Of course something's wrong, and yes, everyone knows it.
The nut of it is that half the country has decided they can tell the other half what to do, take their money, and run their lives. They've forgotten that you can't do that to a free people.
That includes cramming Obamacare down everyone's throats.
Adding insult to injury, the programs are stupid, and sold with falsehoods. If you object, you're racist. And they'll sic the IRS on you (and the DOJ).
It may be a bit messy, but discussing what's been done to us is *part* of fixing it. (Which is why the jerks responsible tell us stuff like "It's. The. Law." and "The debate is over.")
One big difficulty to solving it all is this attempt to suppress actual discussion, called "political correctness." PC, by definition, means you can't say something that's true, or someone with a fashionable chip on their shoulder will throw a tantrum.
If you doubt who's chiefly responsible at the moment, look at the first video here and hear Senate Commerce Committee chairman Rockefeller explain that Obamacare opponents are racist:
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So, that's unhelpful, spiteful--as is Obama--but we the people are, slowly, working it out, despite the constant efforts from on high to agitate, irritate, and divide.
ndex because the significant data is buried in the upper tail of the income distribution, but he doesn't talk about higher-order estimators of distrib ution, which strikes me as less numerate than is ideal, though I am numerat e enough to know that higher order estimators do tend to be dominated by th e noise in the data.
ystem is the most expensive per head of any nation's healthcare system,
True. Government intervention makes our system expensive. Witness Obamacare, and the huge leap in prices just from it, already.
n the best of its - cheaper - competitors (in France and Germany)
Doubtful. We'll assume you made that up, or based on it some deliberately misleading statistic that bamboozled you.
hole than the health care system of any other advanced industrial country.
False.
to run its political system, but he has eliminated a few of it's more obvio us defects. There are still plenty left to go.
Obama's approach is to cozy up to large donor companies and advantage them, to the detriment of everyone else.
The socialist model *hinges* on creating a few privileged ultra-wealthy benefactors like the people Obama hangs with--from Goldman Sachs to Buffett, Gates, and GE--and taxing them to pay for legions of dependent little people.
Under Obama, the 0.01% have soared while the median household income has dropped *during the recovery*. Obama creates inequality. Actively. Aggressively.
That's redistribution.
Answer: The "Affordable" Care Act jacked up your rates. Affordability ain't cheap. >:-)
The real problem is when people such as yourself don't understand the timeless nature of our Constitution's solution to timeless problems, and prefer a reversion some sort of ancient barbarism, an amorphous, ill-thought, allegedly benevolent despotism by people who allegedly know better.
You'd rather a beneficent wise King Obama spreading our earnings, telling us all exactly how to design electronics, pitch baseballs, what toilets we could buy, how many solar panels, and how much gasoline we'd be allowed. It's for the children.
Except that Obama's not interested in business (other than to oppose it), never held a job, and is more interested in sports and golf (and race) than most anything else. He falls a little short when it comes to statecraft, economics, or talking without his prompter.
It's forever comical that people who distrust their fellow man think the solution is putting our trust in politicians, who are often the least pure and least trustworthy. Madison famously wrote about it in
1787, but that ancient truth doesn't appeal to you. Pythagoras' theorem and Newton's calculus should be tossed too, for your same reasons.
Our guys set up a system where each person, pursuing his own interest within a defined framework, will work like a demon to optimize his part of the global problem, and solves the greater problems almost as a side-effect simply by solving his own. We call it "freedom." Everyone benefits.
Yours is the philosophy of slave and master. And you, of course, would be the master. That's exactly what our Founders foresaw, remarked from history, and successfully protected us against for over two centuries.
timeless nature of our Constitution's solution to timeless problems,"
Well put. They had seen it time and time again. Now if people would read th e Constitution and obey it, we would all be alot better off.
Tell them to quit reading between the lines, and just read the lines !
The drafters of the Bill Of Rights slaved over it to get the wording just r oight. the secons amendment was edited a few times until it said exactly wh at they wanted it to say. BECAUSE the government needs guns, THEREFORE the People also need guns. Arms.
