It's one case where a little blurry actually helps.

Man, what a classic nerd response.

This is typical nerd behavior - forget completely what the guillotine is getting ready to do to you and get absorbed in the operating defect! "Wait, I see the problem!"

No, the problem is that this abortion, Obamacare, is getting ready to fuck us all and you're all arguing about how best to load the batteries!

So, unless I give you free shit, you'll take it by force. But if I go ahead and give you free shit up front, 'socialism' as you put it, you'll leave me alone.

Good of you to explain the term 'socialism' so clearly! I agree with you completely!

Socialism is theft, pure and simple.

hmm, I now see why the democrats love this idea. its good for Big Business and bad for the little guy.

FIFY

Fascism definitely helps giant companies that partner with the government. That which benefits a few large corporations doesn't, as a rule, benefit me as an individual. I agree with the sentiment that Repubs only oppose big government when the Dems want it. I believe that the corrupt bastards are happy when they can loudly oppose massive Democratic government growth and then inherit that power later.

US comparison with Canadian single payer system: US was a pain in the ass, as you pointed out. Crazy billing per insurance company per state per item. BUT, in comparison, the Canadian system was MUCH harder to implement. The US system could be handled by tables that linked CPT codes to insurer per state. Annoying as hell to set up, bet then it pretty much just worked.

The Canadian system was vastly more complicated. For one thing, it wasn't "single payer". Each province billed differently, paid differently, wanted the data in different formats, paid depending on the time of year because they would run out of money towards the end of the year and your payments became open ended receivables or worse, the would sometimes ask for money back! Tracked by patient by service by date by age of patient...

Healthcare is one of the things that is too important for the government to be involved with.

So, you want to replace large greedy corporations with...

the largest, greediest most inefficient corporation. One that use lots of guns to enforce it's will.

Hey, what could go wrong?

Or perhaps we can enforce a market with true competition. Which is not what we have now. "Oh Noz! Can't do that!" People must be forced to do the right thing by a vast, inefficient, "compassionate", smarter-than-we-are totalitarian state.

The discussion is almost exclusively how to make everyone have health insurance. It should be all about how to have as inexpensive healthcare as possible.

The cheapest possible healthcare is your doctor, her staff and you. Every insurance lamprey, bureaucrat and government added cost, e.g. endless taxes and unneeded regulation added to that list, drives up the cost of healthcare.

This isn't a cry to eliminate all government, but we have to acknowledge that constantly (and poorly) increasing the complexity of a system increases the frictional losses and government operates on an inverse scale of efficiency.

You think a single payer system is going to be efficient in the U.S.? We have a perfect model already. It's called "the public schools". The U.S. public school system is broken by any engineering standard. Any system that requires literally an endless energy input (money in this case) is, by definition, broken.

Yay! Let's finish what the insurance industry started and completely fuck up what's left of healthcare in the U.S.!

You must not have children. I raised two great kids and have friends that raised kids I consider to be fucked up and you know what? We all did our best.

We're all hard working, happy, no horrible home lives, stable marriages, loved our kids and spent time with them. My kids are happy and fun to be around and my friends kid is in prison and will be for years.

It ain't all just "nurture" folks. I almost feel my kids turned out all right in spite of my parenting and my friends did absolutely everything they could.

People are affected by their parents but are also individuals who make choices, sometimes bad ones their parents would literally die to prevent if they could.

When I talk about liberty, it's not anarchy. I would just like to see the discussion moved to how little government do we need to live and work together. The current discussion, in the US at least, is always about how much government can we have without fomenting an armed rebellion. How much government control of healthcare, communications, income, etc.

Being opposed to a totalitarian state doesn't presume chaos, unless you're a totalitarian statist which a depressing number of people are. They take umbrage at that description of course and claim they just want to help people. because, you know, if people were allowed to make important decisions, they'd fuck up. Only a vast bureaucracy has the compassion and wisdom to run other peoples lives.

Yes people do fuck up their lives sometimes. God knows I've made bad decisions and will make more. That's called living. And Learning. And not being eternally cast in the role as a child who must always protected by the all knowing state.

They might even elect a community activist with no legislative experience as president!