Should We Allow The Uninsured To Die?

tessaesque said:

The question asked last night wasn't about people who can't afford insurance, but people who choose not to have insurance. He also addressed the issue of the cost of medical treatment, which is the biggest inhibiting factor to access for people who cannot afford insurance.

Did that study look into the lifestyle differences of insured v. uninsured? Or did it just do a surface examination with no other evidentiary findings?

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It's likely another "study" with predetermined conclusions, that doesn't examine the other lifestyle factors involved with those that are insured vs. those that aren't.
These type of studies are very useful in swaying ignorant people.

tessaesque said:

Nice rant. Completely unrelated to my analogy, though.

How long to do wait at the DPS? After filling out a form the size of a postcard and gathering your birth certificate and SS card, how long are you made to wait until you get your license? How about the tax office? The DMV? Ever had to deal with the Fish and Wildlife department? What about the IRS? These are all programs and departments devised entirely by the government to regulate and control actions legislated by the government. And they're all bound up in red tape, lines, waiting lists, untrained, unprofessional, incapable staff, and tons upon tons of misinformation.

So you can blame everybody but the government for government inefficiency....but it's just more party-line nonsense designed to villify the people you like the least. Even if you consider the parties you mentioned above...guess what? The government decided whether or not those parties had any influence. So they're still the ones with their pants down here.

We can't even bid on a government job without jumping through a ridiculous number of hoops, and all we do is clean carpets. So I'm sorry if I don't fall into lock-step with the "government is our savior" bullhockey spewed as a justification for handing them the reigns and ability to train, regulate, monitor, and select the guy who measures out my anesthesia before surgery.

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Completely on target.

The problem here is that, no matter how right you are, most people don't know jack about how the medical system in the U.S. operates, the legislation that has been past in previous years that has influenced both the overhead costs and the other costs associated with care.

It's like talking to a brick wall, you have to overcome a huge amount of misinformation and plain ignorance, in our society to make people understand.
Which isn't likely to happen.

Harry Guerrilla said:

It's likely another "study" with predetermined conclusions, that doesn't examine the other lifestyle factors involved with those that are insured vs. those that aren't.
These type of studies are very useful in swaying ignorant people.

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Nonesense my wife owned a large salon...all her employees made 40 grand and more 15 yrs ago...and only a couple of them chose to pay for health insurance even when reduced group rates were offered to them through my wife and they all could have afforded it...they didnt think they needed it...they all made good money but if something catastrophic happened only the richest could afford to pay it out of pocket.
Do you actually believe that anyone is going to follow ron pauls ideas...do you think for a second that they would ever be implemented....your pissing up a rope...hes nuts...not all his ideas are bad and some I agree with ...but the rest are too far out there.
Stop and think...right now today if doctors and hospitals werent subisidized with our tax money to take care of illegal immigrants health care, there wouldnt be but a couple of hospitals with the doors open out west...they would all be closed and doctors would flee the area in drove...Paul is a weaver...he throws out these great sounding plausible argument that a small segment wants to hear, that will never happen in 2012...pauls been spouting the same things for years and has never taken into acct the changing world.....I have to laugh when the same Ron Paul lovers railed on McCain as being to old and out of touch and the bow before Ron Paul and hes older and waaaaaaaaay more out of touch

Pinkie said:

Do you agree with Ron Paul's POV, that the uninsured should be denied life-saving medical care?

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Paul is a medical doctor. I'm sure they still adhere to the Hippocratic oath these days.

And to deny emergency medical care to the uninsured would involve repealing the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act.

The real question is, who pays (or rather, who should pay) why, and how.

we should certainly not deny the uninsured access to life-saving treatments. especially in our current environment of unaffordable health care for individuals not eligible for a group policy.

the spartans put the weak, sick, feeble and infirm out in the elements to die.... :shrug:


let natural selection do its job

Helix said:

we should certainly not deny the uninsured access to life-saving treatments. especially in our current environment of unaffordable health care for individuals not
eligible for a group policy.

