Re: Defining Terms - Posted by JHyre in Ohio
Posted by JHyre in Ohio on October 22, 2008 at 12:16:48:
Sounds like you’ve already defined it for us…“affordable preventive health care”…say, who but some sort of extremist could possibly be against that? Who knew that fact-based scientists were so good at rhetoric. I can only imagine how we might objectively define “man-made” climate change.
To answer your explicit question: I would define socialized health care as a healthcare system predominatly run by govenment or one indirectly run by government via their funding of same, much like our primary & secondary educational system is funded, and as a practical matter, run by government, in all of its glory and success…a success I would expect to see repeated when applied to healthcare.
To answer your barely implicit statements: Words mean things, as you point out. Some words have bad connotations. For example, we no longer have “liberals” because that is a word with a negative stigma. Instead, we have “progressives”, because “liberals” have not managed to savage the reputation of that particular term (they are working on it). Likewise, “socialized” has negative connotations b/c most people do not wish to live in countries with stagnant economies, double-digit unemployment, high taxes, low class mobility, etc. “Scoialized” is a synonym for “government run”, which historically implies expensive, inefficient and poorly done. Technocrats often seem unable to grasp why government tends to produce those results. Here’s my personal take: Governemnt is run by politicians, a breed of human that tends to promise much to all and deliver based on what actually gives them power (via campaign contributions or media adulation, for example), as opposed to what is efficient, effective or even correct. Furtehrmore, politicians are far less accountable than most (or perhaps all) other classes of people. The incentive to maxinize power, added to spending “unlimited” sums of other peoples’ money and low accountability leads to rather poor results, which is why classic American theory of government tended to allocate to government only those things that were absolutely necessary, with a big “N”. I find the following idea amusing in the extreme: “Businessmen (or some other class of people) are doing a bad job, therefore let us give the job to the politicians, who will do a much better job”. In my view, socialized medicine means taking the remenants of the medical private sector and letting the politicians attempt to do a better job…good luck with that! They will fall flat and ignore a cardinal rule of medicine “First, do no harm”. But that won’t matter, we will be able to say “they tried, their intentions were good” - and that’s of course what really matters, right?
Will affordable healthcare bring about the fall of Western Civ? Not that THAT is a loaded or biased question - it’s the wrong one. Will government bring about truly affordable and effective healthcare? Fat chance. How have they done with Medicare & Medicaid? Say, weren’t those programs supposed to solve the very problems we are dicsussing? BTW, how are they doing budget-wise, especially when compared to original political projections of cost - off by several thousand percentage points, perhaps? Why would one think they’d do any better with even more money and control? What kind of rational decision-maker throws good money after bad…probably depends on WHOSE money it is!
Costa Rica…now there’s a germane example. Let’s see, first we could find a country that would defend us so we could have a near-zero military budget to put into healthcare…France perhaps? LET’S look at sonme facts in terms of actual care received and actual costs - including high taxes, high unemployment, slower economic growth, less class mobility (you can’t have your cake and eat it to, LET’S look at Costa Rica’s whole system and not conveniently isolate just the happy facts), and government to decide who lives, who dies, who suffers, who waits…not to mention the effect on innovation and medical tech. The latter is the reason for much of the greater cost of care, cures that did not exist a few years ago do exist now - for a price. Which cures would you un-discover or prevent once government decides - based on politics, as always - what gets funded and what does not?
Preventing birth defects alone is not likely to destroy society, so gee, end of argument. Giving the governemnt the power to do to medicine what it has already done to the school system will cause more suffering overall…but if it doesn’t actually destroy society, let’s go ahead and give it a shot.
Terms defined enough for you, as an obviously very objective scientist? Enough to factor in the subjective, but no less real impact, of letting homo politicus run things? It’s not as if we lack history of how things tend to turn out once that noble class of man is given more power over our lives. Or is it a case of “ignore what cannot be objectively measured”?
And by the way, an honest question as to definition would have been forthrightly answered. But since you had to get all sarcastic, I figured it would be much better to give than to receive…and I really am a giver.
John Hyre
Uncompassionate, Uncaring, Selfish, Afraid that Affordable Healthcare Will End Society, or worse yet, End Cheap Beer
