Inconvenient fact #1: Private corporations deny people coverage and deny them care all the time because they are too expensive. You cannot simultaneously attack government for any time it does this and not attack corporations for same. Not if you’re going to be morally consistent, and CERTAINLY not if you’re a Rational Thinker.

Inconvenient fact #2: No modern western-style democracy with government run health system has ever devolved into this paranoid fantasy you invoke of “a society set up so men and women no longer have to feel individually responsible for their fellow humans and instead can be callous, selfish immoral people who just let a mindless, automatic government bureaucracy take care of all the moral decisions.” It’s a fantasy, a bugaboo, a red herring, and a definite impediment to rational thinking. To whatever extent people shuffle off their moral decisions to government, they no more do this than they do to charities, to private corporations, or individuals other than themselves.

Indeed, #2 leads me to conclude that there ARE no Rational Thinkers amongst the market-worshiping zealots who are opposing this badly-needed reform.

A reform that, I remind you again, a majority of the medical AND health insurance industry favor. Those who actually WORK in the market favor this. You’d think that would penetrate through the fog of ideology for some, at least.

“Reform” ideologue: “We need healthcare reform and the public option because too many people fall through the cracks because private companies deny coverage or treatment because it is too expensive. Healthcare reform will CHANGE THIS”

Rational Thinker: “Uhm, scarce resource allocation is a fact of life. If you have a public-run healthcare system you’ll have the same denial but no way to sue, appeal or otherwise get the treatment you need”

“Reform” Ideologue: “So what if governments do this? Corporations already do this all the time”

To which the only response the Rational person can say is “Then, since you’ve undermined your own basic argument, why do you still want it?”

Oh, and I don’t think Jesus would be very happy with a society set up so men and women no longer have to feel individually responsible for their fellow humans and instead can be callous, selfish immoral people who just let a mindless, automatic government bureaucracy take care of all the moral decisions.

So all I can see is that you’re suggesting the horrid possibility that government might, maybe, do what private insurance companies already do every day of the week.

It’s really bizarre to me to hear someone telling horror stories about how government might do things that corporations are already doing.

People get refused coverage every single day in this country. They die from it, every single day in this country. I cannot take seriously anyone who wants to even have this discussion if they cannot, will not, acknowledge that fundamentally undeniable fact.

So I’m thinking more than five minutes into the future. And a good bit more than 5 minutes into the past, come to think of it. History is already the judge, and the theory that getting government involved in health care results in mass oppression and the death of freedom has already been judged by history: it’s a fantasy based on hyperbole and little else.

As for Christ: the Church’s position has been for some time now that whenever possible government should provide universal health care. Were it not for thorny questions about abortion and physician choice in related matters, the Church hierarchy is already on the President’s side, and on the side of the majority in Congress. And I don’t think the Church’s mission is to turn us all into slaves either.

Health care isn’t about making people slaves. It’s about fulfilling a positive moral (and Christian, come to think of it) obligation to each other.

People need to take care of each other. The notion that freedom only comes from doing for yourself as the rugged individual isn’t particularly deep, isn’t particularly thoughtful, and isn’t particularly Christian.

If you want some deep thinking, you might try, just as a thought-experiment, shedding notions that “true freedom comes only from taking care of yourself.” It’s deeper than that. We are not a species of isolated individuals; no man is an island. And in seeking to see that ALL Americans (not merely myself) are covered, I may not seek “comfort” for them or myself; I may in fact seek protection, for us all. Mutual protection being one of the things we’re supposed to do for each other.

I think, myself, that much of this generation’s market-worshiping zealotry stems from philosophies of the 20th century that were opposed to Marxism. Where Marxism revered the collective above all (to a psychotic level), so in reaction opposing forces revered the individual above all, and a generation later that’s reached at least near-psychotic levels.

I believe both such philosophies represent bipolar extremes which each deny the central truth: we are all simultaneously individuals and part of a collective whole. We are 100% BOTH. And, we have positive and negative obligations to each other, but the bottom line, in my view, is that seeing to it that the sick are cared for is a positive obligation we all have that is every bit as important as any other form of mutual protection. It’s why we are social animals, just like all other primates, and not solitary beasts. It’s not our nature, it’s now how we’re supposed to be–and it’s not, in fact, how most of us really are. Or should be.

I put it to you that you have a wider obligation to the society that nurtured and protects you. And that society has obligations to you. Sometimes, forcing you to act responsibly is part of the messy business of being alive and part of the human race. The question isn’t whether this is ever necessary, but where to set the limits.

On the whole, I’d rather be told I have to help pay for others’ health care than be drafted to fight in a war. But I don’t deny that both may sometimes be necessary. So be it.

Forcing companies to cover people at a loss is just not sensible. Would you require life insurance companies to sell people insurance 0n their deathbed?

The current system has problems, but those are mostly the result of government intervention: mandates create high premiums, and insurance companies aren’t allowed to compete across state lines. Let’s fix those and unleash the free market.

corporation-run health care system screws people over right and left, and kills people off–children, old people, the disabled–every damned day.

