Mustard and Blue

It's funny a few months ago I was with a couple of Canadians who were boasting about Canada's pride and joy, the universal health care system. Now I see this....

http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadi ... Gu_Z3KXoQw

Simply put, it's the middlemen in health care which are driving up costs. Imagine doctors being able to directly negotiate with patients about payments and pricing. Imagine having to only pay one person to hadle payment instead of a business office and a massive insurance company or government.

Yup. Every system has it's flaws. Obviously, something that big cannot be set up perfectly. Canada's system is crumbling. The US is unaffordable to many. The UK's NHS is just a pile of steaming crap.
We should stick with what we have but reduce the costs at source to make it affordable. Too many people making a killing with excessive profits. Fix that first and the system will slowly reform itself.

You know what would reduce costs? More doctors. How do we get more doctors? Pay them more. How do we pay them more? Remove the thorn in their side which is insurance companies.

ChasUK wrote:Yup. Every system has it's flaws. Obviously, something that big cannot be set up perfectly. Canada's system is crumbling. The US is unaffordable to many. The UK's NHS is just a pile of steaming crap.
We should stick with what we have but reduce the costs at source to make it affordable. Too many people making a killing with excessive profits. Fix that first and the system will slowly reform itself.

The only effective way to fix excessive profits without government coercion is by allowing the free market to work. We were on our way to achieving this with Health Care Expense Accounts but the GOP lost its nerve under the nightmare that was "I'm a Uniter Not a Divider" Bush (who is not to be confused with his father, the dreadful "Read My Lips" Bush).

Or should I have said, ". . .as usual the GOP lost its nerve. . ."

Absolutely. Free market will always dominate any government run program as long as the government does not enforce its power on business.

On a different note, Healthcare will be the center piece today at the first ever Libertarian Party meeting on Miami (OH) campus. I will be there and I will be at the Tea Party in Cincy tomorrow.

On a random note, Miami is seeing a completely different political shift compared to last year. The College Republicans group has almost doubled in membership compared to last year and the College Democrats have gotten very little attention during the early movements these past few weeks. This is a complete 180 from last year around the same time.

Joetimo wrote:Absolutely. Free market will always dominate any government run program as long as the government does not enforce its power on business.

On a different note, Healthcare will be the center piece today at the first ever Libertarian Party meeting on Miami (OH) campus. I will be there and I will be at the Tea Party in Cincy tomorrow.

On a random note, Miami is seeing a completely different political shift compared to last year. The College Republicans group has almost doubled in membership compared to last year and the College Democrats have gotten very little attention during the early movements these past few weeks. This is a complete 180 from last year around the same time.

I'm not surprised. I was a ardent Democrat when I was in college but then I saw how hypocritical their natural was. Now. I'm a mottled mess who breaks the cookie cutters of politics.

You are a great American.

Bigfatcat999 wrote:

Joetimo wrote:Absolutely. Free market will always dominate any government run program as long as the government does not enforce its power on business.

On a different note, Healthcare will be the center piece today at the first ever Libertarian Party meeting on Miami (OH) campus. I will be there and I will be at the Tea Party in Cincy tomorrow.

On a random note, Miami is seeing a completely different political shift compared to last year. The College Republicans group has almost doubled in membership compared to last year and the College Democrats have gotten very little attention during the early movements these past few weeks. This is a complete 180 from last year around the same time.

I'm not surprised. I was a ardent Democrat when I was in college but then I saw how hypocritical their natural was. Now. I'm a mottled mess who breaks the cookie cutters of politics.

Joetimo - congratulations - Miami of Ohio - very cool school indeed!

I would simply like to admonish Joetimo and Bigfatcat to not waste too much time in things like The Libertarian Party and the wilderness of being an "independent." In this two party country the only thing that we can use to stop the scourge of liberalism is THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.

I believe ALL conservatives/libertarians should pile into, and become active in, The Republican Party so that the Party becomes as reliably conservative as the Democratic Party is reliably liberal. We men and woman of the right simply dilute our strength when we run off in a number of different directions.

I used to be very moderate, but after last years election I bent completely right until I realized the Right is just as bad as the Left. Why Palin and McCain were running together is beyond me. Romney and Ron Paul would have been amazing.

Bigfatcat999 wrote:I'm not surprised. I was a ardent Democrat when I was in college but then I saw how hypocritical their natural was. Now. I'm a mottled mess who breaks the cookie cutters of politics.

There was a saying I heard somewhere, maybe on the old boards: "If you're not a Democrat in your 20s, you have no heart; if you're not a Republican in your 40s, you have no brain." So if I'm a Libertarian, what is it that I'm missing? My appendix?

Having been on a pair of very different college campuses, I see a large number of potential libertarians, and I wonder why the Libertarian Party hasn't tried reaching out to college campuses. They're recruiting gold mines.

Frankly, I cannot bring myself to agree with either the Democratic or Republican philosophies in their entirety, and in practice, it's an illusion of choice: both parties have similar fiscal MOs (which boil down to running the country into an enormous debt and then blaming it on the other side), neither party presents a unified front on social issues, and the Democrats are just as aggressive with the military as they accuse the Republicans of being.

And w/r/t the topic of health care, I don't claim to have a solution, but I don't think that replacing private bureaucrats with public ones is going to solve a whole lot.