Yessiree that UK socialized medicine is great!

[piscator]

It's the latter, which means you are either stealing from someone elses paycheck or they are stealing from yours.

Insurance is just like that. They may call it "Voluntary", but it's about as voluntary as driving...

All I can say is I'm glad we have Insurance Regulators on the taxpayer's tab!

Well, I suppose that makes me a thief. I have health insurance through work. I can guarantee that the charges for couple of visits to my rheumatologist with all the bloodwork (they draw between four and ten test tubes of blood since some values are checked every three months, others twice a year, and some once a year) costs more than I pay in premiums each year - and I see my rheumatologist at least four times a year and my primary care doctor two or three times a year. My out-of-pocket costs are negligible. Don't get me started on my prescription coverage - one month's supply of prescriptions retails for more than my premiums cost me in three years.

Yet, insurance companies still manage to make billions every year. There can't be that many people each year who don't use their insurance.

Seth's rhetorical use of "Theft" hinges on his even more rhetorical definition of "Voluntary" . See, a person would voluntarily pay private road owners just to leave his home in a Libertarian World, but the same act of leaving the house on Marxist public roads amounts to theft, because wage earners and businesses are compelled to pay taxes on fuel purchases by the thermonuclear armed might of the State.
And so it is with insurance. A person who needs insurance to operate his farm is volunteering to monitor your hemoglobin when he throws a dart at a board and picks the same system of for-profit insurers, reinsurers, HMOs, and pharma companies as you, but he is compelled by thermonukes when his government does the same thing objectively better and for less of his money.

Remember, all forms of Governmental compulsion, from a simple street crosswalk to the pure atheistic Marxist killing fields of Pol Pot, are thefts of your labor. And as such, crimes.

[mistermack]

Hmm. I find myself in complete agreement with you mistermack. It's not right.

I haven't been well.

[MrJonno]

I love the idea that a 'thief' is actually the worse thing a person can be, a murderer due to lack of action ie paying taxes is a far worse crime

[piscator]

John Galt has to shut down the planet and let the population dwindle to about 10% of its former, so the rest can start a world based on self interest.

Of course, if he tried that shit today, some asshole shareholders will call proxy votes and get those companies running again under new management in about a day, so the guys who actually run the world can come on in, turn the lights on, and get paid like they're supposed to.

[MrJonno]

John Galt has to shut down the planet and let the population dwindle to about 10% of its former, so the rest can start a world based on self interest.

Of course, if he tried that shit today, some asshole shareholders will call proxy votes and get those companies running again under new management in about a day, so the guys who actually run the world can come on in, turn the lights on, and get paid like they're supposed to.

Which is why libertarianism is so utterly evil, every other ideology in the world no matter how flawed at least claims it wants to benefit the majority of humanity, libertarian is at its core genocidal and requires most of humanity to die.

Luckily any ideology that has contempt for the masses will never be accepted by them no matter how they try to spin it

[Seth]

I'll just leave this here

Go shit in your own living room.

Mission Statement

The Commonwealth Fund—among the first private foundations started by a woman philanthropist, Anna M. Harkness—was established in 1918 with the broad charge to enhance the common good.

The mission of The Commonwealth Fund is to promote a high-performing health care system that achieves better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency, particularly for society's most vulnerable, including low-income people, the uninsured, minority Americans, young children, and elderly adults.

The Fund carries out this mandate by supporting independent research on health care issues and making grants to improve health care practice and policy. An international program in health policy is designed to stimulate innovative policies and practices in the United States and other industrialized countries.

As we see, the Commonwealth Fund is hardly a neutral or objective organization. It is specifically dedicated to advancing "socialized" medicine for the "common good."

Therefore, in its ratings any nation that does not have socialized medicine rates at the bottom of the list merely because it does not have socialized medicine, which the Fund considers the most important aspect of health care with respect to its mission statement.

This "report" is just exactly like Goebbels telling Germans that Nazism is a good thing because it wants to kill Jews.

It's propaganda and nothing more.

[Seth]

I'll just leave this here

Thanks for the link. Powerful article, seeing it deals with facts.

Actually it's almost entirely fact free and deals completely with socialist propaganda.

