| HappySqurriel said:
Except that healthcare (for the most part) is not an emergency service ... People make choices which allow their body to deteriorate over long periods of time to a level where it becomes an emergency, they then are faced with expensive care to return them to the pre-emergency status quo, and then they have years of amazingly expensive care in an attempt to reverse the damage that they have done. There is minimal cost (and in some cases massive savings) in an individual preventing the most common and costly illnesses, and there are massive costs associated with repairing the damage from their choices. If people took care of themself, healthcare costs would be around 1/4 to 1/3 their current cost and the majority of those costs would be associated with unpreventable illnesses, injuries, and preventative healthcare and the system would be great for everyone regardless of who ran the system ... In contrast, while people still refuse to protect their own health and we develop new long term (and expensive) treatments to keep people with preventable illnesses alive longer costs will continue to skyrocket and the healthcare system will be poor for everyone regardless of who runs the system.
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Police protection in many cases is not an emergency service. If I call up the police because there is a crazy party next store at 5 AM in the morning or if there are non-violent drug deals going on across the street, that is not an emergency. Does that mean I should have to pay the police to come out and do something?
Same thing with national defense. There are very few true "emergencies" in the national defense context. Does that mean the government should charge people directly to protect their cities and borders from attack when there isn't a war?
And one of the reasons WHY government sponsored healthcare is a good idea is that it would encourage people to go to the doctor earlier and solve little problems before they become big problems. A lot of people do not go to the doctor early on because they are worried about the cost or worried they will be diagnosed with something that could lead to a rise in their health insurance costs or getting dropped from their healthcare provider altogether. If anything, the reason you cited is a good reason WHY the government should sponsor healthcare.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
