JayB

Things are just getting started in Venezuela. They've just started the long-march on "The Road to Serfdom." Destinations: Repression, Poverty, and Collapse. There is no escape from this.

Crass? Yes. Heartless? Yes Truthful??? Yes. Seahawks equates socialism with totalitarianism. One does not follow necessarily from the other. Once the state has amassed enough power to assume complete control over the economy, it has more than enough power to crush all dissent. Leon Trotsky said it best: "'The old principle, 'Who does not work shall not eat,' has been replaced by a new one: 'Who does not obey shall not eat.' ''

The U.S. will never stop the competitive slide with this approach. Again, an educated workforce is the only competitive edge we will have going forward and 'baseline catastrophic coverage' will never provide the necessary baseline of family health necessary. 1). You seem to be either oblivious to or deliberately omitting an acknowledgment of the role that lifestyle choices have on one's health, and healthcare expenses. Take a look at obesity alone, here. There are scores of millions of fat people who have zero problem accessing an extravagance of preventive care, none of which has any impact whatsoever on their waistlines. Ditto for smoking, etc. 2). The notion that preventive care is a major, or even the sole determinant of workforce productivity and/or competitiveness is just bizarre. Education, taxation, infrastructure, labor-market regulation, trade policy, etc, etc, etc, all factor into the mix. I don't think that you'd be able to convince many folks that direct foreign investment in China or India is driven by the strength of their health care systems.

Kind of dumb question, it not really free, someone pays. So if the poor can't pay and the rich know how to get around paying who going to pay??? I think you can answer that. I'd agree with you that the poor can't pay, but the data doesn't support the conclusion that the rich aren't paying. Top 1% pay ~ 23% of all taxes. Top 5% pay ~ 52.2% of all taxes. Top 20% pay ~ 68.2% of all taxes. These percentages have been trending upwards ever since Reagan cut the top marginal rate. This is the data. People can argue about whether this is fair per their particular conception of the term ad infinitum. http://www.irs.ustreas.gov/pub/irs-soi/04asastr.pdf

This paper from Baldwin during his days as a Useful Idiot is classic. http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/blog/baldwin.pdf "Freedom in the USA and the USSR." Key Quote: "I champion civil liberties as the best means of building the power on which worker's rule must be based. If I aid the reactionaries now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties. The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental. When the power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means." Emphasis in the original. Thankfully, the same naive idiocy which enabled him to fawn over the Soviet Union during the worst of the Stalinist violence, prevented him from realizing that the means that he was envisioning to create a worker's paradise along the lines of the Soviet model in the US would not only *not* bring about the desired ends, but would prevent such an outcome from ever occuring so long as they - civil liberties - remained in place. Hilarious.

I'd love to be responsible for my personal health and health records instead of having the medical establishment as highly interested party caretakers who except for the rich (or those not rich willing to pay massive fees) provide no user specific services. I needed to receive an antimalarial. A Drs office charged me $100 for the pleasure of following the exact CDC website flow chart. He was nice enough to print out a copy for me. His value added = 0, however he's the gatekeeper to a prescription. How convenient. I'd have no problem with making the vast majority of drugs OTC.

Both the availability, and the wait associated with the procedure, would depend on which state you are talking about. Still doesn't support the conclusion that the benefits of a health-care market which is not a public monopoly are confined to the entities that derive their profits from that system. Guess what happens to innovation in pharmaceuticals if the single most significant provider of effective demand for new therapeutics imposes price controls. Might introduce the rest of the world to the flip-side of the "free rider" problem when there's nothing for them to ride for free.

One could argue excepting the negotiated insurer discounts, self insuring for catastrophic care is fiscally realistic. In 7 years I, or my employers, have paid probably $20,000 in premiums to health insurers. I have utilized my health insurance a total of twice for a total doctor bill of $150. I would love to have all of my compensation as cash, and obtain a tax deduction for the premiums that I pay (rather than the tax benefit being confined to my employer) on a plan of my choosing - which would have a deduction on the order of $5K or more. Don't see this happening under any single-payer model.

Have you been out drinking with the Senior Senator again? The health care system sucks. It's all the profits of the freemarket with none of the consumer benefits. So when the pharmaceutical companies develop an entirely new class of drugs, like statins, or TNF blockers like Enbrel, or any of the many anti-HIV drugs and the benefit is confined exclusively to the drug companies? Blow out your knee skiing, and the only one who benefits from the reconstruction is the physician? Etc, etc, etc, etc.

