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Mandated Burial Plot

Should the government be able to regulate this market in advance as stated below?

  • Total voters
    21
Your Star said:
I never said the democrats were competent. If they were they probably could have gotten it done. It's just shows their incompetence that they couldn't with a freaking supermajority.
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Yep. Also part of it is that while Single Payer would be consistutional based on case law, that doesn't necessarily mean that 1) it wouldn't still be challenged in court (just means the government would have a better chance against it) and 2) doesn't mean it would be good to do (that's an argument for a different thread). I think the Dem's may've figured that the constitutional barriers to this law had a better chance to be defeated then the various legislative barriers to single payer
 
Zyphlin said:
Yep. Also part of it is that while Single Payer would be consistutional based on case law, that doesn't necessarily mean that 1) it wouldn't still be challenged in court (just means the government would have a better chance against it) and 2) doesn't mean it would be good to do (that's an argument for a different thread). I think the Dem's may've figured that the constitutional barriers to this law had a better chance to be defeated then the various legislative barriers to single payer
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you attribute far too much prescience to the dem legislators
 
Zyphlin said:
I think the Dem's may've figured that the constitutional barriers to this law had a better chance to be defeated then the various legislative barriers to single payer
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The "constitutional barriers" to this law weren't even on anyone's radar screen until after it had already been passed. They were widely seen as very radical views of the Constitution that had very little chance of even being heard, let alone accepted, by the Supreme Court.

Sadly, I'm convinced that it didn't really matter WHAT the content of the Affordable Care Act was...Republicans were going to mount a PR assault on *any* workable health care bill, and failing that, a legal assault on the law based on whatever flimsy legal arguments they could cobble together (and egged on by conservative judges). If it wasn't the individual mandate, they'd find some other pretext to challenge it. And quite possibly succeed, regardless of the legal merits.
 
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barbarian_style said:
I am speaking of death insurance not health insurance, nice spin but stay on topic.

It already comes out of my taxes so I would be paying the same. If I am forced to buy something you say I should have for your benefit not mine as an individual responsibility is ridiculous.
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But that is the difference between the two, as I said in my first post. However, I did think we were speaking of health insurance.
 
There's more to this than meets the eye. I worked for a burial vault service and buried hundreds of people. I owned a monument business and again circled the periphery of death.
Burial could be simple. Rinse the body. Wrap it in linen or some cloth, dig a hole and drop it in and the corpus would be good fertilizer. That's way too simple. Dig a really big hole and install a concrete box to hold the corpus. Put a lid on the box and there will be no settling of the surface from decomposition. This is to make the cemetary look pretty and organized. Kills labor jobs. You could eleminate the concrete box and use a pine box and it will decompose, settle and require landscaping. You send the body to an undertaker and he gonna shoot it up with formaldehyde so it doesn't smell bad after the makeup artist gets it ready to display. Concrete box, coffin, formaldehyde and thousands of dollars so that the cemetary looks nice.
I just want to be buried in my yard overlooking my pond and I'm gonna. This is what I have told my kids. Rinse me off in the pond (people crap themselves when they die, so the rinsing is necessary), roll me up in the huge white linen cloth I have in the closet for this purpose and drop me in the hole, cover me up, and have a party. I want to be good fertilizer, and expect to be, so occasionally throw some seeds down on the spot. If anything blooms, it will be a touch of me and perhaps merit a smile. I will have the hole dug before I pass and a small stone (3 feet) from the local creek to mark the spot. I just want you to know that this issue has a wide range of possibilities. If the County wants to dig a small hole next to me and throw somebody in without formaldehyde, it's ok by me. More fertilizer. Fertilizer and that's the key word here.
 
Getting back to the OP. I don't know. I do know I am getting really sick of the government telling me how to live, let alone what to do after I die. I am to the point where I just want to be left alone to live and be happy and let others do the same as long as it is not hurting anyone else.

Uncle Sam, I love you man. Now please leave us the hell alone.
 
Kandahar said:
The question about burial insurance was the one posed by Justice Alito during Tuesday's questioning. The solicitor-general attempted to draw a distinction between health insurance and burial insurance...but my view is that they ARE legally the same, and the government CAN mandate that people purchase burial insurance if it desires (at least to the extent that it affects interstate commerce). Whether it SHOULD mandate burial insurance is a separate question for Congress to decide, but I see no constitutional problem with it.
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Exactly...it's definately the same argument but the costs carried by society is not near the costs of the non-insured.
 
Boo Radley said:
They also found they needed a stronger federal government, which is what the articles of confederation failed, as it was too weak. And limited doesn't mean absent. How far and how limited is the issue.
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There is no issue. The powers are enumerated. It is clear to anyone that can read and comprehend english.

