Healthcare & the founding fathers

Oh gee, the founding fathers supported Socialized Healthcare.... Including the requirement to buy healthcare, of course they didn't have the tax breaks we have today...

http://blogs.forbes.com/rickungar/2011/01/17/congress-passes-socialized-medicine-and-mandates-health-insurance-in-1798/

the law itself

http://www.scribd.com/doc/29099806/Act-for-the-Relief-of-Sick-DisabledSeamen-July-1798


Spread the word, because I want my fucking insurance exchange now!!!!

no shit, there it is

This doesn't address the concern, even brought up in the first article, that the amount of tax required to maintain a health care system of that nature (for us, from scratch) would be tremendous and that many of these systems in other countries are discovering that better health care is increasingly expensive as time and technology roll on.

Call me crazy, but this actually sounded like an intent to protect port and population from the spread of disease by dissuading the intended carriers from being negligent, and a method for continuance of trade despite its own haphazard (at this time most "foreign trade" would mean at least a month or two out at sea devoted to just crossing an ocean).  The federal-run facilities were the bone for the seamen and shipping companies who would have the bulk of the burden and otherwise no reward for it, as well as to ensure that the purposes of the bill could be enacted (it even says, paraphrased, "in ports where no accommodations exist").

I like how the act itself is concise and yet is very clear that only the people who would willingly put themselves into a position to be affected by the law would be the ones to pay for it.  Even if it has since expanded erroneously to include normal income tax for funding, I like how it had been worded so as not to included unrelated parties.  Especially the  "Provided, that the moneys collected in any one district, shall be expended within the same" part.

(Only the first page of the law is showing for me; the image for the second is blank.)

>>3  

So just to review your saying that health insurance isn't a profitable or sustainable business...  Which is amazing that you might think that considering the record profits that the private health insurance companies make.

As for the tax issue, there weren't any income taxes at the time it was paid for by tariffs and "land sale"(cause them natives aint using it).

"Provided, that the moneys collected in any one district, shall be expended within the same"   what do you think insurance is!? Distributed risk!

Provided, that the moneys collected in any one district, shall be expended within the same"

this actually furthers support for the state based exchanges over a single national one(which we all know would have been better)

>>5
Shut your dirty, socialist mouth you, you, SOCIALIST!!!

>>4
Neither sustainability of the business nor its profitability are what I questioned; I questioned the ability to a single force powered by taxation being able to support the United States system as it grows.  In fact, the United States system is much more profitable for individuals in it, and provides more consistent coverage for as many people as can be accommodated, as it currently is than most of the centralized systems in Europe.  The problem is that for people who use the business-system, not those who work in it, though that does factor into it, both the better treatments being produced and the insurance required to mitigate liability of the professionals and institutions carrying them out are gargantuan and risk outstripping basic affordability.

Additionally, misunderstanding my previous point like that risks being interpreted as an attempt to shift the conversation into an alternate topic.

what do you think insurance is!? Distributed risk!
What does that have to do with anything?  the fact that anyone can get hurt and is then dependent on personally allocated or institutional health services is beyond question.  The law did not apply if you were not employed as a sailor, which is a reasonable choice that could be made, and no one who chose not to be a sailor had to manage (part of) the bill, or at least as it was stated.  In fact, you could stop being a sailor and find a different profession.  This is more like an additional port fee or customs fee.
Do you have a proposal for a current-day nationalized system that allows me to opt out, does not penalized me for opting out, does not penalize or burden any private system that wishes to operate alongside it?  Pending reading the actual proposal in writing, I will throw my hat behind such a plan.

>>6
Oh. my. god.
He's a SOCIALIST?????
Quick, hide the spoons!

People have already seen their premiums rise dramatically as a direct result of this bill being signed.
How, my SOCIALIST comrades, does this help the working man?

>>9
Single payer would work a lot better, but then that's actual socialism, which is BAD. I heard it on Fox News.

>>10
Yes, as is evidenced by the flood of people leaving America to get better treatment in nations that have socialized medicine...lol....see, thats' sarcasm, what I said right there..

>>7

You realize under the recently passed law, you'd have to be making at least $90,000 a year and not have insurance(from work or parents) and refuse to buy insurance before you would get fined.

Do you know the details?  If you make under 90,000 and don't have insurance you get tax credits & vouchers to buy it.

