The debates have flown thick and fast since yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling justifying Obamacare, and I’m fascinated by this abrupt halt to “I can haz” cat photos and baby pictures and check-ins at restuarants – all of a sudden, everyone online has an opinion about what the government can tax, mandate or require, what “Constitutional” means and whether or not the warm fuzzy ideals of free healthcare for all makes sense.
We’ve had more debate in the last 24 hours than our President allowed when he passed this awful piece of legislation, and I couldn’t be happier. Because debate – real debate – not simply hurling insults – brings light and understanding to a complex problem. Calling Obamacare what it is: an onerous tax on people who are already struggling – makes this a real problem and not a rainbows-and-unicorns-free-healthcare-for-all fairytale.
I’ve heard a lot of people say that this is a huge step for our country, that having mandated healthcare for all will give rise to prosperity, and I have to wonder if they were taxed for not driving a Chevy Volt or buying organic foods or using high-speed internet or smart phones or countless other things that do, indeed, make our lives better – if they would be so inclined to celebrate. After all, don’t you deserve the right to drive what you want, choose your groceries, use the Library’s slow internet or choose a lousy cell phone plan? Don’t you have the right to roll the dice and go to the doctor once a decade without being charged for everyone else’s aches and pains? I fail to see how lumping every unique person into a one-size-fits-all healthcare plan brings prosperity to anyone. Expensive, government-run programs are everywhere and they rarely work – when was the last time you had an enjoyable experience at the Post Office or the DMV?
Of course, the other side of the argument is a lot of talking about hypothetical woebegone types who are going to perish without His Majesty’s healthcare bill, and you’re probably a white supremacist for not agreeing to foot the bill. There are a few more reasoned debaters in favor of this taxation free-for-all, but that’s pretty much the gist.
Either way, there’s two sides to the argument – one who’s pro-taxes and pro-Nanny State and one who’s pro-freedom and pro-individual choice. Neither option is perfect – regardless of the hyperbole on the internet, people are going to die either way, because that’s kind of what people do. The question is, do they get to die in the way they choose or because the government bureaucracy ran out of their medication?
Debate on, Facebook-debaters. The marketplace of ideas is a dangerous place for flawed ideas like hefty taxes, loss of freedom and government-run “charity”, so I have faith that with a little common-sense, it will all shake out.
The sad reality is, that when people don’t have health care and they get injured, they go to the emergency room, which costs everyone more.
You also have a strange way of framing your argument. You say I either love taxes and hate freedom or I hate taxes and love freedom. By starting your argument in such a limiting way, YOU are already being unreasonable. I could start my arguments by saying: You either love money and hate people or hate money and love people. THAT would be equally unfair to YOU. So cut it out.
Hi Tim,
Thanks for the comment! I see what you mean about how I’ve boiled it down, and I understand how that could get under your skin. However, let me clarify: I do think that loving taxes = hating freedom, but that’s not all there is to it. Of course there are necessary taxes, and I’m not an anarchist, but I also have had a little life experience that proves that the blunt instrument of government is not the best tool for lowering costs, improving a system as complex and personal as health care, or creating new, innovative ways of allowing freedom of choice and lifestyle. I also think it’s interesting how the debate has changed. When the health care bill was first signed, it was labeled compassionate because there were supposedly thousands of people dying in the streets without health care and we don’t do that in America, right? Conservatives wailed about how anyone could go to any ER in the country and get treated no matter what, and were laughed at for being naive cavemen by the “compassionate” liberals.
Now that the mathematical realities of the bill are coming to light, it’s suddenly a fiscally conservative smart move, and all of those people being treated in ERs across the country won’t be bankrupting us any more by getting their freebie health care.
The truth is that both lines of thinking are a scam. No one is dying because of lack of access to health care (except in Britain and Canada, where people have to get visas to come here for surgeries that are limited by the compassionate government health care of their own countries) and not that many people are bankrupting us by going to the ER without paying for it. Even if they did, don’t liberals just want Mitt Romney and Bill Gates to pay for those downtrodden ER visitors anyway? It seems to me that this argument is circular – on the one hand you don’t want to pay for people’s health care and on the other you want to slap Conservative’s wrists for not wanting to either.
As the great Margaret Thatcher said, “the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money” and it seems that the Obamacare tax is going to quickly prove her right to the thousands of liberals who hoped for a free ride.
People are dying because of lack of health care.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/09/17/us-usa-healthcare-deaths-idUSTRE58G6W520090917
Valiant effort, Tim, but here’s the trouble with cherry-picking the internet to get the answer you want:
“The questionnaires asked a sample of 9,000 participants if they were insured and how they rated their own health. The federal Centers for Disease Control tracked the deaths of people in the sample group through the year 2000. Drs. Himmelstein, Woolhandler, and company then crunched the numbers and attributed deaths to lack of health insurance for all the participants who initially self-reported that they had no insurance and then died for any reason over the 12-year tracking period.