Now, I know it is hard for some to discuss without name calling.
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I have noticed this in you.
 
Kandahar said:
Unfortunately it also means that plenty of sensible amendments cannot be passed. There's no way that our government could continue to function with an 18th-century constitution that is so difficult to amend, if we actually tried to follow the original intent.

No one is suggesting it should be easy to amend the Constitution. But by making it nearly impossible to amend, the framers guaranteed (whether intentionally or accidentally) the necessity of a "living document" approach to the Constitution rather than an originalist approach.



:roll:
Don't bother to couch your argument in progressive terms; it doesn't fool me. What you are asking is to turn the clock back to 1789 (with the exception of a few amendments since then). "Amend the Constitution" is simply not a viable solution for much of anything. Like I said, ours is the hardest constitution in the entire world to amend...not to mention the oldest. So unless you think that a bunch of dudes in wigs in the 18th century had all the political solutions for all time, something has to give...because an originalist approach combined with a nearly-impossible amendment process are simply not compatible with the modern world.
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Complete and utter liberal BS. The continued attempt to get out of having to follow the constitution because it is inconvenient.

Suggesting that bible thumpers would love an amendment to ban gay marriage are not 'progressive terms', they are my terms. Progressives haven't given much more than lip service to providing equality to gay's in terms of marriage.
 
Hmmmm...

IF..... we died multiple times through our time here, and those service costs were skyrocketing, that we don't know what the services cost will be going forward, along with the fact that many were getting the service without paying for it and that was driving up the costs for me, then yeah, I would think it would be a good idea for Congress to come in and get everyone to participate in the pool to help control the costs.

BUT...since we only die once, and the costs are fairly well known, not too many can skip out and it is not putting a significant burden on me....then no, Congress should not get involved. Besides, I think the states have this well regulated as it is.

This whole question is the Scalia broccoli argument, it is so weak.
 
Ockham said:
I agree cremation is the way to go. I just dont know how it could be universally implemented.
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who is going to complain
if they come forward to do so, you say 'here is the body, now dispose of it at your expense'
 
Arbo said:
There is no issue. The powers are enumerated. It is clear to anyone that can read and comprehend english.



I have noticed this in you.
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Again, if you think it is clear, and therefore no room for debate, I suggest you don't understand it as well as you think. I've already shown there is disagreement.
 
justabubba said:
who is going to complain
if they come forward to do so, you say 'here is the body, now dispose of it at your expense'
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You'd be surprised... the family who didn't want to pay for the funeral WOULD turn around and sue the county if they thought they could, after the fact. I know cremations are less expensive.
 
Cheaper still to bury them in my back yard. :coffeepap
 
Boo Radley said:
Again, if you think it is clear, and therefore no room for debate, I suggest you don't understand it as well as you think. I've already shown there is disagreement.
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Yes, I know it is normal liberal mantra to suggest others do not 'get it' or 'understand'. It is a part of that whole making fun of and name calling which takes the place of actual content and personal thoughts.
 
Zyphlin said:
So talking ot my relatively apolitical wife about the health care law last night and the arguments made in court, she brought up an analogy that I actually thought was rather on point and one I wanted to expand on.

People die. When people die, if there is no family or no one able to provide for their burial we do not simply leave the dead decaying body to lie out and about. Someone bears the cost to go forward with disposing of the body either thorugh burial or cremation. And when that's ont a family member its putting an unnecessary financial burden on portions of society. Everyone, in some fashion, will enter into this market place at some point. There is no an individual who at some point in their life will be involved in some fashion with this particular market. We don't know when an individual may enter this market, and the entrance to it could be sudden and without any forthought.

As such, should the government be able to regulate this market in advance by mandating that every individual do one of the following two things or be levied a tax penalty?:

1. Purchase Life Insurance, assuring that everyone who dies will have some money doled out that will cover after-death costs. To go along with this, regulation will be put on Life Insurance that it must cover ALL forms of death at least to a minimum amount, including suicide.

2. Purchase a burial plot and coffin or pre-purchase cremation services.
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The answer to this is similar to asking: when a non-married relative passes, does their wealth go to anyone other than the state when no will/testament exists? should the same not be true for a poor person's death? if not, and the poor option should no longer exist, i.e., loners can't die without pre=paying for death, should having no will/testament result in remaining wealth of dead be equal distribution to the most closely related relatives instead of going to the government?

Consistency is what i'm suggesting, and i'm sure a death insurance legislation would not support that.

