I don't think emotional arguments are a distraction, they're the whole point. This is a moral issue. Other countries manage to have universal healthcare and it doesn't break the bank. In fact, they spend less per person. The fiscal argument is the distraction.
Disingenuous? You think people arguing that it's immoral for someone to die because they were born poor are not actually sincere in their argument? Tell me, what is my evil ulterior motive? Do I actually just want to increase taxes for the hell of it?
Of course its not a sincere argument: I believe that you can believe it, but its insincere at least to yourself to say that the reason healthcare should be universally provided through government is for the poor. If you cared for the poor the argument is to make food stamps for healthcare services, not universal. Universal is also for yourself. So yes, it is disingenuous to say that which is best for your is also best for the poor.
Reminds me to the typical argument that college should be free so poor people can go, but ultimately, middle class and up go. Healthcare is similar: the richer live longer, which means they live more of the most expensive healthcare years.
It's like garbage collection, it's just something the government provides as a service to all citizens.
Whether it's regressive or progressive entirely depends on the tax used to pay for it. If everyone has to pay exactly the same, it's regressive, as poor people are impacted much more than rich people. If it's a proportion of income, it's progressive.
In the UK our national insurance, which pays for our universal healthcare, social welfare and pensions, is actually a regressive tax, it's 12% on the first £46k you earn, then 2% after that (something like your first £6k is actually tax free). I don't know why people don't make a bigger deal out of this given that the NHS is suffering at the moment.
> In the UK our national insurance, which pays for our universal healthcare, social welfare and pensions, is actually a regressive tax, it's 12% on the first £46k you earn, then 2% after that (something like your first £6k is actually tax free). I don't know why people don't make a bigger deal out of this given that the NHS is suffering at the moment.
Are you arguing that NHS is not a benefit to the poor? Because its a regressive tax? So eliminating NHS is actually in benefit of the poorer classes.
No, I replied and rapidly edited out a few words of my original reply to try and make it clearer, but seem to have done the opposite. The last sentence initially started with "Interestingly". My original meaning of the last paragraph was "here is an interesting, related, factoid. The UK happens to have a regressive tax to pay for the NHS".
My main point is that governments are free to provide the same service to rich and poor without that being regressive or disproportionately favouring the rich. For example, bin collection, policing, national defence, fire safety, etc.
A universal health service can simply be another collective service. If you want more because you're rich, in the UK we also have private healthcare services you can pay for, much like you can pay for a cleaner in addition to your bin collections or a body guard in addition to the police or national defence or pay to install fire suppression in addition to the national fire service.
What makes it regressive or not is how it is taxed for.
> "Nobody should go hungry, so everyone should be able to eat anywhere they want and not look at the tab".
This is a violation of the most oft-ignored HN guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
What the moral argument side is saying is that it is immoral for a country this rich to not provide socialized healthcare up to a certain level. What level, specifically? I don't know. I'm guessing it would probably include a diabetic's insulin, and would not include a smoker's lung transplant. The point is, (according to the argument you're disagreeing with) there is a level and it should be higher than it is now.
What you did with your straw-man quote - "everyone should be able to eat anywhere they want and not look at the tab" is set the level at infinity, so that the argument is trivially wrong and easy to defeat. You've done the same elsewhere: "The logical consequence of this is that any cost must be paid" and "If its rationed then some people are going to be left out, and the moral argument crumbles, as people that need it don't get it." This doesn't get us anywhere.
Try, before responding to an argument, paraphrasing it such that the person who you're arguing with would agree. If you can't do that - if you can't restate their position in a way that they would say, "Yeah, that is indeed my position" - then you don't understand it well enough to argue against it.
Lets do that excercise "It is immoral for wealth to exist in a way that, properly distributed, would solve the fundamental necessities of people. Thus, wealth should be confiscated until this goal is achieved for morality"
And I answer "the very application of that goal will be immoral because it will take from all and give to all, and will do so unevenly on both ends while also destroy a part of everything levied."
> "It is immoral for wealth to exist in a way that, properly distributed, would solve the fundamental necessities of people. Thus, wealth should be confiscated until this goal is achieved for morality"
I don't believe anyone in this thread would say, "Yes, that is what I was arguing." I don't believe you do either. Stop trying to jujitsu random passersby in to discussing your preferred topic with you and the downvotes will abate.
"It is morally wrong that someone can die from X because they're poor" is a fine point to make. There's nothing wrong with moralizing in that sense, IMHO.
