Health care consumes resources. In a free market system, health care would be contract-based like every other free-market system. Resources would be supplied by the patient, or the patient would not receive treatment.
But wait. A contract is invalid if the parties involved don't consent, or is incompetent to contract. That means that an unconscious individual requiring treatment would never receive it, because they couldn't consent to pay beforehand. The same applies to children, or the mentally challenged. So what do we do in those situations?
Well, we either treat, or we don't. If we don't treat, people die. Lots of people. If we treat, we run the risk of the doctor not getting paid, especially in cases where the patient literally can't pay. But someone's got to pay the doctor, or health care ceases to exist. We have to have some capacity for a doctor to be paid by someone other than the patient.
In other words, we have to have socialized medicine. The only remaining question is, who pays?
My vote is for the people who are hurt the least. Why on earth would we cause more harm than necessary? Seems rather un-medical...
Saturday, February 27, 2016
Saturday, February 20, 2016
Mosquito-Borne Illness: Save the Doggies
I've talked before about mosquito-borne illnesses. Mosquitoes kill over a million people every year. We could kill all the mosquitoes everywhere with minimal environmental impact, and save all those lives. But we don't. After all, those diseases don't happen here. I mean, sure, West Nile Virus has killed nearly 2,000 Americans since 1999, but that's a rounding error, right?
Well, the Zika virus has peoples' attention now. I'd rather kill all the mosquitoes before this virus starts to spread further. But that kind of forward-thinking argument doesn't get very far sometimes, so let me make a more immediate one: mosquitoes are directly costing you money every year.
Heartworm is mosquito-borne, and infects dogs and cats across the United States. I'm having trouble finding the number of reported cases in the US, but there are an estimated 160 million cats and dogs in the country. Part of good pet-care is giving your cat or dog a heartworm preventative each month, like HeartGard. Supposing you get a good deal, that's $50/year. Supposing only 10% of pets actually get that medication, that's $8 billion dollars a year we collectively spend on heartworm prevention. And I bet that 10% number is way low.
We could kill all the mosquitoes for far less than that. Why don't we?
Saturday, February 13, 2016
Bet you don't understand socialism
I've seen a large number of posts about Bernie Sanders, most of which show a distressing lack of understanding. I'm not some hardcore Bernie fan, I just hate misinformation. I'm writing this to respond to all of these mistaken posts at once, in order to help mitigate the damage being caused. Unknowingly repeating a lie does just as much damage as lying on purpose. If you spread misinformation, you have a moral obligation to stop. So please, if you see any of the same lies I have, don't share them. Shut them down. Now, on to the corrections:
Socialism is not communism. Communism advocates the elimination of money, property, and government. Socialism was originally conceived as an intermediate step towards communism, but it's never actually been practiced as that. There are a huge number of variants of socialism, and treating them all as if they're the same as each other and the same as theoretical communism is lazy and dishonest.
Socialism is not inherently totalitarian. The Soviet Union was a socialist dictatorship. Europe is a socialist democracy. This is why Bernie Sanders is called a democratic socialist. This is completely distinct from being a Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist, or any other unpleasant-ist.
Democratic socialism, by definition, does not eliminate individual freedom. By every measure taken by every group, Europe is at least as free as the United States, if not more so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Justice_Project#WJP_Rule_of_Law_Index_2014
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Property_Rights_Index
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
Socialism is not a fundamental rewriting of the structure of the United States. Everything we do is socialist. Don't believe me? Suppose I told you you were required to pay taxes to fund your protection against calamity. You don't get to opt out and trust to your youth or wealth to save you; everyone is required to pay, and everyone is protected. Does this description of socialized medicine make you angry? Sound un-American? Well, I'm not talking about medicine; I'm describing fire departments. And police forces. And jails, and courts, and elections, and schools, and emergency relief, and the military... where's the difference? What some call socialized medicine is just an extension of the fundamental concept of every government, including ours: taxes suck, but they're often better than the alternative. That transactional balance is where the discussion has to be. Are you getting what you're paying for? If the discussion is about having taxes at all, you're really contemplating whether you want to have a civilization in the first place. That's not a discussion I care to have. If you think having no government would be great, move to Somalia. You'll find it more to your liking.