Are people going to be fined if they refuse to buy death insurance? Will the cost go to the closest blood family member(s) automatically for those who don't buy death insurance? How could such a thing be enforced/legislated? The funeral business depends on the cultural values of "saying goodbye" (i.e., values encourage, force people to take care of their dead) and if that's not enough, the business should adjust accordingly.

This sort of law seems ridiculous. Such legislation would negate the definition of business to funeral homes and the death industry. business requires choice, not only a choice of services to choose from but also a choice to choose at all.
 
Zyphlin said:
This is actually different. You are not mandated to pay into social security in a technical sense. Let me explain based on my understanding of the court case that challenged SS and the governments argument.

Social Security Taxes does not actually directly go to social security. IE there is no actual legitimate trust fund where the money you pay for social security goes directly into said fund and is used to pay back out to you. In reality, "Social Security Taxes" are simply a form of income taxes that goes into the general treasurey. At the same time, "Social Security benefits" are offered to people by the government at a specific rate. These benefits are paid for by the general treasurey fund which allocates moneys to Social Security (and in cases where it allocates less than it should, because its using SS money elsewhere, it gives it essentilaly an IOU).

So with Social Security, in reality, you're not paying for social security in a direct sense. You're paying the government a tax called "social security tax" that goes into the pot with all the other taxes. The government is providing a general service called Social Security to you and it pays for it from that general fund. However, THEORITCALLY SPEAKING either one of those parts...the SS tax or the SS benefits...could go away while the other one remain in place as they don't DIRECTLY connect to each other from a fiscal stand point (though from a legislative stand point that's a different story).

That is why, when SS was argued, it was able to avoid the notion of the government forcing you to pay for social security. It isn't. It's forcing you to pay for a tax. And along with that tax, they are implimenting a new government benefit.

In the case of health insurance, or "burial insurance", there are a few issues that make it different than social security. First and foremost, you're not paying the GOVERNMENT money...you're paying a private company money. So its not the government directly taxing you, but rather overtly taxing you by forcing you to purchase something. Second, the government isn't providing the benefit in this case but rather its a private industry.

Now, what this does mean however is that...as far as case law goes...it would be constitutional in a general sense to do a single payer system. In that case, an individual is paying a "health care tax" that goes into the general fund rather than paying SPECIFICALLY for health care. Along with this, government provides health coverage to its citizens as a benefit, not directly tied to the "health care tax" but theoritically having the deficit in the budget it would cause be covered by the new tax.
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Great post bro. I actually learned something reading this. And good on YourStar for giving you a like after showing her the difference between SS and healthcare.
 
This 2,700 page joke that the supremes are going to throw in the trash never had to happen if Dem's could just be honest about what they want and that is single payer. Our health care system is a mess and in a civilized country health care should be a right not a privilege of wealth at least on an intellectual level. If obama and Dem's would have said we want single payer and here is how much your taxes will go up and here is how it will work I would have listened. That way we could have had an honest debate and been able to weigh what we currently pay for health insurance against how much our taxes would go up to fund a single payer system. Instead they chose this back door smoke and mirrors back room deal making mess that wasted 4 years of our time and money.
 
Arbo said:
Yes, I know it is normal liberal mantra to suggest others do not 'get it' or 'understand'. It is a part of that whole making fun of and name calling which takes the place of actual content and personal thoughts.
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It isn't liberal or conservative to not acknowledge realities as you are doing. The fact is knowledgeable and honest people on both sides have real disagreements. Pretending that this isn't so is what I'm calling you on.
 
Boo Radley said:
It isn't liberal or conservative to not acknowledge realities as you are doing. The fact is knowledgeable and honest people on both sides have real disagreements. Pretending that this isn't so is what I'm calling you on.
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You are not calling me on anything. You are dodging and diverting. I'd guess you've done it in the range of 18000+ times around here. As I said, it is quite transparent.
 
Your Star said:
The question I have is why is the mandate in such question when you are already mandated to pay into social security?
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That one blatantly unconstitutional and fraudulent scam has been forced upon us, and has withstood any legal challenges, is not a very good argument in favor of another.
 
earthworm said:
The mistake made by some many "Constitution lovers"..
These problems, these situations simply did not exist at the time of the Constitution...So how in the world could the framers have written anything.
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Yes, they did, actually. They wrote into the Constitution specific provisions for amending it as necessary, to deal with circumstances unforeseen at the time that the original document was written.

If there is a solid enough body of public opinion to the effect that the federal government needs to be granted some new power not originally granted, then the process exists by which to amend the Constitution in order to grant it this new power.


earthworm said:
News flash !
Today, things are different...
And, its our government's responsibility to handle this care of the people - but only the financial end...IN MY OPINION.
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No, it is the responsibility of individuals to see to their own needs and those of their families.
 
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