Hellobee Boards

@Applesandbananas: yeah, I've heard people say healthcare isn't a right too, which I get to an extent but I also can't imagine that people want to live in a third world country where the have nots are wallowing in the streets with disease.

But the other thing is taxpayer money already pays medical residents salary and funds the majority of scientific basic research. It's like buying stocks to support a company's growth, but with zero benefit to the stockholders and only the CEOs. There should be a lot more control of pharm profit margins when the basis of discovery is primarily tax payer funding.

@lawbee11: Everything you said.

@Anagram: Slightly off topic, but I don't think it matters that republicans hate Hilary. They're only going to vote republican anyways. Independents and moderates win presidential elections, not strongly partisan voters.

@ShootingStar: More right wingers may turn out to vote against Hillary because she is so polarizing though.

@Applesandbananas: I agree that we as taxpayers should pay for healthcare for those who cannot do so themselves. But I think perhaps the caller who said healthcare isn't in the Constitution meant that this is something the states should handle, not the federal government. If that was his/her argument, I'm sympathetic. The Constitution absolutely left the police powers and general welfare to the states to address. I know that federalism is not popular among progressives, but it is nevertheless a foundational principle of the country. No society has provided humanity with more prosperity and freedom than the U.S. Certainly no socialist state has ever done that. Federalism is a cornerstone of the Constitution and American society. Sanders is proposing to remove that cornerstone as a matter of expedience to achieve an illusory goal. (Note that no one, not even his supporters, thinks he can get to completely taxpayer-funded healthcare for everyone.)

@Applesandbananas: Unfortunately, I think people tend to think of federalism as an academic idea with little impact on American society. It's not. I think America would do a better job of providing for the poor and lifting more people out of poverty if we hewed more closely to that principle. What that means is that local communities need to have the bulk of the responsibility for taking care of their poor, and that they must also have the power to do so. But when the federal government preempts them and takes over basic "taking care of your fellow man" functions like healthcare, there is an unspoken (and often unappreciated) abdication of responsibility at the state and local level, as well as at the individual level. The assumption becomes that the federal government is doing whatever needs to be done, even though it's very unlikely that the federal government is actually better at figuring out what needs to be done at the local level than the local community itself. I think that's bad for everyone--the poor, the rich, and everyone in between. I think it is fundamentally destructive to society to cultivate an attitude that "someone else/the government is doing that," particularly with respect to helping those who are struggling. If you really want to help the poor, consolidating power in a centralized government seems to me to be a terrible way to do it.

@Applesandbananas: Just saw your response. I concur.

ETA: To get back to Bernie's college plans specifically...I wanted to correct myself about not having seen numbers on Bernie's free public college plan. He says it will cost $75 billion/year. His plan is to tax "Wall Street speculators" to raise this amount, and he defines "speculator" to include "people investing their savings in stocks and bonds."

@Maysprout: Apologies for the delayed response! But I wanted to respond to your points, because I think they are good ones that raise important issues, even if we are kind of talking to an empty room at this point.

If you think that the principle of checks and balances for government is a wise principle then you would oppose Sanders’ proposals and his presidential bid (and also that of Clinton, but we can perhaps discuss her another time). The balance of power between the federal government and the states is already outside what was provided for constitutionally and is rather heavily skewed to the federal government. The states are conceived as sovereigns under the Constitution yet the federal government constantly flouts their sovereign rights and powers. We’re talking about Sanders’ plans, so I think that we need to be very clear that he has every intention of appropriating more power to the federal government that should and does belong to the states under the Constitution.

Now, to answer your very good question: How do we get states to deliver healthcare if we don’t force them to?

If you think states do not provide enough healthcare, then the course of action is quite clear. The way that you implement your ideal rules and level of funding is by convincing people of the rightness of your ideas and getting them to vote for them at the state and local level. This is the foundational idea of America—that people should govern themselves.

There is no valid reason to prefer a program run by the federal government over programs run by the state governments if you want to provide indigent and struggling Americans with more healthcare. The states have the taxing power and robust governing structures. The states also have different populations with different healthcare needs and a state-run system is likely better positioned to respond efficiently and effectively to those different needs. And very likely there isn’t a single optimal solution for every population to these very complex questions. If you let the states think about these questions and develop solutions, at least we can continue to work towards better solutions. But you foreclose that sort of innovation if you impose a single solution on everybody. Even more importantly, a single vote has a much greater impact on a state election than a federal one. If you do not like how your state government is handling healthcare, you need only convince your fellow state citizens of the correctness of your opinion to make the necessary changes.

The motive for pushing ideas like this at the federal level is the belief in the absolute rightness of one’s own ideas. The federal government provides a way to impose one’s great ideas on the entire nation. But using it to do that violates the key principles of the governance by the people themselves on the one hand the sovereignty of the states on the other. The reason for the principle of governance by the people is that the founders thought it was the best way to avoid tyranny. The brilliance of this design is easy to understand. Suppose that instead of Bernie (or whoever you prefer for president), we eventually have a leader whose values and priorities you despise. And now picture that person as president, with the level of federal power that Bernie or even Hillary wants to enshrine in the federal government and the executive agencies in particular.

Following the constitutional design of leaving the police power with the states means that you avoid locking everyone into a lousy program if your solution turns out to be a bad one. Sanders assumes that “Medicare for All” is the solution to making society a fairer place. But if that assumption turns out to be wrong and it is implemented on a national scale, we will never find a better solution. We will have entrenched nationwide a mediocre, sub-par, or incredibly bad system with next to no hope of getting out of it, adding to the suffering that it was meant to alleviate.

Using the federal government in the way proposed by Sanders fundamentally contravenes the identity of America as it is prescribed in the Constitution. Before we throw away the structure that has created more prosperity and freedom for human beings than any other in the history of humanity in order to impose our good ideas on everyone, let’s at least realize that is what we are doing.

http://www.people.com/people/mobile/article/0,,20988843,00.html