I have a serious question, and I'm curious why it hasn't been asked...

[jsbowden]

McCain's health care plan is a 5k tax credit.

My question is this:

How does this help families who are so poor they already don't pay taxes?

Seriously. Why hasn't one single reporter asked him or Palin this question? A five thousand dollar tax credit isn't going to give them the money to buy health insurance. We're talking about people who just worry about making rent and eating. And are the folks most likely to end up sick.

If someone has, and I missed it, what was the answer?

The rich stay healthy and the sick stay poor...
U2

Comments

[cerebresque.livejournal.com]

Because he's blithering on about "deserve", which - apart from being a transparent attempt to cast the whole issue as the wealthy giving the poor the finger, and a gross misrepresentation of the other side's point - isn't even a useful concept for the debate. (What do we deserve, anyway? We deserve perfect lives, free energy, utter satiation of our material desires, total knowledge, infinite wealth, completely satisfying relationships, and, oh yeah, immortality. And probably also to be horsewhipped through the streets for our many flaws and sins. What the hell's that got to do with anything?)

He's saying he wants it made a "right", not a "market good", because everyone "deserves" it. Well, yeah, but everyone deserves a lot of things, but here's the problem:

We live in the real universe, and so it, along with everything else that we deserve and which would be nice to have, is a market good. It is a good or service, it has non-zero value to the recipient, and non-zero cost to the provider. That's the definition of a market good.

And making it a right is going to change exactly nothing. It's not going to magically create more healthcare out of thin air. Congress can make it a right, they can write it into the Constitution, they can stand on street corners and shout about it, and it's not going to do so much as heal a goddamned bruise. The only way to get more healthcare is to (a) produce it for yourself, or (b) buy it.

"Right" versus "market good" is therefore a bullshit dichotomy.

Because you can't buy it or produce it with nothing, you have to obtain the means to do so somehow.

So, you can either take money away from people to give it, or the market good bought with it, to other people. Where I come from, taking money from Peter and giving it to Paul is called theft.

Or you can insist that people produce the good for you for free (or, combining it with the latter, at well below the market rate; in many of the countries with nationalized healthcare systems, for example, this is enforced by making it illegal to practice medicine outside the system). Where I come from, requiring people to work for you on terms other than a mutually agreed wage is called slavery. It may not be chattel slavery, but it fits the broader concept.

Jeff's argument is predicated on the notion that the property of the wealthy and the labor of the doctors and other healthcare workers is an asset of society that he can allocate as he sees fit to produce an optimal outcome. "From each according to his abilities, to each according to their needs^W^Wwhat they deserve".

Those of us over here in libertarian-conservative land point out that the whole "deserves" argument is so much irrelevant bullshit, because said property and labor are not social assets because of real, old, fundamental and inalienable rights like life, liberty, and property; appropriating them is, therefore, ipso facto wrong; and that while the People and/or Congress can make theft and slavery legal, they cannot make it right.

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

What do you call a system that mandates that a consumer must purchase a product or service at an artificially inflated price?

[cerebresque.livejournal.com]

Define 'artificially inflated', please?

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

Our medical system has set the pricing for medical care at everything the insurance industry will bear. It has nothing to do with the actual cost of the process and is the result of long iteration of our pooled risk, pooled payment system. Nowhere eles in the world does medicine cost what it does here.

[cerebresque.livejournal.com]

That, I call structural failure, in re bad regulatory choices that require insurance to cover elective/chronic/routine care as well as acute care, and which set up insurance pools in a way that no actuary would consider reasonable. See my proposal for reform in other comment.

Of course, there are also other factors - like that we are perhaps the only country in the world that buys pharmaceuticals at the market price, since most nationalized healthcare nations have monopsonic purchasing organizations, and that price is inflated by that very monopsony.

And, of course, minor things such as being able to get the result of the pathology on your suspected-cancer biopsy overnight, instead of three months later, your MRI in good time, and so on and so forth, but while that is more expensive to achieve, I think the poor bugger with the cancer doesn't mind so much, eh?