The problem is when you add "And therefore the presence of profit making entities must be the cause". That inserts a moral argument as a substitute for identifying the core problem. I think that's the kind of error you're making here:
>Other countries manage to have universal healthcare and it doesn't break the bank. In fact, they spend less per person.
True, but there are differences other than the universal coverage. The same things that lead, in the US, to bureaucratic bloat and 700% markups on saline, may very well also torpedo those systems!
I think it's a reasonable point for the parent to criticize the kind of moralizing that doesn't attempt a legitimate root cause of why health care spending is so ineffective in the US.
However there is a trust issue here, how can Americans truly trust their government to implement it right when the same government cannot get the VA right and worse there seems to be active opposition within the VA and government to right it?
Throw in the BIS run systems which make the VA look good and its a very hard sale.
A lot of the cost of medical care is because there are too many limits on competition for both services and insurance. It certainly needs reform but to get the trust of the people it must prove it can run what it has
Penn Jillette also believes global warming is a conspiracy. No nation with free market health insurance has universal healthcare, so as the person making an extraordinary claim, it's on you to come up with proof.
Well, he spouts whatever makes a youtube video gets hits. Without research or background. He is an entertainer after all. What he actually believes is probably unknown.
That's a fairer criticism, although I disagree. You could say "what he actually believes is unknown" about anyone, really. He makes his views quite well known, at least from what I've followed him.
Still, I think replying to someone's quoting Penn with the equivalent of "well he denies climate change, so why would we listen to him?" is pretty pointless for a debate, especially when what you say is wrong! We might as well throw out the ability to quote anyone, since basically everyone has some view that someone disagrees with.
Ok maybe he's saying what he thinks when he posts those rant videos on whatever subject. But in them he appears shallow and sophomoric. I think he's smarter than that, so I disbelieve they really reflect his opinions.
The VA has gotten a lot of bad headlines, but I work with a vet who absolutely loved the VA. He brags about the quality and speed of his healthcare all the time. This is in Charlotte, NC. Different offices might be different.
The thing with the VA isn't that it's all bad. It's that the percentage of completely inept people seems higher than in a normal hospital.
Normal hospitals don't have multiple scandals of reusing insulin pens on different people, reusing colonoscopy bags, killing people, paralyzing people and periodically losing all of our records.
A lot of veterans who are covered by the VA are like me. Technically covered because of service connected disabilities, but I will never use it.
Again, this is not true. Read the studies comparing VA care to private care. You're actually better off going to a VA hospital than most private hospitals.
I've been to a VA hospital. My brother/dad/uncle have been to the same VA hospital. Our experiences have all been poor.
If you were told that you'd get an appointment some time in the future and they sent you a notice randomly in the mail a few months later, you probably wouldn't be happy with the service. If your doctor was over an hour late, you wouldn't be happy. If you had a friend that was paralyzed after a spinal tap (my dad's buddy) then you probably wouldn't hold the VA in high regard.
You are the first veteran I've ever met who had good experiences at the VA and who doesn't know anyone that has been crippled by the VA.
>If your doctor was over an hour late, you wouldn't be happy.
Doctors aren't on time in privatized offices either. It's always a long wait for me. But you're right about the not being happy about it.
>If you had a friend that was paralyzed after a spinal tap (my dad's buddy) then you probably wouldn't hold the VA in high regard.
Yes, but that happens in private hospitals as well. They aren't all that great in the US either.
>f you were told that you'd get an appointment some time in the future and they sent you a notice randomly in the mail a few months later, you probably wouldn't be happy with the service.
Ya that sucks. Private industry has solved the scheduling problem with DSS and template based schedules. My uncle didn't have a good experience with the VA either. He had dementia and the nurse questioned him about it and he said "I have diabetes," which he did, but he didn't know what was going on. The nurse of course said, "we don't treat diabetes," or something like that and sent him away. All the while his sister was telling her about the dementia, she just didn't want to hear it.
I could tell you horror stories about private hospitals too and how after being admitted, they shipped him to a nursing home an hour away wearing nothing but a gown in winter. No calls, no nothing.
I guess the bottom line is right now, the US sucks at healthcare, period. I'm sure being a highly politicized wedge issue doesn't help matters much. (The VA, universal healthcare, skyrocketing costs in the private industry, etc).
> He brags about the quality and speed of his healthcare all the time. This is in Charlotte, NC. Different offices might be different.
The VA is run in a federated fashion, so there is a massive variation in how well they operate.
The problem with the VA isn't that literally every hospital is terrible. The problem is that:
(1) a lot are bad
(2) the bad ones are really terrible
(3) the bad ones are consistently bad over time, with no success in improving them
Part (3) is the really damning one, because it's not like there haven't been efforts to fix the issues with the VA. But because the US is such a heterogeneous country, the successes of Portland don't translate well to Memphis.