And I define arms as anyhting they'll use in us. We need equal or better. t hey do not use bombs on us, therefore we do not need bombs. but if they got assault rifles, dammit, we have the RIGHT to have them as well, and actual ly a DUTY to keep and bear them.
The words "alter or abolish it" are in the Declaration Of Independence, and it is getting high time to alter it for sure. And if it doens't like the a lterations then it is time to abolish the damn thing.
I get the idea that alot of people are not too happy about the changes in t he world in the last couple decades. I see good reason for that. Things are always the worst they've ever been, as a whole. Personal fortunes may rise and fall, luck comes and goes for people individually, but overall, it doe s nothing but get worse.
Bring me that optimism when they LOWER the debt cieling.
S/DOS political operating system - better than anything previously tried, b ut distinctly half-baked, and unfortunately prone to promoting the interest s of the well-off.
Haven't been brainwashed to the point where they could accept such blatant nonsense. The US constitution contains lots of solutions to the problem of slow communications - such as the electoral college - which are now totally unnecessary. A "timeless solution" to problems that went away after we'd h ad the time to invent railroads, cars and aeroplanes.
The people who put together the current Japanese and German constitutions w ould find that characterisation distinctly inaccurate.
us all exactly how to design electronics, pitch baseballs, what toilets we could buy, how many solar panels, and how much gasoline we'd be allowed . It's for the children.
I certainly wouldn't recommend that, as I've pointed out to you before. You seem to think that the USSR style of centrally planned economy is the only alternative to the US system of organisation.
Germany and the Scandinavian countries do seem to run basically free-market economies with enough government control of the free market to prevent it' s worst defects.
They do collect a lot more of the national income in tax than you do in the US, but they redistribute what they collect rather more sensibly than you do. the result is better education, better health care and better social se curity.
Geramny now exports more than the US despite having only a quarter of the p opulation, which does imply that their system works rather better than you rs.
never held a job, and is more interested in sports and golf (and race) tha n most anything else. He falls a little short when it comes to statecraft, economics, or talking without his prompter.
He still beats the pants off George W Bush. If you had a better constitutio n, you might be able to elect better politicians.
solution is putting our trust in politicians, who are often the least pure and least trustworthy.
The comedy comes from people like you, who think that purity and trustworth iness can be measured, or are worth measuring. A pure and trustworthy stupi d or ill-informed politician is rather more dangerous than his corruptible equivalent.
appeal to you. Pythagoras' theorem and Newton's calculus should be tossed t oo, for your same reasons.
What Madison wrote in 1787 was presumably fine, as far as it went, but whil e Euclid had the advantage of being able to define the subject he was talki ng about, Madison was talking about politics, which has now includes a lot of areas that didn't exist when Madison was writing.
The Old Testament define pi to be three, which was close enough to being tr ue at the time.
hin a defined framework, will work like a demon to optimize his part of th e global problem, and solves the greater problems almost as a side-effect simply by solving his own. We call it "freedom."
Actually, it's Adam Smith's invisible hand, and it works just as long as yo u stop each person from optimising his part by cheating others, as Adam Smi th pointed out.
Only as long as they spend enough on justice and defense to prevent cheatin g. That's part of your "freedom".
It turns out that if you also tax the body politic to pay for universal edu cation and universal health care as well as justice and defense, you can do even better. Madison wasn't aware of that, because medicine wasn't good en ough in his time to be worth spending much money on, and education was too expensive for anything like universal education to be feasible - it took th e agricultural and industrial revolutions to make it affordable.
A complete inversion of the truth. There's nothing of the slave and the mas ter in modern democratic socialism, while your founding tax evaders were p erfectly happy to own slaves.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney (but currently in Nijmegen)
-index because the significant data is buried in the upper tail of the inco me distribution, but he doesn't talk about higher-order estimators of distr ibution, which strikes me as less numerate than is ideal, though I am numer ate enough to know that higher order estimators do tend to be dominated by the noise in the data.
system is the most expensive per head of any nation's healthcare system,
It was more expensive before Obamacare. The general opinion is that it is e xpensive because it is over-administered, with doctors running unnecessary tests to minimise their risks if they chance to get sued.