[Seth]

I'm pretty certain that someone presenting in that condition to our local medical centre would receive prompt first aid. Mind you, it is a fairly large clinic, with a dozen doctor's room and a nurses station at the centre...

My GP's office is simply that, a very small collection of offices/consultations rooms, a reception desk, and at best 2 GP's and a nurse. And they are dealing with appointments not walk-in injured, it's not what they are there for. If someone were to turn up and was patently bleeding out all over the floor, the staff would - like in any shop or office - try and help, and call an ambulance, I'm sure.

He was obviously turned away rightly because he had a non-life threatening wound, and was quite capable of going to the A&E.

Horseshit. What's the primary principle of the Hippocratic Oath? "First, do no harm."

No rational person of moral character, particularly a doctor, would refuse to provide emergency medical assistance to a wounded person if they were physically capable of doing so. In this case, if the patient needed an ambulance or merely a fire service first responder because the idiots in the medical office don't have a crash cart or first aid kit, then someone in the office should have called the fucking ambulance while others treated the victim as any trauma victim should be treated, which means at the very least sitting him down, preferably lying him down and treating him for shock, which can kill him regardless of the nature of the actual injury. No halfway intelligent person with any medical training or knowledge whatsoever would simply tell a wounded person to go away and find someone else to treat the wound. If that man had walked out the door, passed out from shock and fallen into the path of an oncoming vehicle on the street and gotten killed, everyone in that office would be at the very least morally responsible for his death and any doctor employed there should be de-licensed.

[Seth]

Either way, he won't get a bill.

Hmm. I find myself in complete agreement with you mistermack. It's not right.

He should get a bill. A large one. That will help to teach him to use proper chainsaw operating practice in the future.

[Seth]

Insurance is just like that. They may call it "Voluntary", but it's about as voluntary as driving...

All I can say is I'm glad we have Insurance Regulators on the taxpayer's tab!

Insurance is completely voluntary, just like driving is. And you pay based on an analysis of your risk to the pool of insured, which is perfectly rational.

[Seth]

Well, I suppose that makes me a thief. I have health insurance through work. I can guarantee that the charges for couple of visits to my rheumatologist with all the bloodwork (they draw between four and ten test tubes of blood since some values are checked every three months, others twice a year, and some once a year) costs more than I pay in premiums each year - and I see my rheumatologist at least four times a year and my primary care doctor two or three times a year. My out-of-pocket costs are negligible. Don't get me started on my prescription coverage - one month's supply of prescriptions retails for more than my premiums cost me in three years.

If you pay for a private insurance plan, you're no thief.

Yet, insurance companies still manage to make billions every year. There can't be that many people each year who don't use their insurance.

Actually, there are. That's why insurance companies exist. "Health insurance" is based on a carefully crafted plan and program of instilling fear into the public by insurance companies. By making a boogie-man of the rather small potential of a catastrophic illness insurers reap those billions by selling snake-oil to the credulous masses, most of whom will never use a fraction of what they pay in premiums.

I've saved more than a hundred thousand dollars in a savings account by putting what I had been paying in insurance premiums into that account for decades. It's still mostly there. My routine medical costs come to about $1500 per year for meds and office visits. That's approximately HALF of what an insurance policy will cost me under Obamacare PER MONTH.

It's a racket, big time. But it's a voluntary racket and everybody in the pool with you gets pissed on by their own consent, whereas with Obamacare and other forms of socialized medicine the healthy get pissed on in order to pay the health care needs of the sick and they don't have any right to get out of the pool.

[Seth]

Remember, all forms of Governmental compulsion, from a simple street crosswalk to the pure atheistic Marxist killing fields of Pol Pot, are thefts of your labor. And as such, crimes.

Wrong. The exception to your rule is government compulsion exercised in its police power role to prevent and redress instances of the initiation of force or fraud.

But everything else, yeah, you're right.

[Pappa]

I'll just leave this here

I doubt that would make any difference to Seth. Regardless of the cost per person and efficiency of socialised medicine, it's still stealing out of somebody else's paycheck.

[JimC]

I'll just leave this here

I doubt that would make any difference to Seth. Regardless of the cost per person and efficiency of socialised medicine, it's still stealing out of somebody else's paycheck.

It's very nice to know that true libertarians are a tiny and irrelevant minority...

Noisy, though...

[pErvinalia]

Yeah.