>>12
That's the thing.  I'm saying that because I never wanted any to begin with.

>>13

either you should re-read 12, or your just an idiot.

>>14
no, he's a richfag who wants to refuse to buy insurance.

>>14
your
>>15
-fag
Neither of you are contributing anything of intelligence to the discussion. /b/ effluent like you two belong there.

>>16
fuck off.
your post said NOTHING relevant to the conversation, as opposed to both of ours.

>>17
Seems like you forgot how to get back there, allow me: http://boards.4chan.org/b/

>>18
way to derail a thread. Is that the new propaganda tool?
What do YOU have against healthcare, hmmm???

>>19
What do YOU have against healthcare, hmmm???
Nothing. It's just discussing the issue with morons is where the problem lies.

>>20
 well, don't get all butthurt just because someone called you out for being an oligarch.

>>21
Oligarch? You can be lower middle class and still have a fucking brain by using it, which most people don't because apparently watching talking heads on Fox/MSNBC/other media channels is more convenient.

No one is addressing the fact that EVERYONE'S PREMIUMS AND CO- PAYS ARE GOING THROUGH THE ROOF BECAUSE OF OBAMA'S BILL!

>>10 said single payer would be better, that, at least, is an admission that the bill that we now have IS SHIT!

>>23
an admission that the bill that we now have IS SHIT!
Pretty much this is common knowledge. Everyone from libertarians to progressives, (albeit for their own different reasons) said that the healthcare bill is shit.

>>24
So you admit Obama is a failure. That the Democrats have failed the American people. Again.

>>25
He passed what he could, are you aware that he doesnt just get to wave a magical wand and that there is something called the congress? You should look in to thast. You can google it right now to see what it is. Give it a try, its easy to do!

The Republicans, when asked for a viable alternative could not even give a cohherent idea (kind of like when asked for specific tax cut proposals while on the campaign trail!). All they could do was howl and neuter the bill. Which is all that they can do anymore.

>>26
LOL Dems controlled both Houses at the time.

>>23


Derp Derp morons, the premiums aren't going up because of the Reform law, they're going up from corporate greed. The corps & lobbyist blame the Reform law, but there isn't anything in the law to cause it to go up(go read yourself).. Then go read the annual shareholders report for your favorite insurance company, then look up how much those execs take home... Don't buy into the corporate branding and lobbyist tag lines..  Learn something, educate yourselves.

    Reminds me of a friend turned tea bagger "the big corporations GIVE me things to BUY & WANT" I almost died laughing, way to sound like your from north Korea(yes yes the best Korea)...

>>28
No offense to your preferences in friends but he sounded like he was an idiot even before that ...

>>27

apparently you don't know of the filibuster senate rules, and the minority right to a single objection shoot down.  Watch C-span for a while.

>>28
Insurance premiums are rising for the same reason that medical fees of all classes are rising many times faster than inflation:  distortion of supply and demand due to government intervention in what should be a free market.

Look.  It's really, really simple.  I will use small words with very few letters in them, so that even you can understand.

If you want to buy a tomato, you can go to your choice of competing supermarkets, and spend 50 cents on a bag of tomatoes.

But if suddenly one day the government decides that access to tomatoes is "a fundamental human right," and starts running up the national debt printing trillions of dollars of checks for free tomatoes, the demand for tomatoes goes up.  You go to the supermarket and find yourself standing in line behind fifty people all waving their million-dollar free-tomato checks in the air.  Do you suppose the tomatoes are going to get marked to a higher price?  If not, why not, given that the demand for them just increased tremendously and that the number of dollars in the economy devoted to chasing tomatoes has just gone up tremendously?

Medicare and Medicaid are not only unconstitutional, they have also driven the price of basic medical services into the stratosphere.  Compare the price of veterinary tumor removal surgery on a dairy cow and on a human being.  They use the same tools and the same technology, yet one costs $400 and one costs $400,000.

The government created the housing bubble by interfering in the real estate market and the banking business, pumping up demand and pumping money in as fast as the market could absorb it.  Government grants and loans are the reason why college tuition costs are going up by 20% a year and more, too.

Get the government out of the medicine business, out of the housing business, out of the banking business, and out of the education business, and you'll see these prices come down to match the demands in a free market.