There is an argument that it's more expensive because American are sicker t han most, due to the high level of inequality in US society.
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han the best of its - cheaper - competitors (in France and Germany)
y misleading statistic that bamboozled you.
Pity about that. I can see why you'd want to assume that I made it up
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whole than the health care system of any other advanced industrial country .
In fact true, as you can check on the WHO web-site (posted above).
s to run its political system, but he has eliminated a few of it's more obv ious defects. There are still plenty left to go.
m, to the detriment of everyone else.
That's the way the US political system works - it's designed to be suspecti ble to influence backed up by lots of money
enefactors like the people Obama hangs with--from Goldman Sachs to Buffett , Gates, and GE--and taxing them to pay for legions of dependent little peo ple.
Not true. As you've pointed out repeatedly here, they don't have enough mon ey. Look at the tax breakdown for the Scandinavian countries and Germany.
The rise of the top 0.01% versus the median has been going on since Reagan came to power. The median didn't actually go backwards until the GFT hit. Obama happens to be against inequality, but he's stuck in a political system which was designed - from the start - to enhance it.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney (but in Nijmegen at the moment)
Have they? Let's just see how long it lasts. Obamacare blew up on the launchpad, when they tried it out on just the first 5% of the population.
Obama himself, meanwhile, has disabled, delayed, waived, and bailed out every other part of it, just to protect the other 85% from Obamacare's ravages.
elf.?
After four decades' practice, the left does this instinctively. It's a vicious herd instinct, pecking-thing.
Occasionally I talk to lots of people. Lots. Of all sorts. My sense matches consistent polling that 2/3rds of Americans think the government's too big, spends too much, and is too deep into everyone's business. Even more say they *fear* it.
We'll see if anyone has the balls to take it away.
When he's done, he'll let it all collapse in on itself. He would earlier but that would put an end to the imperial Presidency.
It's not a new book, nor are the ideas exactly new. Alinsky put them together and taught it to these leftists when they were in college. It's only somewhat recently that the cat has been let out of the bag so it can be fought for what it is.
...until someone talks about taking their hobbyhorse away.
Since Obama copied Mitt Romney's scheme which has been working for years in Massachusetts, Obamacare isn't the only author of this "precious perfect g ift".
It would be nice to think that Obama was some kind of diety, who could ensu re that the legislation that emerged from congress was entirely fault-free
- all thousand-odd pages of it, with all it's industry-bribing compromises
- and could then ensure a perfect implementation.
Sadly, Obama is merely human, and essentially a figure-head for a large and sloppy organisation built out of other fallible human beings.
This puts him a little ahead of James Arthur, who looks more and more like some kind of right-wing nitwit propaganda machine, who can't be bothered th inking about the rubbish he is posting.
As engineers, we all know that getting complicated mechanisms to work is mo stly a process of error detection followed by error correction. James Arthu r seems to think that by adopting the right (usually far-right) ideology yo u can keep your mechanisms simple enough that you can get them to do the fa r-right thing first off. Since the far-right attitude is that the governmen t can't do anything useful in the first place, his mechanisms don't have to do much.
This hands-off approach doesn't actually deliver an optimal society, but Ja mes Arthur is convinced that it work absolutely perfectly - his politicians look super-human to him, though look distinctly ordinary to more objective observers.
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suggests otherwise, but James Arthur won't be able to comprehend it.
That *is* a nice talking-point for people who really don't care about the truth. They *are* kind of the same in the same way China has a government and Australia has a government, and they're both run by politicians.