Well that's reassuring, seeing as this is decidedly not the case in Canada. How is this different than the current model, other than one can only "opt-in" to the government healthcare system via poverty, disability, old-age, etc?

That's a joke no doubt - the families of those same individuals do not have adequate, secure health insurance coverage either. Hell, who does have decent coverage that wouldn't be canned in a heartbeat at a job change after a serious illness, accident, or cancer? You? Are you sure? Just to take the "job change" example, you could go a long way towards addressing this by transferring the tax deductions for health-care premiums away from employers and granting them to individuals. Affordability varies wildly from one state to the next, and the prime reason for this is the different mandates that are imposed on insurers in some states but not in others. Make it possible for insurers to sell insurance in any state, and transfer the tax benefit for premiums from employers to employees and you've gone a long way towards making health-care more affordable. Another interesting tidbit with respect to affordability comes from the data that Massachusetts collected when they were putting their health care plan together. They found that the single largest segment of uninsured individuals were young men earning decent salaries who could afford health-insurance, but elected not to obtain it, presumably because they figured that they didn't really need it. "Eric Fehrnstrom, the governor's communications director, said that for those people with incomes above 300 percent of poverty, "our assumption was that these would be mostly single mothers who just did not have the wherewithal to get insurance. It turned out it was mostly young males. In some cases they are making very attractive salaries. These are people who just don't imagine themselves needing care, but of course when they break a leg when they're out bungee jumping they go to the hospital and we end up paying for their care anyway." You also seem to be leaving the development of new or better treatments completely out of the analysis, and also seem to be under the assumption that the adoption of a single-payer model would have some meaningful impact on the manner in which people lead their lives. Anyone working on the front lines can tell you what percent of their work is devoted to dealing with ailments that are substantially self-inflicted.

Even if all of the assertions about the state of the medical system here were true, this wouldn't necessarily support the conclusion that nationalizing health-care and forcing everyone into a single plan would be the optimal means by which to address these problems. Massachusetts has adopted a plan that provides for universal coverage without the state taking over the health-care market. It's not perfect, but it's accomplishes many, if not all of the objectives that advocates of a single payer system claim are behind their support of a single-payer system.

That's precisely the point. The term health care market is complex and heterogeneous. Health care services administered and paid for by the government might be the best way to provide health care for those who are constitutionally incapable of paying for it themselves - children, the indigent, the elderly poor, etc - but it doesn't follow that this model would be optimal for the remainder of the health care market any more than the fact that we have public defenders for those who cannot afford their own attorneys means that government administration of the entire legal market is the way to go. It's not like there aren't alternatives to the single payer model that would achieve many of the same goals. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/us/05mass.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5088&en=f0af8c5ff31d540d&ex=1301889600&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Let's compare apples to apples here. Your argument was that that because some subset of the population benefits from health care administered and paid for by the government, it follows that nationalization of the entire medical economy is clearly the optimal model for the provision and delivery of health care for everyone, as well as fostering lifesaving innovations, etc. One could easily make the same arguments for legal services, or any other sector of the economy. Why is it that you are so sure that such an arrangement would be optimal for a segment of the market that is much larger, many times more complex than the sector of the economy in which you make a living, but unsuitable for legal services?

Got mine done for ~ 1250 per eye with Dr. John Jarstad at the Evergreen Eye Clinic. Very happy with the results. My folks got their eyes done their and also had very good results/experiences. This was before the "no blade" thing came along, so that may have affected prices. My wife just got hers done a few months ago with the "no blade" option, and the tab was $4500. Seemed to be roughly the going rate out here, but pretty much everything is more expensive.

BTW - why are all of the passionate advocates of nationalization so unenthusiastic when someone volunteers their profession/industry for the same treatment. Strange.

Works as a bumper sticker, not terribly helpful elsewhere. And proper oversight equals...nationalization?

Good argument for developing a single healthcare data platform, bad argument for transforming all of health care into a public monopoly. Millitary procurements take place within a single payer system, and we've certainly never seen any corruption, waste, inefficiency, or politically motivated misallocations of resources there, have we? BTW, how would you feel about transferring control of IT/electronics/programming to the government? Again, surely the benefits of a single-payer system would be equally valuable in this sector of the economy.