>>31
Free market is good and all, but how can it cope with problems like Information Asymmetry? Where the seller of a product often has more information than the buyer, thus cheating the buyer out of a decent/more adequate product. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry

Which is also why there's things like the Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson-Moss_Warranty_Act to help govern and regulate warranties on consumer products. Exactly how, in your opinion, would a truly free market be able to solve and cope with these problems WITHOUT any government regulation AT ALL?

>>32
Free market = property rights, warranty = property.

>>32
Information asymmetry
Information isn't free, those with the information should obtain the full market value of that information. This is something you communists don't understand, you think work is all about manual labor, it's not. How would the laborers know what to do and how to be productive if their managers did not work smart and figure it out?

>>33
Still needs a government in which to protect private property rights in cases of encroachment.

>>34
Information asymmetry is exactly one of the big reasons why lemon automobiles get sold, and is why there are lemon laws on the books. A person who has no idea about how an automobile works or any of its specific parts could easily be swayed into buying something that is essentially a piece of shit. New or used.

The rest of your post is full of teabagger hyperbole and needs not addressing, since it assumes that I desire to abolish the capitalist mode of production, when it is in fact, that true free market capitalism has no natural mechanism in dealing with situations like this.

>>31
Medicare and Medicaid are not only unconstitutional
Necessary and Proper Clause could be made to dictate it Constitutional, though what's "necessary and proper" is highly subjective. This clause was used to justify the creation of the first central bank of the US, as argued by Hamilton. Essentially, anything could be argued to be Constitutional because of this clause.

>>25
>>24 here, that implies that I was in defense of Obama, to which I'm not and never really was. I'm not sure how well he did with other legislation, but with healthcare he obviously bombed on that, and unfortunately the healthcare bill was his biggest wager and it failed.

Lord, no one here has ever gone into business....  I'll make it simple...

Free Market - A lie told to the poor to make it seem as if they have a choice in how they will be screwed out of money...

  Standard Oil is a perfect example of the "free market"

>>38
There are many people who were once poor, had a great idea, capitalized on it, and are now wealthy. The free market allows for this.

This would never happen in a centrally controlled economy. People in communist countries never have this opportunity.

>>38
State planning would be worse because then they would have no choice, except at this point there is no turning back and regretting your decisions to become a marxtard because it will be too late, the state is in complete control over the economy and thus your life and freedom.

This is what you communists fail to understand, the only reason capitalism looks bad is because it's more difficult to hide corruption under capitalism. You're such tools.

>>40
Social Democracy =/= Marxism. And nobody today seriously is promoting pure socialism or communist socialism because everyone knows it doesn't fucking work. But neither does pure free market capitalism.

>>41
You know why none of these broad society paradigms actually "work?" because corruption is endemic and vital to human nature and ambition.  Corruption emerges because it isn't paradigm-dependent; it's the way people think; it doesn't bias itself to moral or immoral activity.  If you seriously think there's a way to stack the rules against it, then that's attempted totalitarianism.  Also, I own the Brooklyn Bridge.

>>42
Well sure, there's no perfect system. Pure free market capitalism is not somehow exempted from human nature, and people will take advantage of others, probably much more so under pure free market. Though in the same vein, pure socialism doesn't work either and yes, can degenerate into complete totalitarianism, which nobody wants, which is also why nobody seriously speaks about completely abolishing the capitalist mode of production since that's just throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Bwahahaaa! You guys need to pay for getting sick! Now that's sad...

Oh, and you own most of the medical industry too?!? Capitalism is so fair...

>>42
So, corruption is endemic, yet we need to have people overseeing the free trade of goods and services with dictator powers?

>>43
>and people will take advantage of others
the only one who "takes advantage" of anyone is government workers using the monopoly of "justice" and force. And people/companies allied with government.

>>46 re: >>42
I am actually on the other side of the argument than the one you think I am.

>>46
the only one who "takes advantage" of anyone is government workers using the monopoly of "justice" and force.
Nope. The robber barons of the 19^th century took advantage of people, and the economy was arguably much more free market than it is today. This was also around the time from the expiration of the Second Bank of the United States, to the establishment of the Federal Reserve, so they didn't even have a central bank to pump in credit to fund their bullshit, so the idea that the government and only the government is the problem, is fallacious.

