Posted on 11/08/2005 6:38:58 AM PST by Jacksonville Patriot
Again, you think "conservative" means libertarian, Old Guard Republican, "Business of America is Business" types. Such people are only a tenth of the electorate. The bulk of the GOP, what made it a majority party, was the defection of blue collar people from the party of cultural elite lifestyles. But now they see the GOP pursuing policies that add to the economic insecurity of their lives (cheap labor policies like free trade or "guest workers") and generate downwards wage pressure upon them. It is ridiculous to talk about an "ownership society" to people who see their economic status being steadily eroded by competition with cheap labor.
I'm freedom-driven.
And yet most parents today who consider themselves "responsible" and "security-driven" when it comes to their children have absolutely no qualms about sending their children off to a government institution for 6-8 hours every day where the parents: 1) have no control over the learning environment of their kids; 2) have no control over the safety of their kids; and 3) have no control over what types of people (children and adults) their kids will encounter during the course of the day.
You can either work for a living or watch your kids 24-7, so what's your point ? Rich people can have tutors and governesses and nannys. Most people can't. The ability to exercise absolute control over who you come into contact with is a function of wealth. So your objection was ridiculous.
Health insurance is not a luxury. It is a necessity.
A mandatory plan should avoid the problems of adverse selection that are crippling the GM health plan (an older and older insured group costing more and more in benefits) by including the young and healthy. It would also not shackle workers to their existing jobs. Ever heard of something called "pre existing condition" ?
No, just more evidence that Republicans have never been conservative. They can talk the talk when it comes to running for office but they're no different than Democrats after being elected. They intend to buy votes the same way Democrats do, by passing handout legislation.
Those people were Democrats when the Republican Party was seen as "the establishment," and they became Republicans when the Democrat Party was seen as "the establishment." Contrary to what the author of this article has stated, having the GOP stand up and promote big-government initiatives like mandatory medical insurance isn't going to get them strong support among that shrinking cohort of voters.
1. This country existed for about 170 years without it, so I'd hardly call it a "necessity."
2. Even if it were a necessity, there's no reason for government to mandate it. Eating is a necessity, but any so-called "leader" who sponsored a law mandating a minimal caloric intake and maximum fat content in everyone's diet would be laughed out of office.
You have narrowed the definition of "blue collar voter" to be the Northern urban Catholic, the kind who left the cities for the suburbs generations ago. Blue collar voter also means the Southern evangelical who was a William Jennings Bryan voter three generations ago and a New Deal Democrat for the past two generations. It means that half of the American work force that is not college educated.
A lot of that demographic is single mothers who are under tremendous socio economic and cultural pressure. A national health plan would go halfway to resolving her most pressing problems.
And it is the reality of her life that she cannot spend as much time with her children as she would like. You may find this unusual but she has to work to support them. Her power to shelter them from the world around them, from the ceaseless economic insecurity of their lives is very limited. She can't fight Viacom for the souls of her children singlehanded. So she supports the GOP against a culture that wants to teach her children MTV values.
Excellent. :-)
This country existed for 170 years without modern medicine so you'd hardly call it a necessity, right ?
Ending the "pre existing condition" limitation and the adverse selection problems that are crippling GM would be so overwhelmingly popular with voters and industry that it would be a slam dunk.
I limited my definition of "blue collar voter" to northern Catholics because in the context of this topic that's really what is being discussed. Southern voters are largely GOP voters for cultural reasons and will likely remain so (which explains why Democratic presidential candidates barely even campaign in the South these days), but it's the urbanized northern states that have become the true swing states in recent decades -- states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and even New Jersey to a certain extent.
A lot of that demographic is single mothers who are under tremendous socio economic and cultural pressure. A national health plan would go halfway to resolving her most pressing problems.
Why stop there? A $10,000 cash payment every month would go even further toward resolving her most pressing problems, if that is what you are defining as her most pressing problem. As far as I'm concerned, a government is incapable of addressing a single mother's most pressing problem without resorting to utterly unacceptable totalitarian measures.
There was a time when charitable religious organizations were perfectly willing and able to address the needs of people like single mothers who -- for reasons completely outside their control -- found themselves in severe economic distress. It's no coincidence that "single motherhood" became more of a problem once government institutions replaced religious organizations as the primary means of dealing with this kind of problem.