Let's take a quick run through that, shall we?
o RomneyCare was 70-odd pages, where ObamaCare runs around 2,700. The two aren't anything close in the particulars, either.
o Not to mention that Massachusetts elected Sen. Scott Brown, a Republican, to replace permanent Democrat Ted Kennedy in a desperate attempt to stop ObamaCare and keep their plan.
o ObamaCare is so exactly like RomneyCare that MA, which had been operating RomneyCare for years, was unable to create and recently had to scrap their ObamaCare exchange as hopeless, too.
o As far as affordability--your constant lament--RomneyCare drove MA's already nearly highest-in-the-nation health costs up double-digits for four of its first five years. (It would've been worse but they've cheated by shifting temporary funds around. That's run out, so now they're raising taxes.)
o Hey, check out Dr. Donald Berwick's campaign site--"At one of the most critical times in our nation's history, Don implemented many of the most important provisions of the Affordable Care Act."
He's one of your crew, one of ObamaCare's designers, and DML's ex-Medicare/Medicaid head. His website has a nice graph showing MA's exploding costs:
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"In the Massachusetts state budget, almost every key line item has gone down by 20%, 30%, or 40% in real terms since 2000 except health care, which has gone up by 60%. In 2013, 43% of state expenditures are for health care - that's more than double what we spend on education."
He's running *against* ObamaCare. You'll like his solution--more government!
Wow, that's an amazing success, isn't it? YES WE CAN!
Based on that utter shambles of a foundation the rest of your ramblings don't follow. But thanks for the insults, as always.
Of course. Don't read history, that's brainwashing. Read Al Gore!
The electoral college was another level of safety against run-away, positive-feedback populism, something engineers understand and design into their critical systems.
Nope, a timeless solution to counter intemperate public passions and manias--damping--as appropriate now as then (if not more so--now we need it more than ever). As opposed to your solution--autocrats.
[...]
They were perfectly aware of it--you're making stuff up again. They expressly rejected such works of charity. Their federal government didn't allow it, and didn't need it.
You've just made all that up. The fact is such functions were left to the states to do however they wanted, which they do. You're simply unable to conceive of anything existing without a centralized authoritarian government to compel it.
Of course there's nothing of slavery in it for you, Mastah Bill, I was speaking of the people who've labored in the field in your service supporting you these last couple of decades.
It's so much cleaner and nicer when you can use a government instead of a whip (isn't it?), but it's really so very much the same. You take other people's labor, and use their labor to support yourself, or things you want supported but wouldn't want to pay for yourself.
It's very convenient.
Some of our founders had slaves, but thought they'd created a nation that would end that shortly. It's kind of like you and Al Gore bemoaning global warming as you fly to Nijmegen. Or not, actually.
By "founding tax-evaders," you prefer your founding rapists and axe-murderers to people who might resent being unfairly taxed to support you?
Here's an alternative--how about we let people shop, let people choose what they really want, and let them vote with their own money. Obamacare is undemocratic; this way is completely democratic.
We could do something about the uninsurable in the states, and the truly poor. And for everyone else, let them shop, and choose.
Instead of raising costs like Obamacare, we'd cut the cost by half in no time. Instead of Obamacare's adding middlemen, delays, paperwork and bureaucracy, we'd wipe them out. We'd bring the same forces to bear that have squeezed out the cost and upped the performance and quality of every other thing we buy, from toilet paper to CPUs. The same forces recognized and designed in by our founding tax-evaders.
Freedom--the freedom to choose and live your own life--it's still as powerful a thing and force for good as ever was.
s in Massachusetts, Obamacare isn't the only author of this "precious perfe ct gift".
Perhaps, but Obamacare is an obvious derivative of Romeycare, which was all I was saying. I didn't suggest that it was identical, which seems to be th e strawman argument your irrelevant comments would have demolished if I'd m ade it.
Why bother, since it's all irrelevant?
Obamacare is a step in the direction of a more rational US healthcare syste m. To get the bill passed Obama had to bribe the medical insurance business.
Getting US health costs under control - or even down to German and French l evels - does require much more rigorous control of the medical insurance bu siness's marginal costs - which does take more government intervention. The bribes were an unfortunate additional expense of moving a little way along that trajectory.