Corporations can’t decide to deny coverage because it’s too expensive. They have to fulfill their contracts or face ruinous legal liability. Yes, rescission happens. Yes, they are sued for it.

Gov’ts, otoh, can and do simply let people die if they’re too expensive, and you have no recourse.

If the only thing that you’ll ever consider is what will happen in the next 5 minutes, there’s no point in trying to warn you off of jumping off of a building from which it takes 6 minutes to hit the ground.

I get that you’re tired, Dean. But frankly, you need to man up and stop trying to run away from thinking about the repercussions of actions. Thinking hurts, and you want someone else to fix all your problems, but you really need to think anyway.

Free men are often poorer than slaves; that doesn’t make the free man a slave and the slave a free man. There may be more important things than freedom, but please stop trying to call black white.

When the government tells you that you have to buy insurance or men with guns will come and lock you away in a cage, you’re not free, even if you are healthier.

In the ancient world, free men often sold themselves into slavery in order to eat. That may have been the best choice, it may have been the worst choice, or it might have been anything inbetween. But they went from being free men into being slaves.

Dean, you’re hurting and you want someone else to take care of you. That’s fine, if that’s what you want. But be a man and admit it. Stop making fun of people for caring more for freedom than for health by saying that they’re not free now.

Comfort isn’t freedom. Stop conflating the two.

You want to sell your freedom for comfort. It makes sense; that’s your right. But whether you do it or no, please stay an honest man.

Freedom doesn’t mean the ability to do whatever you want, it means the ability to make your own choices within the limits of what you can achieve. Poverty doesn’t make you a slave. Poverty may limit the scope of what you can achieve to a small number of undesireable outcomes, but it doesn’t make you a slave merely because you don’t like any of your choices.

If somebody threatens to skin you alive unless you deny Jesus rose from the dead, you still have a choice.

Health care isn’t nearly as important as whether one denies Christ, obviously. It’s trivial in comparison. But it is similar. Sometimes your choices suck; that doesn’t make you a slave, it only makes you unfortunate.

A slave is what you are when you trade your freedom for some material good. It doesn’t matter how little freedom you trade, or how many material goods you get. It may be a good deal or a bad deal. It’s not selling your soul. But please call a spade a spade.

Make whatever choices you want, but be honest about what you’re doing.

Of course, under the new system you’d have the same freedom to pay cash or rely on charity, but let’s not confuse people with the facts!

See, it works like this:

Giant corporation = individual liberty and virtuous heroism
Government = nazilike control and collectivist destruction

Even Ayn Rand would see this for the nonsense that it is (and she was nuttier than squirrel poop).

And yes, currently we have “death panels”. People who decide whether you have to pay out of pocket to live. They are only motivated by profit and not votes however.

I mean, let’s just look at this:

Want a heart transplant? Thing people should have preference, since (1) they’re morally superior and (2) they’re less likely to just destroy it. Non-smokers should get replacement lungs ahead of smokers. Replacement knees will go to thin people before fat people, and replacement knees will be less important than treatments for thin people diseases, so there’ll be fewer to go around.

All of that is happening RIGHT NOW, all over America. For EVERYONE.

All of it. Every single bit of it. Today. Right now. In America, in our supposedly “free market” [coughbullshitcough] health insurance system. And, as we’ve already seen (links available) the very best health care in the United States is currently be offered by the government–it’s called the VA Health System.

So really, honestly? I’m not sure I even can answer your question as you appear to have intentionally brainwashed yourself. I hate to be so harsh, but really man.

I have had the (pleasure? experience?) of listening to Rush Limbaugh and others on the right lately get ever more hysterical and out of touch with reality as this bill gets closer and closer to passage. Limbaugh the other day was calling it the end of capitalism in America, the end of freedom, blah blah woof woof–ridiculous.

I am getting really tired, to be honest, of seeing places like Canada and Europe and Japan being portrayed as oppressive dictatorial hellholes of inferior care while America’s “free market” [coughbullshitcough] corporation-run health care system screws people over right and left, and kills people off–children, old people, the disabled–every damned day. It’s nonsense.

I’m simply out of patience with the right and/or libertarians on this. Most of what they’re peddling is a load of paranoid, ill-informed crap and market-ideologue zealotry.

Will the bill that eventually passes–and, thank God, it increasingly looks like a done deal, all over but the shouting–be perfect? Nope. It’ll have a ton of flaws. Over the years they’ll be corrected. It’ll be a huge improvement over the absolutely murderous disaster system we have right now, and with room to improve.

And no, we will not become a communist dicatorship, there will be no “death panels” (any moreso than we have them now, anyway), we will not become a Nazi-like state, government will not control every aspect of our lives. All that paranoid right-wing tommyrot? Well, it’s paranoid right-wing tommyrot. I won’t even deign to call it “conservative” because there’s very little conservative about any of it.

In fact, those things do happen; in Britain they are installing cameras to make sure people on gov’t aid exercise.

European health care is vastly inferior in general. They get drugs a year later and ration in ways we would find abhorrent. They often simply don’t treat marginal cases.