I have an idea that Matt should wholeheartedly embrace, for the sake of intellectual consistency if nothing else. Legal services are a basic right, and there are far too many people in this country who cannot afford quality representation. Public defender's offices, for example, provide legal representation at a cost that's far lower than that which can be obtained in the private market for legal services. Think of the savings to be had, the efficiencies to be realized, and the vast expansion of coverage that will be realized under this model. Clearly the best solution is to adopt a single payer model to provide for universal legal coverage. The government will determine how much all attorney's services are worth, what the total quantity of legal services as a whole, and in each sub-specialty the country will need every year, and compel attorneys to provide representation at a fixed price that it deems fair and reasonable. There are some, who selfishness, greed, or a misplaced faith in "the market's" ability to allocate legal services in an efficient manner, or who question the government's ability to provide legal services that are of the same quality as those obtained in the private market for legal services, or who question the government's right to abridge the citizen's right to choose whichever attorney they think will best represent their interests, but one can see through the naked self interest inherent in these statements. How about it, Matt? What's good for medicine will be good for the law, no?

The government already provides health care for millions under medicare/medicaid/the VA, etc. Government health care is a fact on the ground, and I'm glad that the are programs whereby the states provide care to people who - through no fault of their own - can't reasonably be expected to pay for it. This includes children, the disabled, the elderly, the indigent, etc. Accepting that government has a role in the provision of health care for these people is one thing, accepting that transferring control over the entire health care system to the government and creating a public monopoly over the same is the optimal solution to all of the problems and the shortcomings that currently bedevil our healthcare system is quite another. Welfare payments to those who cannot work can be beneficial to those that need them. It does not follow that we should therefore transfer control of all employment and payrolls to the government.

"I think it is pretty clear that a systematic catalog of where we've invaded or intervened over the last sixty years (post WWII) has a lot closer relationship to where we have had economic interests at stake than it has had with the religious beliefs or internal politics or even the target government's political rhetoric.." Love those scare quotes. Seems like your last reply is an attempt to dodge the fact that no sane or rational explanation of US interventions around the world over the past sixty years is consistent with the thesis that you've put forward in this statement. When you get around to it, it would be interesting to see if you can reconcile how Japan, Europe, Canada, Korea, Taiwain, Australia, etc have managed to get their hands on all of the commodities that they need without seizing the lands that contain the greatest concentrations of the same by force, and how it is that you manage to get your hands on the coffee that you drink every morning without sending a private army to the Colombian highlands to physically seize it for you.

Yes, the Cold War was a minor footnote that had little or no influence these things. Kosovo/Serbia, Haiti, Somalia, etc - all fit into this hypothesis pretty well.

For starters.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Qutb "A History of the Arab Peoples" by Albert Hourani might also be helpful. ..... Japan has no oil whatsoever, and has been one of the world's leading economies for quite some time, yet they "control" all of the oil that they need to by using the resources that they do have to produce goods and services that they exchange for oil. Ditto for Europe. How is this possible without physical control over the resource? We get very little of our oil from foreign territories that we have direct control over, much less that we have conquered millitarily. How does one who insists that physical control over a territory is the sole, or even the optimal, means by which to obtain the resources in the said territory reconcile this theory with these empirical realities.

Quite a bit of the fault may lie with the defense, but my own prejudices are such that I suspect that the testimony of a pro-freestyle skier will matter quite a bit less to the average juror than the testimony produced by an physicist from Caltech who's never hit a jump before in his life. Thankfully there are states like Colorado that have passed statutes covering terrain parks, and Whistler will always be close after one more season of exile out here, so the damage from judgments like this that I disagree with will likely be contained to states like Washington.

I'd love to figure out how you transmogrified the lawsuit outcome into this thesis - it makes liberal conspiracy theories look rational. Every jump has some envelope of entry speed + skier weight that can land within a given comfort level. The smaller that envelope the worse the jump. The envelope can indeed be designed JayB, and it's no stretch to think there should be some reasonable standard for the resorts to design their jumps too, the same as they are required to maintain their lifts to a reasonable standard. I'd actually say it's velocity alone that matters, not the skiers weight, but whatever. A lift and a jump are fundamentally different, and arguing that that it's even possible to apply the same principles to them, much less that ski resorts should be expected to do so is one of the more ludicrous propositions that I've ever heard. One guy fucked up and crippled himself. No matter what parameters go into jump design - even infinite landings for 3 foot kickers - there's simply no way to eliminate the possibility that someone will do something completely fucking stupid and cripple or kill themselves on the said jump, much less specify globally valid quantitative parameters for jump design. The same design, on a different aspect, with different visibility, and different snow conditions, and different temperatures, hit by people with different skills will always produce variable risk that cannot be engineered away except by one set of boundary conditions obtained by reducing the height, width, etc of the said jump to zero.