Nothing is going to make health care cheaper, in the long term. It's gettin g more expensive everywhere - the medical profession is finding ever more w ays to help it's patients, keeping them alive even longer to use up even mo re health care. The US system is half-again more extravagant than everybody else, but getting it efficient and cost-effective isn't going to reverse t he long term trend.
What precisely is the "amazing success" that you think you are referring to ?
Your strawman isn't the foundation of my argument, much as you'd like to pe rsuade your readers that it was.
No need to thank me for the insults. You've earned every last one of them.
an MS/DOS political operating system - better than anything previously trie d, but distinctly half-baked, and unfortunately prone to promoting the inte rests of the well-off.
ant nonsense.
I do read history. Not having been brainwashed, what I read doesn't persuad e me that what you claim has anything to do with what actually happened
A good idea. He doesn't know all that much, but he listens to people who ar e better educated than you are.
ommunications - such as the electoral college - which are now totally unnec essary.
That's one way of looking at it. From another point of view, it's a way of cutting down the number of people you have to influence to get the result y ou want. More recent constitutions have not bothered to incorporate this pa rticular US innovation. Run-away positive feedback populism - as practised by people like Joseph McCarthy - doesn't seem to be any more of problem in countries that haven't adopted this particular device.
e to invent railroads, cars and aeroplanes.
as--damping--as appropriate now as then (if not more so--now we need it mor e than ever). As opposed to your solution--autocrats.
It's less than obvious that it's do anything useful today. In practice the members of the electoral college take the results of the popular vote to Wa shington and rubber-stamp them there. You would save a whole lot of unneces sary assembling and voting if you chose your president by a direct popular vote. Those countries that are silly enough to have president with executiv e power - France is the obvious example - have a two stage election in whic h the first stage identifies the two most popular candidates - notionally e quivalent to your primary elections, but without the state-by-state elimina tion process (which gives the states holding the earliest primaries an disp roportionate influence) - and a second stage to select between these two su rvivors
education and universal health care as well as justice and defense, you ca n do even better. Madison wasn't aware of that,
essly rejected such works of charity. Their federal government didn't allow it, and didn't need it.
There you go. What passed for health care and education in 1778 looked like charity to Madison, so it still looks like charity to you.
In fact both are investments. Money spent on education is one of the best i nvestments a society can make, in turns of return on money spent. Investmen t in tertiary education is less good for private individual because a subst antial proportion of the population will drop out of tertiary education wit hout graduating and it's hard to predict who they are going to be. In Austr alia about 40% of university entrants don't get a degree. The Australian Te rtiary Admission Rank - basically final year secondary school results - doe s select a top group who have a 95% chance of eventually graduating, but ev ent the lowest decile who can get into university have a 50% of completing their degree.
Im Madison's time health care was largely ineffective, so spending money on it wasn't an investment. Modern medicine works, so the situation is comple tely different.
ch money on, and education was too expensive for anything like universal ed ucation to be feasible - it took the agricultural and industrial revolution s to make it affordable.
On the contrary, it's all straight factual information that you don't want to think about.
nted, which they do. You're simply unable to conceive of anything existing without a centralized authoritarian government to compel it.
In Australia the individual states are responsible for education, but the f ederal government has the money that pays for most of it.
The problem is that giving everybody a roughly equal level of education dep ends on collecting taxes from everybody - more from those with more money - and spending the money in a way that maximises the chance that bright kid s of poor parents will get as much education as they can take advantage of (which means spending a bit more on educating the children of poorer parent s).
Taking full advantage of the talents of every child in the country does inv olve central oversight. It doesn't need an authoritarian government to do i t, and the element of compulsion involved is exactly the same as it is in e xtracting tax money for defence, the enforcement of the law and the rest of the society-wide services that even right-wing nitwits are happy to pay fo r out of tax revenue.