We have had socialized health care for decades, just an extremely bad version of it. Federal law requires hospital emergency rooms to treat people regardless of ability to pay. Who do you think pays the ER bills of those who can't pay for themselves? All the patients who can pay, obviously. We're already not free-market by shifting costs away from point of consumption. Wouldn't it make more sense to shift the costs to some place consciously chosen to do the least damage, instead of forcing them onto those barely able to pay, ruining additional lives and creating more medical bankruptcies? What outcome can there possibly be from that, except the creation of more poor who can't pay? If you want free-market health care, you have to be in favor of letting ERs throw out people who can't pay. Horrified by that? Good, you're a decent human being. But you're also one flavor of socialist. Get over it. Personally, I think that if we're going to have socialized medicine, we should have a variety that doesn't suck.
Some forms of socialism work better than our present systems. Europe has been more socialist than we are, and getting better results. Anybody who tells you we have the best health care on earth is lying to you. Look at the survival rates of serious medical conditions; many European countries are comparable to the US, and for some diseases we're way behind. Our infant mortality rate is triple what it could be. That's 17,000 babies per year dying unnecessarily. We're 40th in life expectancy. And we're paying vastly more for this substandard system.
This country was not founded in opposition to socialism. We were founded in response to a failure of representative democracy. It would be no less of a failure to tell the people of this country that they can't have socialized medicine, if that's what they choose to have.
If I see any more lies I need to respond to, I'll update this post.
Socialism is not communism. Communism advocates the elimination of money, property, and government. Socialism was originally conceived as an intermediate step towards communism, but it's never actually been practiced as that. There are a huge number of variants of socialism, and treating them all as if they're the same as each other and the same as theoretical communism is lazy and dishonest.
Socialism is not inherently totalitarian. The Soviet Union was a socialist dictatorship. Europe is a socialist democracy. This is why Bernie Sanders is called a democratic socialist. This is completely distinct from being a Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist, or any other unpleasant-ist.
Democratic socialism, by definition, does not eliminate individual freedom. By every measure taken by every group, Europe is at least as free as the United States, if not more so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Justice_Project#WJP_Rule_of_Law_Index_2014
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Property_Rights_Index
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
Socialism is not a fundamental rewriting of the structure of the United States. Everything we do is socialist. Don't believe me? Suppose I told you you were required to pay taxes to fund your protection against calamity. You don't get to opt out and trust to your youth or wealth to save you; everyone is required to pay, and everyone is protected. Does this description of socialized medicine make you angry? Sound un-American? Well, I'm not talking about medicine; I'm describing fire departments. And police forces. And jails, and courts, and elections, and schools, and emergency relief, and the military... where's the difference? What some call socialized medicine is just an extension of the fundamental concept of every government, including ours: taxes suck, but they're often better than the alternative. That transactional balance is where the discussion has to be. Are you getting what you're paying for? If the discussion is about having taxes at all, you're really contemplating whether you want to have a civilization in the first place. That's not a discussion I care to have. If you think having no government would be great, move to Somalia. You'll find it more to your liking.
We have had socialized health care for decades, just an extremely bad version of it. Federal law requires hospital emergency rooms to treat people regardless of ability to pay. Who do you think pays the ER bills of those who can't pay for themselves? All the patients who can pay, obviously. We're already not free-market by shifting costs away from point of consumption. Wouldn't it make more sense to shift the costs to some place consciously chosen to do the least damage, instead of forcing them onto those barely able to pay, ruining additional lives and creating more medical bankruptcies? What outcome can there possibly be from that, except the creation of more poor who can't pay? If you want free-market health care, you have to be in favor of letting ERs throw out people who can't pay. Horrified by that? Good, you're a decent human being. But you're also one flavor of socialist. Get over it. Personally, I think that if we're going to have socialized medicine, we should have a variety that doesn't suck.
Some forms of socialism work better than our present systems. Europe has been more socialist than we are, and getting better results. Anybody who tells you we have the best health care on earth is lying to you. Look at the survival rates of serious medical conditions; many European countries are comparable to the US, and for some diseases we're way behind. Our infant mortality rate is triple what it could be. That's 17,000 babies per year dying unnecessarily. We're 40th in life expectancy. And we're paying vastly more for this substandard system.
This country was not founded in opposition to socialism. We were founded in response to a failure of representative democracy. It would be no less of a failure to tell the people of this country that they can't have socialized medicine, if that's what they choose to have.
If I see any more lies I need to respond to, I'll update this post.
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