That was my thought as well. I have to switch to Chrome every once in a blue moon to make things work on my Android phone, but 99% of the time, Firefox works just as well.
First, this isn't a Google app. Google is pushing the RCS standard, a standard that some carriers already support.
And yeah, it doesn't support encryption so it's clearly inferior to something like Signal, but open standards that don't live in a silo are still important. For instance, I have friends that almost exclusively chat through Facebook Messenger. Since I won't install Facebook Messenger, I chat with them over SMS. A "better SMS" would be nice, and might help ease people out of the FB Messenger silo.
It's taken a decade to get everyone on board so they could innovate on SMS. Since the carriers don't have the leverage that they had pre-iPhone and Apple is not supporting RCS, the positioning paints RCS as an Android/(non-iphone) messenger.
Looking at the objectives of the spec from a 10k level, it feels like it's hard mixing network quality with application layer logic in a way that's just going to be messy, hard to maintain, and calcifying of applications. I know the OSI layer model seems out of fashion now, but RCS feels like a lot of lat-80's/early-90's interconnect protocols that were killed by faster moving, more layer-isolated approaches using plain HTTP or applications over fairly direct TCP/IP.
While the standard itself doesn't enforce any encryption, you could write an RCS based app that encrypts messages between endpoints. There are SMS apps that do exactly that, you just have the other contact install the same app and scan a QR code.
> Yes, I'd much prefer that Google and the carriers both have the opportunity to read all my communications instead of one or the other.
And I'm saying, regardless of the current implementation, just because it's an open standard, doesn't mean it can't be encrypted -- either in-transit or end-to-end.
Asymmetric cryptography, e.g. the TLS standard, is an open standard but secure (re: encrypted).
SMS has the advantage of being accessible from a cell tower without a separate data connection. RCS does not. It's like they took all the worst parts of other messaging protocols and put it into one product.
> might help ease people out of the FB Messenger silo.
I disagree. Despite the hopes of the tech community, I think RCS will only really benefit people currently using SMS. Which is great; they need an upgrade. But products like FBM, Signal, iMessage, etc do so much more than even what RCS is capable of, and those feature are often important to its users.
RCS will raise the least common denominator of mobile communication. Very important nonetheless.
Exacty. This is a GSMA standard, I don't get why suddenly everyone's lumping it together with Google - perhaps they pushed a well-timed press release.
It was started way back when, when end-to-end encryption wasn't on anyone's minds and as with everything in the carrier world, it's adoption was/is molasses slow. Google jumped on the bandwagon, implemented it for Android, and made some appliance boxes that they're selling(?) to willing operators. But it's an open standard and no one has to use the Google RCS box, and some operators actually don't.
In 10-15 years there will probably be a new messaging standard that's been started work on today, with end to end encryption and other missing features, and people will be decrying that it's missing some 2028 feature.
Yes, it could be better but it's pretty good for raising the baseline. Now if only all operators and devices would support it, it'd be just great.
So my specific question is how would Google make money out of it? And more generic question would be what's Google's long term strategy with messaging apps? And whether they plan to grow users and ultimately monetize this segment of their business? If Google pushes RCS based SMS app so harder than it seems that even if this app picks up usage, It'd be harder for Google to monetize it as Google doesn't have any control on the app.
That's more a Silicon Valley culture than an American one. Not to say California isn't part of America, but that same glass ceiling exists in most places in America, and it's probably lower.
I don't think he meant there is no opportunity for black people, but that it's truly a "land of opportunity" only for whites (more specifically white men).
Like, I grew up in a lower-middle class family and flunked out of college due to my f-ups. I squandered a lot of opportunities through my 20s, and yet still ended up in a position where I could teach myself to become a software developer, and make good money today. I got a lot of extra chances, chances that people of color don't necessarily get.
SMS is important. It's universal, and it can be used as a way to communicate with anyone. I have friends that I chat with exclusively over SMS. They use Facebook Messenger, and I won't use Facebook anymore. They could join me on Signal or something, but I'm not going to ask them to download a whole app just to chat with me.
It's the one messaging platform that's not in a silo, and that's just as important (maybe more so?) than 100% reliability.
> The watershed and the associated aquifer are where the river water comes from
Yes, that's where it comes from, but it doesn't fill up instantly. Depending on the depth and type of aquifer the well is tapping, it could actually take a very long time for the aquifer to refill (or it could refill very quickly).