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True, but the uninsured that are not insured by choice rather than by poverty...how about them ? Now you may say ok they go to the emergency room and then bill them and do the go after their house and bank acct thing...sure...but what if it comes into the hundreds of thousands or possibly into 6 figuures and they cant pay...who pays then? govt of course because the hospitals will NOT eat those costs, they couldnt possibly survive those kinds of costs...as we speak the GOP is fighting the clause that makes everyone that can afford it by insurance..so tell me how can Ron Pauls idea ever be instituted....how do you get millions of illegal immigrants to be responsible for themselves....bah cmon people...

Universal health care would actually be great for businesses. Yes, you would need to institute a new tax to pay for it, but most businesses now days already pay health for employee health insurance. Private insurance is demonstrably less efficient than medicare (15-20 percent overheads vs 2 percent for medicare), which means the overall cost of the program would be lower. So businesses that currently have health benefits would save more money than they would have to pay in new taxes.

KaptainKraK said:

I agree with tessaesque, Ron Paul did not say this, I believe that if your going to start a debate, start it with a true question like....
Do you agree with the audience of the debate, on whether we should deny life-saving medical care to the uninsured?

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Thank you, sir.

My apologies.

New question: do you agree with the audience?

1Perry said:

It isn't the governments place to step in for either the inactions or the bad choices people make. It is a question for society to answer.

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Isn't government and society the same thing?

lpast said:

True, but the uninsured that are not insured by choice rather than by poverty...how about them ?

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if we choose to keep a largely private system, any individual who does not have a specific health care account with hundreds of thousands of dollars in it should be permitted to opt out. we are a society which does not let people die without treatment, and i think that's a good thing.

lpast said:

Now you may say ok they go to the emergency room and then bill them and do the go after their house and bank acct thing...sure...but what if it comes into the hundreds of thousands or possibly into 6 figuures and they cant pay...who pays then? govt of course because the hospitals will NOT eat those costs, they couldnt possibly survive those kinds of costs...as we speak the GOP is fighting the clause that makes everyone that can afford it by insurance..so tell me how can Ron Pauls idea ever be instituted....how do you get millions of illegal immigrants to be responsible for themselves....bah cmon people...

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the policy that some in the tea party apparently endorse is unworkable outside the theoretical.

rathi said:

I think the more pressing question is about allowing old people to die. 40% of medicare dollars go to the last month of the patients life. We spend huge amounts of money on incredibly expensive treatments with a minimal chance of success that would only buy a few more months of life in the best case scenario. If you are going to start sacrificing people for healthcare dollars, you should start with biggest expenses that bring in the least benefit.

Frankly, I would be downright ashamed to enact such draconian measure at the moment. The only reason every American doesn't have healthcare is because our current system is the most wasteful and inefficient system in the world. We spend more 142% more money than anyone else per capita, and yet can't cover 16% of our population. There is no shortage of healthcare dollars, only people willing to avoid pissing said money away.

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I could not agree with you more, rathi. And it's about to get 100xs worse.

Pinkie said:

Isn't government and society the same thing?

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no.

123456

Pinkie said:

Isn't government and society the same thing?

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Ideally, yes. In reality, not even close.

Pinkie said:

Do you agree with Ron Paul's POV, that the uninsured should be denied life-saving medical care?

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Here's a better question - Substitute 8-year-old girl, or 90-year-old Vet in the hypothetical and see how people sound saying. "We should allow an 8-year-old with a treatable illness to die because her parents don't have insurance." Or "that 90-year-old vet doesn't qualify for a that expensive procedure..."

I actually think Ron Paul is an intelligent guy with some interesting ideas. But when you take some of his ideas to their logical extreme, they become absurd and unworkable.

tessaesque said:

Nice rant. Completely unrelated to my analogy, though.

How long to do wait at the DPS? After filling out a form the size of a postcard and gathering your birth certificate and SS card, how long are you made to wait until you get your license? How about the tax office? The DMV? Ever had to deal with the Fish and Wildlife department? What about the IRS? These are all programs and departments devised entirely by the government to regulate and control actions legislated by the government. And they're all bound up in red tape, lines, waiting lists, untrained, unprofessional, incapable staff, and tons upon tons of misinformation.

So you can blame everybody but the government for government inefficiency....but it's just more party-line nonsense designed to villify the people you like the least. Even if you consider the parties you mentioned above...guess what? The government decided whether or not those parties had any influence. So they're still the ones with their pants down here.