At no time did the original researchers or the single-payer activists who piggy-backed off their data ever verify whether the supposed casualties of America’s callous health care system had insurance or not. In fact, here is what the report actually says:
“Our study has several limitations,” the authors concede. The survey data they used “assessed health insurance at a single point in time and did not validate self-reported insurance status. We were unable to measure the effect of gaining or losing coverage after the interview.” Himmelstein et al. simply assumed that point-in-time uninsurance translates into perpetual uninsurance – and that any health calamities that result can and must be blamed on being uninsured.
Another caveat you won’t see on Rep. Grayson’s memorial to the dubious dead: The single-payer advocate-authors also conceded in their study limitations section that “earlier population-based surveys that did validate insurance status found that between 7% and 11% of those initially recorded as being uninsured were misclassified. If present, such misclassification might dilute the true effect of uninsurance in our sample.”
To boil it all down in plain English: The single-payer scientists had no way of assessing whether the survey participants received insurance coverage between the time they answered the questionnaires and the time they died. They had no way of assessing whether the deaths could have been averted with health insurance coverage. A significant portion of those classified as “uninsured” may not have even been uninsured, based on past studies that actually did verify insurance status. But the Himmelstein team just took the rate of uninsurance from the original study (3.3 percent), applied it to census data, and voila: more than 44,000 Americans are dying from lack of insurance.”
The authors of the study themselves admit to being proponents of single-payer (government-run) healthcare, and they admit the flaws in their own reasoning. Too bad Reuters didn’t think it was necessary to tell the whole story. (More details found here, with links to original documentation: http://michellemalkin.com/2009/10/23/the-bogus-death-statistic-that-won%E2%80%99t-die/)
The bottom line, though, is this: Even if people were dying in droves from lack of healthcare, how does an average $1600 tax increase on EVERY family in America help that problem? (http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/06/29/Seven-new-taxes) How does this tax increase alleviate your previous point about the expensive uninsured and their Free Stuff-itis? Also, which is it, are poor people waltzing into Urgent Cares and blissfully bankrupting the country with their stubbed toes, or are they dying every 12 minutes because ERs are turning them away?
There you go, either or again. People can both be bankrupting the the country AND dying. We do have more than a few people in this country. Cherry-picking facts is just as egregiousness.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2012/06/20/new-estimate-on-deaths-among-uninsured-is-actually-19-years-old/
http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/2009_harvard_health_study.pdf
The Harvard study is quite thorough and long-lasting. Your last paragraph is telling though: you basically say even if it’s true – look Andrew Breitbart says we’ll pay $1,600 dollars a year more in taxes. Cherry-picking, indeed. By the math, the CBO estimates it will cost 1.1 trillion for the insurance mandates in the ACA over 10 years (2012-21), divided by approximately 115,000,000 households is not $1,600, that would be $9.59 per household. Where does that additional $1,590.41 come from?
What I meant to say is 7586, and that is over TEN years, so a $758 dollar increase is not $1,600
9590/10 is still not 1,600
Hey Tim,
Well, perhaps, but why would you think that people bankrupting the country AND dying can both be fixed with one one-size-fits-all bureaucracy? I’m still not understanding how Obamacare magically fixes both of those problems – and I’m kindof attached to my $800 as well as my $1600, so no matter which one of us is right, it’s still a tax increase. Maybe you are a little too privileged to know what it feels like to have to give up hard-earned money to a bureaucracy and get nothing in return? Maybe this kind of money is no big deal to you? I’m not sure, but I typically demand excellence of my investments and the places where I spend my hard-earned cash – and the government has yet to provide me with anything worthy of the rewards of my hard work.
Like I said, I really appreciate the discussion about this…. I just don’t see how this is of benefit to anyone but the extra IRS agents hired to enforce this gawdawful law.
Well written and very good points Dani!
Next thing you know we are going to be paying for every household to own a computer… what if I don’t want the crappy government provided computer? I’m still paying for everyone else’s?
Ok, I know that the Post Office and the DMV can be annoying at times, but I don’t really buy the argument that these government-run institutions “don’t work.” Come on. I may have to wait a while in line, but I get what I need pretty efficiently overall. Bad comparison, but a valiant effort.
MIchelle! You’re back! I wondered where you’d been and I’m glad to see you… even calling me out on my snark, which I do appreciate.
(I do need to rein it in occasionally, don’t I?)
Anyway, maybe going to the Post Office and DMV is a bit of a #FirstWorldProblem, but it seems to me that a company that regularly loses BILLIONS in taxpayer money and a government-run inefficient monopoly aren’t the models I want my healthcare to follow.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/10/news/companies/usps_earnings/index.htm
http://cascadepolicy.org/bgc/dmv.htm