Xequecal wrote:
We can't cut because voters won't take responsibility for the consequences. That's the reality behind most social spending. Why does Social Security exist? It exists because even in an era where failing to save for retirement had far more dire consequences than it does today, people simply didn't do it. You can preach personal responsibility all you want but it eventually reaches a point where you're making the same mistake Communists do and assuming people are better than they are.
Obviously the voters won't go for it - that's why it works as a strategy for liberals. As for people not saving in past eras, in those eras people actually DID save what little they could - then they lost it in massive bank failures. Repeatedly. If you look at the history of the 19th century and early 20th century, every 5-10 years or so there's a "panic". There's also the fact that people simply didn't have as much to save, and saving in your mattress was actually a viable strategy. Finally, far more of the population was rural and did at least part of their business in barter and trade of services and such and didn't physically have easy access to a bank at all.
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The fact is, we live in a country where over half the EMPLOYED population lives paycheck to paycheck. Hell, I just read an article where they polled Americans on their ability to afford a $2,000 unexpected expense on 30 days notice, and learned that almost half of Americans don't even have the available credit to cover that expense, let alone actual money in a bank account to do so. You can't just go and blame all this on government tax policies when Europeans with >60% tax burdens manage to save more than Americans do.
All of it? No, you can't. You can blame a great deal of it on Americans wanting to have it both ways - trying to have excessive liberal social benefits like Europeans have and have a lower tax burden AND foot the bill for the defense budget that Europeans have been trying to weasel out of since WWII. There are plenty of moderate voters out there that may not want any government largesse for themselves but are still tremendously susceptible to pleas for public money for "victims" put in front of them on TV. People who worry about how in "our society" "we" aren't taking care of <insert victim class here>.
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You can complain about the inefficiency and wastefulness of government meddling all you want, but the policymakers have to address this reality. Take health care for example. How are you going to provide health care to a population where the majority literally has negative savings? The thing about private health insurance is if you want it to work, it has to function as, well, insurance. Insurance is supposed to be a risk spreading mechanism. It's something you buy to cover yourself against catastrophes, where you need to spread the risk because you can't realistically ever afford to deal with the catastrophe yourself. Insurance is not supposed to cover all the little expenses that you already know about in advance, like routine doctor and dentist visits. When you use insurance for that, you're essentially doing the same thing as the idiot that buys the service plan and extended warranty plan at checkout at Best Buy. It's a gigantic money pit because the insurance company has to hire tons of bureaucrats to scruitize claims and protect themselves from the absurd moral hazard associated with all their customers buying insurance against expenses they know they're going to have.
I'm not sure what this has to do with anything. The proposal of liberals is, essentially, to simply replace this with the GOVERNMENT paying for all these little expenses and an accompanying Euro-style tax burden. Why is this better? Is the government going to start telling people "No, sorry, you are now going to have to actually pay $70 for your checkup, and you should plan to pay that every year?" No, they aren't. They're going to let people pay $25 or $10, and then there's going to be some fat woman testifying in front of Congress about how horrid it is that some "underprivileged" group has to pay
that much to take their kid to a pediatrician (because foregoing 2-3 packs of cigarettes is just too hard) and when Republicans object to it, you'll see at the next campaign about how they "voted against healthcare for minorities/women/children/muppets/****".
That's basically exactly what happened in Wisconsin. Before the reforms there, teacher's unions wouldn't even agree to a $10 co-pay for doctor's visits. No, it had to be FREE! We're talking about schoolteachers here, not people trying to make it as the maintenance man at the local country club. The difference is that typical teacher's union arguments about "the children!" finally slammed face-first into financial reality - the taxpayers knew they just couldn't afford any more largesse for teachers and as a result the governor survived 3 elections on the issue.
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The problem is, we can't adopt a sane health insurance model that only protects you against big bills, you know, like every other kind of insurance does. Americans NEED full-coverage insurance because they simply don't have any money for unexpected bills. Without total coverage, a $300 bill to see a doctor, get a prescription, and then fill a prescription for a routine problem is something they just can't afford. This is why co-pays are so effective in controlling costs for insurance companies. Make them pay $30 to see a doctor and $30 to fill a presciption and many people won't, because it's a serious problem for them to come up with the $60 on short notice.
