I have read many threads and posts on this and other forums. I very rarely state any of my own thoughts or comments anywhere. I do spend a lot of time thinking about what you all have written. And I appreciate your thought provoking discussions. I have finally registered and after careful consideration decided to share a thought that has been pressing on my mind for sometime now.
“If we are going to get true healthcare reform in our nation we have to first debate the real issue.”
Most discussions on healthcare reform are centered on issues that are irrelevant and only lead to discourse and ill feelings. How many un-insured Americans exist, if we should have a public option, anything about pre-existing conditions, the cost of health insurance, death panels, coverage of illegal immigrants and all the other topics like this fall into this category.
All of these topics are irrelevant if your fundamental understanding of healthcare differs from those that you are discussing. Two main foundations I have discovered are as follows:
Healthcare is a right and should be treated as such.
Healthcare is a service provided and should be treated as such.
If you do not have this common ground as an understanding all other topics considering healthcare will be fruitless. Therefore if we wish to see true healthcare reform in our nation that will not become a cancer in our society we must have this debate. We must decide as a nation how healthcare fits within our social contract. Is it a right or service provided? This is the debate that should be taking place, not all the other nonsense.
Without this debate, discussion, compromise and a solution we all can agree; any and all action done through healthcare reform will have long-term catastrophic effects within our society.
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve had this debate on another forum (granted, it was a bodybuilding / powerlifting forum, so my expectations were low), and I was surprised how many people say it’s not a right.
Especially given that most people would agree that we should have the right to “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In many circumstances, a person cannot live without healthcare. If one has a right to life, and healthcare is a fundamental part of keeping a person alive in a situation where their life is at risk through no fault of their own, then it seems to follow that healthcare is also a right.
Agree. Should we not be discussing the changes? Not how we implement the solution but how these changes effect the foundation of healthcare?
How can you have compromise or even any type of agreement when you have two completely different understandings of what you are trying to compromise? One person is calling it an egg and the other an orange. Are we going to cook it or peel it? Is our solution to make an omelet or to make orange juice? When you try to crack a person’s orange and cook it on a skillet he is not going to be very happy. Until we decide it is an egg or an orange anything we do will have long-term catastrophic results.
On the other hand, as you stated, problems evolve and even rights evolve. The farther we go down this path without deciding if it is an egg or an orange the farther we complicate and muddle the problem. Therefore I agree it is a pressing issue that needs to be addressed for the reasons you have stated but the root needs to be addressed not the symptoms.
This is my point. I intentionally did not give my opinion which of the two I believe it is because I don’t think that is as important as the fact that we are all so divided on which it actually is. The understanding that many view it is a right and many view it as a service provided is the real first step to true healthcare reform.
Forcing your idea on the other never works. Look at abortion. The understanding of when life begins has never been worked through, instead one opinion was forced over the other. The problem has lingered for decades. As emotionally charged as abortion is it truly only effects the small percentage of our population that have to make that decision personally in their lives. Healthcare is an issue that truly will effect everyone’s lives. So if it goes forward the same way as abortion we will have a cancer in our social order that will dwarf the abortion issue and have even longer effects.
Do you really think that will be healthy for our society? Do you think our society can handle such a event? Therefore, “without this debate, discussion, compromise and a solution we all can agree (a right or service provided); any and all action done through healthcare reform will have long-term catastrophic effects within our society.”
Well, the conception of rights is not the only way to skin this cat. The idea of health care as a public utility circumvents rights. Treating the generation of electricity as a public utility doesn’t establish a right. It’s just the most efficient way of providing electricity.
This a root that those that believe it as a right could agree and those that believe it is a service provided could also agree. This is the debate, discussion I am referring. I truly believe if we can find this common ground, all the issues currently being argued would quickly vanish.
I believe so. If the argument can be made that the most cost-effective way to provide this service is as a public utility (which I think it can) then this may be a way to avoid blindly ideological discourse. But rights are generally seen as rights against the state - politics can not be avoided in this case - in fact, it’s all about politics. Which is okay, except that most message-board politicos desire anything but agreement.
I would add that our present system of power generation doesn’t preclude “living off the grid” or (in some cases) privately-generated electricity.
Alas, I don’t have time to go into depth right now - if it’s slow at work tonight, maybe then.
But think of a village - the inhabitants of which all have private wells for water. As the village grows, and depending on the available technology, it may become more efficient to install a common water supply and delivery system.
Or just think about hospitals. As more expensive technology becomes available, hospitals have less incentive to be self-contained. MRI machines are shared. Which means that overhead is shared. Hospitals specialise, so as not to wastefully duplicate services. Improvements in IT, telecoms and transportation allow this. Hospitals band together as groups. This is already happening. Simple economy of scale. A single payer/single provider system is the culmination of this process.
What is so great about the common citizen? What has he ever done to deserve wealth?
If there’s a problem with the way money is distributed in the world, people need to set up new businesses or ceate new banks, which invest differently. Our morally liberal society doesn’t run on a dogmatic idea of justice or fairness, but on constant and intelligent exertion of capital, which still mainly consists of capacity for creative thought. A bank has nothing if it just has money - it needs to be clever and actively involved enough in the worlds scientific and cultural trends to make that money work, to lend to the right people, the businesses who are capable of, if not paying the money back, at least form an interesting asset, not a dead end.
Maybe I’m not seeing the conspiracies in their full extent, but I’m pretty sure the ugly tentacles are just extensions of the main drive for increase of working capital, and that tentacles die out when the core shifts it’s attention to different markets, at least when they are based on merit instead of ideology. A genuine revolution would not come from a society giving up on it’s focus on natural resources and military power, because these two are indispensable for a society stable enough to warrant growth, but from (re)integrating into this focus a sense of moral self worth, which allows for new industries to be set up without the common citizen antagonizing the old ones into defensive behavior.
I’m just not buying this. I don’t see much “intelligent exertion of capital” in the stories of credit and risk over the last decade or so. In the UK we are so in thrall to the “talent” in our financial sector that we daren’t question their practices, even in the wake of the biggest financial crisis in all of our lifetimes. The question this leads me to ask, continuously, is why we can’t just value something else instead? Although in that respect I agree that it comes down to us, as dissenters, to develop our own alternative means of handling capital - bankers be damned.
This a root that those that believe it as a right could agree and those that believe it is a service provided could also agree. This is the debate, discussion I am referring. I truly believe if we can find this common ground, all the issues currently being argued would quickly vanish.