How Intellectuals Betrayed the Poor

Discussion in 'Science & Society' started by KilljoyKlown, Jul 26, 2011.

  1. KilljoyKlown Whatever Valued Senior Member

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    I should have explained a bit more. The system would not be like insurance companies. It would be more like a law that required all healthy people to pay into a common health fund for the particular group of people covered by one doctor or primary physician. I'm not sure what the ideal size of groups would be, but whatever provides the best health options for the money paid into the fund. Anybody that wants to make choices against the doctors recommendation would have to sign a waiver and then keep paying at the healthy level of payment. The whole structure of this system would be structured to keep people as healthy as possible for as long as possible. People are going to die and when that happens someone new will be assigned to that position in the group, so that the total number of people under one doctor remains constant.
     
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  3. kowalskil Registered Member

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    I am an intellectual and I am not indifferent. In fact I was part of "working class" till I retired in 2004.

    Ludwik Kowalski (see Wikipedia)
     
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  5. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    OK. That's getting pretty close to the recent healthcare act - you have to have insurance (healthy or not) which means that money is going into a central fund (i.e. the insurance company.) That way the company has a strong incentive to keep the healthy people healthy, because when they do their costs drop and their profit increases.

    What does "make choices against the doctors recommendation" mean? Does that mean that if he tells you to exercise, and you don't, you'd need a waiver? If you didn't exercise and you didn't sign the waiver, how would that be enforced?

    I agree that that's a good goal, but that's pretty close to how insurance companies work now. Many even have strong incentives for preventative care (i.e. "well baby" programs, low cost or free regular checkups etc)
     
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  7. KilljoyKlown Whatever Valued Senior Member

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    The article may have used a poor choice of words, but then intellectual people come in lots of flavors and some are not so nice. I'd like to think that all of us that participate in this forum are intellectually competent and I'm willing to bet most of us are working class. Sometimes the article writers use titles that catch the eye and get you started reading. At the time when everybody was getting on the free trade bandwagon, I had my doubts about it, but I held my piece to give it a chance. Now I'm sorry about it and I hate what it's done to us. Who talked the Government into relaxing what banks and mortgage companies can do. They screwed and are still screwing our economy over and when the rest of the world steps in and says no more, because they're getting screwed too. Do you think they're are going to show us any mercy? Maybe the smart kids still in school will be studying Chinese.
     
  8. KilljoyKlown Whatever Valued Senior Member

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    It sounds like you care about health care. I don't have all the answers, just some ideas that need lots of work. I believe as a powerful nation we should be able to provide basic health services for all citizens. To do this doctors need to make a good income, but if they're only interested in the money they can make, then they shouldn't be doctors. Not sure what the best answer is, but I do know what we have now sucks big time.
     
  9. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    I would agree provided it is VERY basic. (In other words, they'll patch you up after an accident, but if you come in with lung cancer, you just get painkillers and a prescription for O2.) That way you have a safety net if all else fails and you have some emergent problem, but you pay for anything more advanced.

    An alternative way to do this is to just require that everyone get some form of coverage. This drives down prices for everyone since healthy people would then support the sick. It keeps control of health coverage in the private sector, though, which is set up to manage expenses a little better than the government.
     
  10. KilljoyKlown Whatever Valued Senior Member

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    Yes but when the private sector manages their expenses they usually do their best to stick it to the government when possible and that hurts us old guys that worked a lot of years to earn that medical coverage.
     
  11. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    That, to me, is a good argument to get the government far away from medical care. That way there's no one with big pockets to "stick it to."
     
  12. Stryder Keeper of "good" ideas. Valued Senior Member

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    I wouldn't beat your head against anything, however it's definitely made me realise that Governments just aren't worth my time or effort, (And they shouldn't be yours either)

    Ideally I'd either look to an island retreat or plot the future Independence of a Martian colony that doesn't yet exist. (It's best to nurture freedom fighting early.)
     
  13. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    I'm an intellectual and since I went off to college and escaped from my parents and their "survival of the fittest" politics I have cared about the working class

    I voted Democratic in 1964 because at the time they were considered to be the working man's party. After seeing them send all those working men off to be killed, while killing an equal number of Vietnamese working men, I voted for the Peace & Freedom Party.

    Then in the 1980s when I became concerned as much with economic freedom as personal freedom, I started voting for the Libertarians. Both halves of the Republocrat Party seemed to care more about increasing the size of the bloated, inefficient, slow-moving government than about the lives of their constituents, and besides, the Peace & Freedom Party was pretty much defunct by then.

    For a long time most Libertarians and libertarians were conservatives and my liberal roots made me a one-percenter among my own people, as they tended to concentrate exclusively on financial issues and the fight against communism, while I wanted to increase the focus on immigrants' rights, decriminialization of drugs, abolition of censorship, and halting the persecution and murder of other one-percenters like the ones at Waco and Ruby Ridge. (The working class are by no means the only people the government shits on. Its selectively enforced drug laws are the direct cause of all the fatherless black kids and NAFTA is the main reason all the Mexicans who used to work on corn farms had to follow their jobs to Iowa and Kansas. You'd almost think we still had racial discrimination here, but that's impossible because the government says we don't.)

    Today, as the collapse of our economy looms because the people who constitute our government are more concerned with reelection than the fate of their constituents, many voters are as disillusioned with the Republocrats as we Libertarians have always been. I realize that the libertarian economic philosophy of minimal government is not the best prescription for helping the working class. But the Republocrats are demonstrating that they don't care about any of us ordinary people, working or not; just themselves and their fantasy world in Washington
    Since the beginning of this endless Rooseveltian Era in 1933, the government has, in effect without actually saying so, nationalized (or come damn close to it) the following industries:
    • Charity: they confiscate billions of dollars of our money to "help the poor," so much that if it was merely divided up and given directly to the people who qualify as "poor" by their own metrics, every "poor" family would suddenly have an annual income of about $40K.
    • Education: University graduates can't make change for a dollar without a calculator; those people are now running our banking system and invented the subprime mortgage.
    • Transportation: Ask any architect or structural engineer if he avoids driving over America's bridges; and how many flights have you missed because of the Homeland Gestapo?
    • Health Care: Both doctors and patients are suffering from the symptoms of "defensive medicine" while accountants and lawyers make medical decisions.
    • Communication: It takes three calls to my cable company to repair the bollard behind my house, which was so well positioned that it's usually full of water; but hey they can tap my phone calls.
    • Energy: The great telecommuting revolution of the late 1990s was canceled when the Clown Prince of the Energy Industry took over the White House, and it has never recovered.
    This is a really good time to add your voice to those of the millions of people who don't even realize they're libertarians: fiscally conservative but socially liberal. The era of the paleo-libertarians and anarcho-libertarians, who dreamt of Ayn Rand's "paradise" in which friends charge each other money to loan them their cars, is over. The old joke was that our motto is, "The solution to bad government is no government." In fact it is, "The solution to too much government is less government."

    Today we see the stark reality of just how much our gigantic, top-heavy government is providing with all that money. Everything they claim to have done for the "working class" won't mean shit when our bubble economy bursts and we become the world's largest Third World country.
     
  14. Me-Ki-Gal Banned Banned

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    Fraggle that almost looks like ranting . Me is proud of you
     
  15. KilljoyKlown Whatever Valued Senior Member

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    I'll second that.

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