This isn't actually the case. Most people can come up with $60 or $100 without too much trouble. It's amazing how quickly they can come up with that $100 for bail when the alternative is a night in county lockup. $300 is a little harder, but that's an unusually expensive prescription. I used to be able to see a doctor and get a prescription - with no insurance coverage whatsoever - for $85, and I could pay cash. Oh, and pay all my other bills on time too. I am not any savings or economization guru either. You are (as usual) wildly exaggerating the situation of the typical American.
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Americans spend their entire paycheck the instant they get it. This is actually why we have those terrible extended warranty plans in the first place. For your average American, if they want to buy something like a cell phone, they can't just go withdraw $500 and buy it. They don't have it. What they have to do is cut some expense out of their budget, and then save the $500 over a number of weeks to buy the phone. Now, they need that extended warranty because if something were to happen to the phone, they'd be left without a phone. They can't wait the weeks required to save up for another phone, because they need a phone. So it's much easier to just leave whatever they cut from their budget out and keep putting that money towards a $20/month insurance plan for the phone.
First, Americans do not "spend their paychecks the moment they get them". They may be spent
before the next check, but that isn't the same thing - if those expenses are not absolutely necessary, they can be re-purposed. If people want to skip a few meals out to get a phone, or cut back on beer and smokes, they can. They don't because it's inconvenient, not because it's too hard.
What the **** does an insurance plan for a phone have to do with not being able to buy one in the first place? When you sign up for a phone plan, you usually get a yearly or bi-yearly upgrade for around $100-150 all told when you roll in the "activation fees" and such. Phones tend to last 1-2 years. If it lasts 2 years, at $20 a month, that's $480 - slightly less than the $500 phone. If the phone only lasts 1 year for whatever reason, then the plan only cost them $240. Furthermore, given the number of people running around with broken screens and the susceptibility of portable electronics in general to damage, the plans probably get actually used more often than not.
This has nothing to do with not having $500 for a phone - people can and do come up with that money which is why those avenues for purchase remain open. All you're doing is whining that people take advantage of the conveniences available to them.
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Why do you think we have government subsidized group plans for insurance? We have them because the government knows that if you don't essentially force companies who have employees that are remotely worth giving health insurance to buy it for them, the employees certainly won't do it on their own. If we dismantled the subsidized employer group plans and just had the employers pay every employee in cash what they were paying for health insurance before, that just results in a shitload more profits for China as all those people just go and consume more stuff. In addition, the minority that did save their money end up having to pay for everyone else's problems anyway when they end up in the hospital.
No one is proposing anything like dismantling private insurance and just paying people more in the first place, so this pretty much has nothing to do with anything.
Furthermore, there's the problem that if no one was purchasing insurance, the insurance companies would need to make their products more attractive or go out of business. Without the deep pockets of insurance companies, hospitals and doctors would need to charge less. Supply and demand is actually a thing. If you're positing a system where no one mandates any coverage for health but yet all the regulations about not turning people away remain in place, we'd have massive losses of hospitals and doctors. No one would even contemplate a system like that, and if they did it would remain in place for only a short time before reality came crashing in on it. If you move medical care to a matter of "pay for it like anything else", the entire healthcare system would need to revise itself to the new market or have no customers, and suffer the associated consequences.
It wouldn't just be healthcare for a few wealthy elites either, because of overhead costs. A new drug or treatment costs the same amount to develop whether 1 person uses it or 100 million. Medical providers deprived of deep insurance or government pockets would simply have to consolidate, belt-tighten, and otherwise do what any other business needs to do to survive.
The fundamental problem we have is that liberals have sold the public on the idea that health care is something that people are entitled to -
that failing to insulate the public from economic realities of healthcare is a duty of government, and that people that want to acknowledge those economic realities are heartless and cruel. It is not merely a matter of making provisions for people facing sudden circumstances or emergencies, or even helping out the very poorest people - it is a matter of people with good jobs and the ability to pay things like $10 co-pays being outraged that they might have to do so. People have been sold by the liberals on the idea that healthcare is just like an attorney when charged with a crime. When people are endlessly told they should not have to pay for something and it's a moral travesty if they do, no one should be surprised if they don't save enough to pay for it.
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