Health care, properly understood, is more like defence than anything else. We need a system of doctors and hospitals to cope with the unlikely but pot entially disastrous consequences of run-away infectious diseases. Routine h ealth care is just the bribe the government pays to the population to keep the anti-plague system in operation. This didn't work for Madison, because
1780's medicine couldn't do much more than vaccinate against small-pox (and they didn't really know how that worked). Cholera wasn't a problem back th en, but typhus and typhoid fever were, and medical science couldn't even di stinguish them at that stage.
ld
om
.
master in modern democratic socialism,
I worked full-time as an electronic engineer from 1973 to 1993. From about
1982 I was being paid about 50% more than the average industrial wage, refl ecting the fact that I was tolerably skilled at what I was doing. Nobody wa s labouring in my service - I was just another wage-slave, if a well-paid o ne. Once my wife dragged me over to the Netherlands in 1993 I was probably less productive, but I eventually did manage to get back into full-time wor k for a while, if at an age when a lot of Dutch employees would already hav e retired. I was forcibly retired at age 60 (much to my disgust). I'm not s ure where "your couple of decades" comes from, but you may taken seriously something krw might have posted. He is a right-wing nitwit like you, but I' d have thought that you'd have enough sense to recognise that he's not in c lose contact with reality.
r
I paid income tax in the UK and the Netherlands, which supported precisely the kind of redistribution that you find tyrannical. In the UK I was an act ive member of the Labour Party, supporting more rather than less redistribu tion from relatively well-off people like me, to people who needed help.
It's very convenient for your argument to ignore the fact that I'm now part of the population that would end up paying more tax if society were reorga nised to offer more equality of opportunity.
Jefferson may have dreamt of the eventual emancipation of slaves when young , but he stopped talking about it after 1785, and did very little about it when he became influential in Federal politics after getting back from Fran ce in 1790. He did ask for the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves in 1806 and signed it into law in 1807, but only freed five slaves in his will - he'd apparen tly mortgaged the rest.
Al Gore's unlikely to fly to Nijmegen. If I didn't fly to Nijmegen, the air lines would marginally lower the airfare to persuade some other Australian to fly to Europe on the same plane. These days, all the planes that I fly o n are full.
You want me to indulge in a Quixotic minimalisation of my fossil-fuel footp rint? Fine. I want you to think about what you are advocating. Neither is going t o happen. I've worked out how much I can delay the climate catastrophe by d irect action - it's about 5msec, which doesn't really justify the effort.
The convicts who were transported to Australia before 1850 (which is when t he first of my relatives arrived, after transportation had stopped) weren't rapists and axe-murderers - the UK hanged them, and only transported lesse r criminals, guilty of non-capital crimes - and they didn't get to write th e Australian constitution, which was first drafted in 1891, tidied up in 18
97 and 1898 and came into force in 1901. Australia didn't have take up arms to achieve political independence. Ben Franklin famously - and correctly - said that if he and his colleagues didn't hang together the British would hang them one at time, which makes them rather more criminal than anybody t ransported to Australia.
It doesn't, since you've got your facts lamentably wrong.
ars in Massachusetts, Obamacare isn't the only author of this "precious per fect gift".
ll I was saying. I didn't suggest that it was identical, which seems to be the strawman argument your irrelevant comments would have demolished if I'd made it.
I though maybe you needed it, since you keep uncritically repeating the fal sehood that Obamacare == Romneycare.
tem.
Right. You said Obamacare mimics RomneyCare, and now, having seen that it exploded Massachusetts' already-high costs, now you say it's a "step in the [right] direction."
levels - does require much more rigorous control of the medical insurance business's marginal costs - which does take more government intervention. T he bribes were an unfortunate additional expense of moving a little way alo ng that trajectory.
We agree, doing anything better means we need more government control. Except I mean "freedom" (controlling the gubmint), and you mean "force" (gubmint controlling the people).
ing more expensive everywhere - the medical profession is finding ever more ways to help it's patients, keeping them alive even longer to use up even more health care. The US system is half-again more extravagant than everybo dy else, but getting it efficient and cost-effective isn't going to reverse the long term trend.
" to wise DML for giving us this precious perfect gift?
years in Massachusetts, Obamacare isn't the only author of this "precious p erfect gift".
all I was saying. I didn't suggest that it was identical, which seems to b e the strawman argument your irrelevant comments would have demolished if I 'd made it.
