RE: Third parties profiting off of poor outcomes for patients....in AMERICA!?
April 27, 2018 at 12:41 pm
(This post was last modified: April 27, 2018 at 1:12 pm by Neo-Scholastic.)
(April 26, 2018 at 11:39 am)Aegon Wrote: Neo, you're a smart guy, but for some reason when it comes to politics, you can't think for yourself. Do other people on this forum do the same but with left-wing sources? You bet, but that doesn't make it right. Come on man. Use your head.
I can accept the idea that others, such as yourself, can have vastly different political opinions that me and still be smart and highly educated. Why can’t you?
Perhaps from outside the UK, things look differently. I can fully acknowledge that the US healthcare system is a monstrosity and I have been dealing with its failings all my adult life. That does not mean that a federal government run single-payer system is the right solution. We already have one. It is called the Veteran's Administration and it is generally acknowledged to be a poorly run program that provides inadequate care, in the same way that nearly all government run programs are poorly run, inefficient, and distort the marketplace to the detriment of consumers and taxpayers.
The military procurement process includes specification requirements that result in $300 hammers that are no different from the ones in the hardware store. Locally, construction projects that receive government funding must be built with so-called “prevailing wages” of the Davis-Bacon Act. Those are basically union rates that are up to three times the market rate. While the idea is to encourage so-called living wages, the end result is that communities get 1/3 the affordable housing, 1/3 the community services, 1/3rd the parks, and 1/3 the infrastructure – all to steer work to a small group of well-connected large contractors. I personally wrote those pay requests to big contractors after being forced to turn away the small vendors I trust to get the job done on-time and under-budget.
I have no problem with a certain amount of regulations designed to protect the buying public from dangerous goods and fraud. But IMHO far too many regulations are put in place to achieve goals that do-gooder government officials feel are socially desirable or benefit larger private organizations that can petition government officials for favorable treatment. People forget that Jim Crow laws were government regulations that prevented businesses from providing equal services to the local black population. Real capitalism, unleased from government dictates, is the most color-blind system ever known. The only color it sees is green.
The 2008 housing crisis was fueled largely by government programs that encouraged people to buy homes they could not afford. No doubt NPR was running stories about all the poor people who just wanted single family homes for their families. The result was a massive distortion of the marketplace that made it lucrative for banks to lend money to people unprepared and insufficiently educated to take on large debt commitments. When the bubble burst, lower middle class people found themselves out for luck and banks deemed “Too-Big-To-Fail” were bailed out. The world economy crashes and only one person goes to jail. Things would have been much different if banks had had to make self-interested business decisions about to whom they should lend knowing full well they’d be on their own with no recourse to taxpayer funds to recover their poor choices.
Politicians do not spend millions of dollars in the hope of getting a salary in the low 6-figures. Big Business likes Big Government and every Senator retires a multi-millionaire. That’s not an accident and it isn’t for lack of laws and regulations to “protect the public” but rather it is because of those laws and regulations that supposedly “protect the public” that cronies and the politically connected are shielded from the financial burdens with which they have saddled the general public. The collusion of large business and willing politicians create regulatory and financial barriers-to-entry for small business also in the name of “protecting the public.”
Now you may think I’m wrong about all that and we can have those discussions. I’m not an expert on every public policy but that doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about these things or haven’t had personal experience with corruption and witnessed people I know getting free stuff from the government that they could have afforded if they hadn’t made poor life choices. For example, I had a prospective tenant complain that the security deposit was too high and he couldn’t afford it because, in his own words, “I bought a motorcycle in a moment of weakness.” How fortunate for him that the city has an assistant programs for poor souls like him who just cannot be blamed for his misfortune. The children whose parents lived off the county had popcorn, candy, and soda at the movie theater. But I didn't because my dad had nothing except a crop in the field to pay off the bank at the end of the season. You don’t hear those stories on NPR. Some farmers bought new cars after a good year. My folks bought tractors. Good thing for Social Security because that's all the farmers who bought new cars have for retirement. And they'll complain about how the "rich" should pay more taxes cause they supposedly don't have enough in their old age to get by. Guess who the rich people are - the farmers that bought tractors and more land instead of new cars.
I know a woman that started selling garage sale items on E-bay and she didn't even have her own computer! She's a complete success now. 1%. And the governement takes more the 50% of every penny she earnes. But people like Obama would say she "didn't build that". Oh no. Her friends and family, the ones that couldn't be bothered beyond working the hand-out system and complain about being oppressed, they think she owes them and are coming to her all the time for stuff always with some hard-luck story...the kind you hear of NPR.
It’s so easy to just dismiss my opinions, which is all they are and so are yours, as products of Fox News and conservative pundit talking points. Maybe you should consider that not everyone who disagrees with you politically is a brain-washed dolt. Maybe we have good reasons to be skeptical about the hard-luck stories on NPR when the suggested solutions are big government solutions to protect people from their poor life choices that ultimately benefit well-connected cronies and corrupt politicians to the detriment of everyone else.
