Unless your point is that they just cut payments, and therefore service, by denying evertying instead of just when people are right about to die, seriously?

How do you defend all the libertarians arguing against reform, against Obama and FOR the insurance companies, who "are entrenched in the system"?

You'll find the arguments aren't what you think they are.

who is doing this?

I like how the people arguing for competition and against mandates to buy a company x's product are somehow pro-company x.

The people who want to mandate people buy their product are really sticking it to those dirty corporatist bastards though!

HMMM ...OK

So why are they going to pass a law mandating that all adults go to these companies and purchase their product? Why a minimum benifit?

My understanding of both house and senate bills is that I will not be allowed (by law) to have a catastrohic health plan. As a forty year old, I will have to buy a plan with the governments "minimum benifits" which is going to run me around $500.00 a month. I have a 5k annual deductable plan now for a $136.69 a month.
I am willing and able to pay cash for my first 5K in health services anually. I do NOT WANT to pay an extra $350 a month for added benifits (I probably won't use). I'm pretty healthy and very rarely go to the doctor.

Of course I don't trust the government. IS obama telling the truth that I can keep my plan? Nope! Not when he makes it illegal for my carrier to offer it. Washington is just going to cost me more money and create new problems. Of course they will have alot of pictures takin of themselves and brag about their accomplishment.

I wish the government would GTFO of my life.

ty

I was referring to the Public Option debate (which also applies to Single Payer/Medicare for all.) Please define an argument against either that doesn't involve defending the right of the rent seekers to continue to extract their pound of flesh in perpetuity.

The same argument 2+2 politics posters make against every single government program.. bla bla it's the government... bla bla held at gunpoint.. bla bla slavery and theft.

The problem is that you are increasing the rent seeking behavior, not decreasing it, with a mandate and PO that does not take over the entire market. Insurance companies would love nothing more but a requirement to buy their product.

Frankly, the argument you are making is laughable. You are arguing that the current system is full of rent seeking behavior, thus the only solution is to wildly increase political intervention to er, avoid using political influence to make a profit? This seems counterintuitive.

It's pretty simple. If you remove the avenues that companies can use to wield political influence in the market, then the rent seeking behavior will not be possible anymore. You seem to be confusing the fact that Libertarians don't blame corporations for taking advantage of a corporatist system for a defense of those companies. Libertarians rather remove the source of the problem instead of trying to patch over each symptom.

DE,

A pound of flesh is a pound of flesh. Doctors and drugs and MRIs are going to be paid with your flesh either way. You want the government as the middle man. I don't want a middle man at all, but I need one in the event of a catostrophic health problem.

What I want doesn't effect you. But what you want effects ME. My interests are vastly more important to me than your interests.

If you want to make some kind of non-for-profit health care thing that is not government funded go ahead. The problem with the "public option" is that the people that are strong proponents of this are true single payer folks. The plan is pretty clear:

1. pass reform bill with public option

2. couple years later pass bill lowering cap on premiums/ mandate more benifits (4 private INS Co.)

3. Rinse repeat until it is impossible for private insurance companies to exist.

US is single payer in 10-20 years.

I know where this is going and I don't like it.

See, right now I can tell Anthem to F off if I want. I do not want the IRS coming after me cuz I don't want to purchase the government plan.

This is just not true. Corporations will always be incented to seek out, establish and protect rent seeking opportunities and the use of non-economic means to do so does not require the government's presence to be effective.

Yes you can, up to the point you get sick, after which point you will find out how good a deal your catastrophic policy actually was, and instead of telling anthem to F off you will be asking them to please use vaseline next time.

Peetar, please cite the claim that the mandate will force everyone to buy 500$/month insurance.

I'd rather have the government protecting my interests... than some "libertarian super consumer advocacy group".

GET THIS.. government is by the people, for the people, and representative of the people. Yes our democracy has been corrupted, but let's work to fix that instead of constantly discussing some fantasy land..

OK how do you suggest we do that?

By the way, contrary to popular belief, it was not the tax exemption for employer provided insurance that cemented that model into place, but the experience of the non-profit Blues which convinced the for-profit insurance companies that the adverse selection problems that they had assumed would make medical insurance unprofitable could be overcome by selling coverage to large companies, whose employees tended to be relatively young and healthy and whose automatic enrollment would bypass adverse selection. Even without the tax deduction, the industry would likely be lined up in the same fashion it is today as there simply is no profitable model for selling individual health insurance plans that are both affordable and actually do what the person that's purchasing the plan thinks they will do if they get sick.

Stop voting for democrats and republicans.

I mostly agree with that statement and definitely agree we should work to fix the system.

Quite obviously you make better use of your vote. It would be good if you started to do this


The problem with both the American and British system of first past the post is that it encourages duopolies (Republican/Democrat and Labour/Conservative). That is because people are sold the idea that there is such a thing as a wasted vote, which there is it's just not what you think it is. If you vote for a party just so the other party does not get elected then you are thoroughly wasting your vote, it's actually what these duopolies crave as such negative voting only distributes votes amongst two parties.

The funniest thing I've seen in relation to this is on the simpsons treehouse of horror VII with Kang and Kodos and how stupid the American electoral system has become.

FWIW I'm a big fan of proportional representation

EDIR: I think as Libertarians this forum should be quite up for proporional representation too.

the idea of "fixing" democracy is far more fantasyland than anything any acist every wrote.

So you're saying that the chance of getting a satisfactory government through democracy is < than the chance of getting ACland to work.

I don't believe you and would like to see your reasoning.

100%. Democracy (especially as it was concieved in the US) is designed to keep power away from the people and in the hands of the politically connected few. You can't fix it because it's already working perfectly as designed.

I agree that in countries where democracy effectively becomes a duopoly of competing governments that Lobbyists wield immense influence, but is that not due to the fact that who's in power is inherently fixed so keeping in with the Democrats/Republicans is the equivalent to keeping in with the King/despot.

I will try and keep this of away from PR. I had never heard of Doubleagles "rent seeker" term before but quite liked it when I read up on it. It seems to me that rent-seeking behaviour is generally promoted where there is a high level of inertia between the shifts of power. Company X under the high inertia model finds it cheaper to lobby the government (in this case one party) to pass regulations in favour of company X's interests than it would updating their business.

In ACland I believe that there is no government so there would be no-one to lobby so there would be no perverse regulation. I do see the logic in this but feel that the loss of government would outweigh the benefit of the former.

In PRland the government is essentially weak as it needs over 50% of the vote to form a majority government and will most likely have to form a coalition government. The effect of this is that the government in power has a lot more incentive to do what their voters will want instead of what the corpratists would want. This generally leads to more equitable outcomes, which as ACers is what I thought you were after.

The problem I have with PR is that when they try to form a coalitional government they are bargaining and horse trading with other peoples money. So say Party X gets 2% of the vote and their platform is they want 5 billion spent on some god awful useless nonsense they are likely to get it in order to ensure their support because the party that got 34% isn't paying with their own money but the benefit of that 2% is accruing directly to them. Public cost private gain is the worst possible situation.

PR systems are far more representative than the american one, you libertarian types would almost certainly get 5% of the vote and thus 5% of the POWER

Uh, no. Groups can have 5% of the vote and 0% of the power, or 5% of the vote and 50% of the power. This is why PR sucks.

Moreover, you tend to give power to extremist parties, and the general flow of politics varies much more, which significant shifts to the left and right. Our system basically ensures moderation.