And people/companies allied with government.
That's an issue of campaign reform, lobbying and lack of transparency. True, the government can't be relied on to give complete transparency and third parties and whistle-blowers are important to counter this. Governments are not infallible, and they're prone to be abusive just like corporations, just like banks, &c.

>>48
Robber barons are given an unfair verdict by history, their activities rarely affected the middle classes who only made well researched low risk long term investments, their activities weeded out the old money and grifters from the stock market in the same way a king would put any petty princeling in his place.

At a time when the US was pretty much centrally planned by a close knit hereditary plutocracy this was essential for the fledgling free market to rear it's head, of course the robber barons and general nouveau riche aspired to gain stately powers, the fact they went about it through economic management rather than politics is the key here, compared to Mexico the US could achieve far greater levels of economic sophistication even though the Mexican aristocracy was not significantly less intelligent or educated than the US and had every opportunity to attempt to imitate the latest advancements seen in the US.

>>49
their activities rarely affected the middle classes
Right, which is why a lot of the middle class lost their homes and properties during the 1890s depression and the Panic of 1907.

>>50
Didn't the US government pass a series of acts and tariffs intervening in the economy in 1890 that were directly responsible for the panic of 1893? Didn't JP Morgan subsequently bail out the government? Also didn't the government fuck with railroads for a number of years prior to the panic of 1907 thereby causing unnecessary instability during the aftermath of the SF quake and economic instability abroad (in statist nations that fucked with the economy as a policy)?

Also, the gilded age was an era of enormous economic growth for America, 100000s of immigrants entering the country each year and modern technology bursting onto the scene these crashes were more bumps on the road, like someone living in a gilded cage complaining because he's not getting richer as fast as he would have liked.

>>51
Didn't the US government pass a series of acts and tariffs intervening in the economy in 1890 that were directly responsible for the panic of 1893?
There was the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the McKinley Tariff, which has been partly blamed on for causing, or aiding to cause the panic, however, it was heavy speculation in the railroad industry that did the most damage. Government mostly kept out of the affairs of markets and industry. Most elected officials in those times were still strict adherents of the gold standard, and kept a laissez-faire approach.

The SF earthquake of 1906 is unfortunate, and nobody was really prepared for that; most of the cause of the panic of 1907 was cause by the Wall Street assholes with their speculative fuckery.

Today is even much worse, since the Internet and technology and instantaneous communication makes the Wall Street heads scheme even more efficiently, and would be even worse if they weren't regulated at all.

>>52
speculative fuckery
You mean like the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the McKinley Tariff? Most elected officials were laissez faire, the few that weren't who occasionally managed to slip through fraudulent deals like these were guilty of intentionally engineering the panics along with the populists and ignorant voters who supported them, I think it's obvious which loophole needs to be closed off. Like I said, the robber barons were statists, just less statist than the old money, like Mexican aristocracy who kept Mexico shitty and stagnant for so long, and thus better for the economy, it's still the state that creates these monstrosities though.

>>53
You mean like the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the McKinley Tariff?
Nope, I mean actual, unregulated speculative fuckery, like the one that just recently took down the economy. The total pot of the derivatives market is anywhere from 600 trillion to 1.6 quadrillion dollars, which I've heard is somewhere between 24 to 60 times the GDP of the entire planet. The government itself doesn't even have anywhere near that amount of cash. It's quite easy to see who's really controlling things here. And no sane person would seriously suggest that amount of wealth amongst a few should be left completely unregulated and unchecked.

You see the robber barons in a lighter light, because the consequences of their actions were not as severe as the current Wall Street fat cats. True, they use the state towards corrupt means, however, that doesn't preclude the state from being able to do good things. It's a tool, of which can be used for good and the betterment of society, or as an instrument of attaining corrupt ends. For example, a betterment would be being the funding and subsidization of scientific endeavors and advancement.

There's bigger problems than that, and a lot of it has to do with the blatant anti-intellectualism that permeates the culture and society of the US.

>blatant anti-intellectualism
>hurr durr anyone who doesn't spend his Friday nights hanging out at Starbucks wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt is obviously a stupid hick, my mommy says I'm special

>>55
I like how people have capricious notions about you from their imagination simply because you disagree with them.
Also, way to fail at
Shiitchan quoting.