Around, actually.
alsehood that Obamacare == Romneycare.
That's not what I said. "Copy" isn't "replicate" and a scheme which works i n one state is obviously not going to work across multiple states. As usual , you are distorting what I said so that you can create another of your str awman arguments.
ne
ystem.
s.
I said it was derived from Romneycare - which is all that "copied" could im ply in the context where I used the word.
now you say it's a "step in the [right] direction."
I haven't seen that it "exploded" Massachusett's already high costs - healt h care has been getting more expensive across the US and the rest of the ad vanced industrial world, and it's a trifle unrealistic (even though it suit s your preconceptions) to blame all the increase in the Massachusetts costs on Romneycare.
ch levels - does require much more rigorous control of the medical insuranc e business's marginal costs - which does take more government intervention. The bribes were an unfortunate additional expense of moving a little way a long that trajectory.
Why do you think that? Do you think that the governments in Scandinavia and Germany are less sensitive to the opinions of the people than is the US go vernment. Since the rich don't spend as much on buying TV ads for their fav oured candidates in German and Scandinavia as the rich do in the US, the US government is probably less responsive to wishes of the population, since the rich get to fool more of the people more of the time.
tting more expensive everywhere - the medical profession is finding ever mo re ways to help it's patients, keeping them alive even longer to use up eve n more health care. The US system is half-again more extravagant than every body else, but getting it efficient and cost-effective isn't going to rever se the long term trend.
.?
In theory, sufficiently advanced technology could automate a lot of the hum an labour element in health care, but I'm still paying human cleaners to cl ean our flat. Eventually it's going to happen, but it's going to take a whi le.
g to?
husetts,"
Who claimed that it was an amazing success? That's another of your "straw m an" inventions. Romneycare and Obamacare are both rather small steps toward s the "national insurance" schemes that do work well in France and German, and deliver rather cheaper, but perfectly adequate health care in the UK. T hat Obamacare and Romneycare work at all, granting the defects of the rapac ious, over-staffed, and under-regulated health insurance companies on which they are based, is a trifle surprising.
e and law sometime in the 1700s. Get with the program here.
You didn't reject English common law, merely got out from under paying taxe s imposed from the UK. When the UK got around to adopting democracy, they d id it rather better than you did, having the advantage of being able to see the defects in your - rather primitive - system, and avoid most of them.
ed with some sort of asshole religion.
I don't want your guns, but if you understood your own best interests, you wouldn't either. The US does have a peculiar enthusiasm for religion - my t heory is that your education system has to stifle critical thinking, which would otherwise lead to widespread scepticism about your primitive and clum sy constitution, and your population is thus unusually susceptible to the n onsense of organised religion.
I'm perfectly accustomed to it, which doesn't make me think that it is anyt hing other than national foolishness.
Worked great in Iran and Chili, and seems to be working out just as well in Irak. If you had a democratic system worth exporting, it might have worked better.
American-style democracy is to real democracy as MS/DOS is to a real operat ing system - better than nothing, but barely adequate when first developed, and a poor basis for further development.
It's the world's most expensive health insurance because it is being sold b y health insurance companies who hang onto rather more of the money paid in than most, then have to pay the costs the world's most expensive health ca re system, with a depressing tendency to over-test (to protect the doctors if they get sued for malpractice by a huge clan of ambulance-chasing lawyer s) and to over-treat (because they make money out of anything they do, even if it is of marginal advantage to the patient).
Obama may eventually be able to do something about both problems, but it is n't going to happen overnight. Despite James Arthur's irrational conviction s, the perfectly free market isn't always the best way of distributing good s and services, and the buyers in the medical market really aren't in a pos ition to make well-informed choices. Health-care in France, Germany and the Netherlands does have some free-market aspects which do tend to make medic al service cheaper there than they are in the US, but the market as a whole is heavily regulated, as are the medical insurance companies who insure ev erybody - you can choose which insurer insures you, but you do have to sign up with one of them.
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