Sunday, June 16, 2019

Chris Wallace Put Bernie Sanders on the Spot About Universal Healthcare

This morning on "Fox News Sunday," Chris Wallace put a very important question to Bernie Sanders about universal healthcare. To paraphrase, he asked, "Just who the hell is Bernie Sanders to decide for everyone what their medical care should look like?"

This is pretty much the question that I asked the architect of Obamacare, the evil Ezekiel Emanuel:




-RW

6 comments:

  1. That is an all too rare instance of questioning the basic foundation of government interference. Too often the media (and even "conservatives" cede the basic argument by skipping the "why" and go straight to the "how."

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  2. The reason why doctors prescribe medical care and there is no real price competition is because starting in 1910, maybe even 1906 the government was used to wipe out alternative choices in the free market. Licensing was a big player to that end as was training doctors. Doctors became trained to see symptoms and then produce a course of care as they had been taught. Medical care was in that respect industrialized into one dominating system. It also intentionally increased prices. Each time the prices rose to unaffordability the government stepped in to tap more wealth.

    So yes, Emanuel and Sanders are correct in describing present conditions, but they ignore the history. I think Emanuel may know it, Sanders I doubt it.

    This is why it will never be solved. Their arguments are circular. They ignore why we have the conditions we do. Much like prevailing medical care. Treat symptoms not root causes. Hence all the chronic care.

    Furthermore Emanuel treats people as presumptive idiots. There are so many ways a free market can deal with the problems of the customer not knowing something. First most doctoring, especially trained doctoring is very simple and even an idiot could figure it out with help of a machine. We also live in age where information barriers are being broken. People can teach themselves. And then of course people can get multiple opinions and bids.

    Then of course they'll bring up 'you don't have time for bids when you are hit by a bus'. True. But that's what simple and cheap insurance plans can deal with. Along with things that are expensive to treat. Although in a free market nothing would stay expensive to treat for long.

    Then they move on to the exploitative doctor and hospital and uninsured person. You got hit by a bus and the ambulance crew gets a kickback for bringing you to hospital X, and hospital X charges $1,000,000 for something where the going rate is $1,000. What then they say? Well, I would throw in their face how only the most simple government regulation and its basic job in contact law and dispute resolution prevents that. It's a minarchist approach but I think effective. Yes, I know there are free market replacements, but I like leveraging statist thinking against itself by pointing out complex government "solutions" are used to patch government's failure to do the basics.

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    1. “They ignore why we have the conditions we do.”

      Such as prior to Medicare and Medicaid healthcare was not considered a legal right.

      Growing up in the 40’s & 50’s I heard no complaints about outsized health care costs in my low-middle income family despite numerous instances of surgeries and hospital stays. I don’t know if my parents had catastrophic insurance which would have been cheap at that time, in line, as were ordinary medical costs, with most families’s income.

      If this control freak were honest he would have told Robert the reason you can’t afford major, catastrophic medical procedures is because we, the feds made it so; so now you are dependent on us. Which is how we want it.

      What evil lurks in the minds of men. The Shadow knows...

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    2. James Corbett produced an interesting podcast a few years ago about how the Rockefeller Foundation had a large hand in the making of the modern medical business. He also incorporated some of this into the second part of his two part documentary on big oil.

      https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-286-rockefeller-medicine/

      https://www.corbettreport.com/bigoil/

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  3. "You're not educated enough to know what the right thing to do is." Notice the unsupported, unquantified assertion there? What constitutes "educated enough"? How would you measure that? What data is there that would support that kind of assertion? In any event, Emanuel offers none. He pulls this assertion out as if it were self-evident, but what it really constitutes is a "gut-feeling" about the nature of human beings. It's a philosophical metaphysical supposition, not a statement of fact.

    "We know that when people spend their own money for healthcare without insurance and without guidance, they tend to not get preventative services, which 'we' think are important." Again, look at the hubris on display here, the unquestioned value judgments asserted as objective. Notice also what Emanuel is saying about human behavior and the market for medical goods and services: that unlike the behavior of human beings in every last single other market conceivable, people do not shop for medical goods and services, nobody who is not controlled strictly by government is capable of giving advice to consumers or is willing to do so... All of these are unsupported assertions of philosophical prejudice, not science. Somehow, people are able to feed and clothe themselves, get their cars and appliances repaired, find reasonable legal, tax, and accounting advice, choose a college, etc. but with medicine...well, that's different. Dogma. There is no support for the assertion except to point to a distorted medical goods and services market as if it were evidence that the distortion was necessary in the first place.

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  4. So, nobody can afford to buy medical goods and services out of pocket, but almost everybody can support an expropriation system which then subsidizes everyone's purchase of medical goods and services. Somehow, force and coercion magically make things affordable. Outrageous. Great job of exposing his irrational dogmas, Mr. Wenzel. You can tell Emanuel doesn't like having his comforting presumptions questioned at all.

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