, if I don't choose to do it freely.

I find that many of these conversations get muddled.

The inefficiencies and skewed incentives that government interference in a market create don't fit into a simple, "A = B" message board conversation. Especially when those interferences get convoluted and pile disparate laws on top of each other, creating messes of things like the health care system or higher education or the housing market over decades.

Generally, though, the cost of health care really took off in the U.S. when Medicare and Medicaid were passed in the 1960s. Medicare, in particular, took the demographic where the vast majority of onerous medical costs are borne and created a bloated buerocracy around it, and made it a huge societal problem, with all of the moral hazard and false promises about the costs that come with a large, inefficient entitlement program that dishonesly promises resources to everyone that are not actually paid for (or worse, that have tacked the cost onto medical care for everyone else, bankrupting people in the process). Since then, we've made our overall healht care system worse with tack-on regulations (always the arsonists riding in the fire truck to put out the fire they lit in the firs place), culminating with Obamacare and where we are today. So when you look at an average American hospital today, that is what you are seeing. The fact that hospitals are merging into basically a handful of companies controling them and we are starting to see shortages, particularly with rural communities being underserved, is because all of the regulation, made it impossible for them to operate and exist as they used to. Same as Canada having severe doctor shortages in many of its provinces due it its Medicare system.

I am not holding up the U.S. health care system (as a general entity) as some bastion of quality care compared to what Canada has done to itself. At least not anymore. We have fucked everything up here. Although to the extent that we still allow a tiny level of entrepreneurship here that others don't, there are still some aspects of medicine where the U.S. is throwing innovation to everyone else, mostly relating to medical research and discoveries of new technologies and drugs. Still with each year, actual health CARE is getting worse here because we have made a mess of it, and not coincidentally it corresponds with how regulated it has become.

In any case, it's interesting to me that you consider your taxes an "investment." When I invest in something, anything, I don't want to be coerced into handing over my property or savings or my time or the fruits of my labor whether I actually want to make the investment or not. If I make an investment, I solely take whatever risk is involved, but I am doing it to reap a possible reward. The choices surrounding that investment are all mine. When I invest in something, in fact, there is pretty much always risk involved because as a normal human being who isn't a child, I accept that there is never a risk-free return on any honest invesment. Either way, I am free to make the choice on my own, and it's not a matter of others telling me what I have to "invest" in and then forcing me to pay for things to benefit others, which to me isn't an investment, it's simple coercion.

You and I will just fundamentally disgaree about this, I guess. I believe that any form of coercion on a grand scale -- forcing me to pay for your education, for example -- is morally wrong.

Even if we just get past that moral question, though, what you are prescribing economically is (and always has been) a formula for reduced standards of living in the aggregate, so it goes beyond a moral question. Depending on just how much BS was promised to get people to sign off on the coercion / "government is going to take over something and give to for free," by its nature that kind of command economy always culminates in some combination of higher prices or rationing (or worse, both), by throwing a ton of demand (people are happy to consume things others are paying for -- moral hazard is bankrupting) at not enough supply, along with a reduction of the quality of those services compared to what an unfettered market would typically have provided.

It's not a matter of investment. But if it was, it's a lose-lose investment to me.

 

Yup, it's just a stark reality that we don't have unlimited resources (nobody does, including Canada), and that old people consume a lot of health care, often to extend a life for just months at great expense. I get that leads to emotional conversations, but we can at least be honest about it. There is no good prescribed government-mandated balance that can make the resources any more plentiful to take care of everyone's medical needs throughout their lives and give them all the available care possible when they most need it in old age.

I also know tha Canada doesn't pay for everyone's cancer treatment, while Americans need gofundme pages. At least that is a huge oversimplification of the difference between the two countries. One of the reasons, in fact, that Canada spends less on health care per capita is that they won't cover a lot of costly treatments that they have deemed to be of marginal benefit. It's also why outcomes for cancer and other serious illnesses aren't as good there as they are in the U.S. It's a great place to live as long as you don't get TOO sick. If you have the means and you do get too sick, you are probably coming to the U.S.