We can't even bid on a government job without jumping through a ridiculous number of hoops, and all we do is clean carpets. So I'm sorry if I don't fall into lock-step with the "government is our savior" bullhockey spewed as a justification for handing them the reigns and ability to train, regulate, monitor, and select the guy who measures out my anesthesia before surgery.

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Government only has the powers that we give it. They work for us. If we view government as anything besides our employees, then we have screwed up royally.

Pinkie said:

Do you agree with Ron Paul's POV, that the uninsured should be denied life-saving medical care?

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As others have already pointed out this isn't Paul's position. I however will answer your question as you presented it. Yes, they should be allowed to die. When this becomes known we will have a society with sky high insurance converge.

RiverDad said:

As others have already pointed out this isn't Paul's position. I however will answer your question as you presented it. Yes, they should be allowed to die. When this becomes known we will have a society with sky high insurance converge.

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And lots of dead poor people.

Temporal said:

We have the highest cost of care and the most bloated medical system in the western world. Clearly what we have is not working efficiently or providing quality care.

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Does the US also suffer from the problem of having the largest average home size in the world?





Housing and health care are both superior goods. What this means is that as people become wealthier they want to consume more superior goods. Inferior goods are items which are consumed less when people become wealthier, say for instance, Raman Noodles or Kraft Dinner. There probably aren't many billionaires around who have a hankering for a nice plate of gooey "cheesy" Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

Our health care is some of the most expensive in the world because we, as a society, are pretty damn rich, and we spend money to buy ever better quality of care. Our home sizes are larger now than they used to be in the past and the quality of fixtures in our homes (granite countertops in mid-range homes) are also better because we are richer today than our parents and grandparents were back in the day and the homes are larger than those in other countries because we have more money to spend on housing than citizens of other countries.

People object to universal health care for philosophical reasons. It could have the potential to actually save us money.

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It could save us money by implementing rationing. That's how it works. If we implemented Canada's standards on the use of MRI machines, we'd have to get rid of something on the order of 8,400 of our 10,000+ machines in order to match Canada's per capita level of MRI machines. Sending fewer people for diagnostic testing will cut our expenses on MRI screening, so too will rationing the care such that every machine is utilized to full capacity, which means more people having to go for a screening at 11:30 at night after waiting 4 months for an appointment.

These are the trade-offs - if you like getting your MRI test done with a day or two so that your physician can act on that information in a timely manner then you have to pay for that convenience and if you don't mind a physician declaring that your symptoms don't meet the new conditions that are imposed to limit MRI screenings, then you'll save money.

Paschendale said:

And lots of dead poor people.

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No. Bare bones catastrophic insurance is within the meas of all poor people. The issue becomes one of priorities. We see this with the stories of families who are earning $90,000 per year and choosing to remain uninsured. They can afford it but they think that there are better ways for them to spend their money. The same rationale applies to people in poverty - if health care is important to you then you will find a way to pay for care that saves your life. Catastrophic care is an insurable event - catastrophic accidents don't happen to people all of the time, in fact, they are pretty rare events in people's lives, precisely what insurance is designed to cover.

Explain how this system of universal healthcare will be paid for, who get's the services (because there will always be limited resources) and where will be the economic incentives for reduction of cost and improvement of health care?

If you believe in "universal anything" you obviously don't understand economics.

Excellent now as an individual you can determine for yourself whether the cost of insurance outweighs the increased probability of death. BTW everyone is 100% likely to die just depends when and how.

Kulterkampf said:

Excellent now as an individual you can determine for yourself whether the cost of insurance outweighs the increased probability of death. BTW everyone is 100% likely to die just depends when and how.

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Some conditions are treatable with a fairly high acceptability of morbidity. Such as in heart disease a transplant can change one's life.

OscarB63 said:

the spartans put the weak, sick, feeble and infirm out in the elements to die.... :shrug:


let natural selection do its job

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It would be kinder and more efficient to simply make assisted suicide and euthanasia legal. Are you in favor of that?

DiAnna said:

It would be kinder and more efficient to simply make assisted suicide and euthanasia legal. Are you in favor of that?

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Why yes I am.