And it is the reality of her life that she cannot spend as much time with her children as she would like. You may find this unusual but she has to work to support them. Her power to shelter them from the world around them, from the ceaseless economic insecurity of their lives is very limited. She can't fight Viacom for the souls of her children singlehanded. So she supports the GOP against a culture that wants to teach her children MTV values.
That's a heroic mother indeed, but you'd have to provide me with some solid evidence that this cohort of voters is actually supporting the GOP. I think it's actually the opposite, and that people like Bill Clinton and Al Gore got a lot of support from this type of voter.
Once upon a time, Southerners voted overwhelmingly Democratic on economic issues. Now they vote overwhelmingly GOP because they have correctly perceived that a core of the Democratic base viscerally hates Christianity and is committed to pushing all moral and cultural envelopes. Kerry, the Ivy League, Europe worshipping liberal, was everything they despise about the Democrats.
But then again, Clinton carried several Southern states. So don't assume that if cultural values can be neutralized (say, by a conservative Supreme Court that will not impose California values on Georgia or vice versa) as a national issue that a Southern democrat talking economic populism couldn't repeat that.
You throw around the word "totalitarian" like confetti. And yes, you do sound elitist. Libertarianism has made no electoral progress of any sort because it is the ideology of people who have it easy. People to whom national health care is "totalitarian".
The basic premise of any insurance policy is the transfer of risk from one person to another (or to a group of people). If I am concerned about wrecking my car, I buy an insurance policy on the car and pay my insurance company to agree to pay the costs of repair in the event I get in an accident. Insurance companies make money by accumulating a large pool of clients, and essentially making the very good bet that the number of times they actually have to pay for repairs is very small in comparison to the total number of policies they have on their books. In other words, the risk of a single driver getting into an accident (or the cost to the individual driver) may be substantial, but the risk of more than, say, 1% of the drivers in a large group getting into an accident in any given year is actually small.
The key, of course, is that most forms of insurance "work" for society as a whole because the nature of these insurance policies is such that the frequency of claims for any individual policy holder is very low. Many property owners will insure their homes, for example, despite knowing that there is a 99% chance that they will live there for 40 or more years without filing a single claim.
Health insurance is the exact opposite, for it is the one type of insurance where everyone involved in the process (policy holders and insurance companies alike) know from Day 1 that claims are going to be filed with such boring regularity that it makes almost no sense to even call it "insurance" anymore. If you filed three or four claims every year on your auto insurance, then your insurance company would either dump you as a customer or decide that it's cheaper to buy you a car and hire a driver to get you around. But somehow we have such an entitlement-based mentality about medical insurance that we are appalled by the notion that an insurance company just might not want to do business with you.
Some other fatal flaws with medical insurance are as follows:
1. Insurance claims don't adhere to typical economic principles of supply and demand because there are three parties to every transaction, not two. This is not a serious problem with something like life insurance because there a finality about death that makes the claims process and the aftermath much more clear, but for health and property/casualty insurance it introduces a potential flaw that often rears its ugly head. If I crash my car and file a claim, we have three parties to the transaction who operate under conditions that do not apply to a "pure" economic transaction . . . 1) I have already paid for the insurance, so I really don't care how much it costs to fix the car -- I want the best parts, best service, etc.; 2) the insurance company doesn't have to drive the car around, so it doesn't really care about the quality of the repair and is perfectly willing to accept something that is sub-standard by my standards; and 3) the body shop is dealing with two "customers" who have two different goals in mind in the transaction. This three-way dilemma also applies to medical insurance, and is why the problems you perceive in medical insurance are almost identical to the problems many states have encountered in auto insurance (including Mitt Romney's state of Massachusetts).
2. Medical insurance is the only type of insurance that is pretty much an open-ended financial commitment on the part of the insurance company. In agreeing to pay your medical bills, an insurance company has no control over how complex medical procedures get over time, and how advanced technology becomes. So they always find themselves spending more and more money on what is "normal care" -- because the definition of "normal care" is always changing (upward, of course) and getting more expensive over time. Imagine how expensive your auto insurance would be if you drove a $10,000 sub-compact car, but had the ability to have it replaced by a $200,000 Rolls Royce. That's basically the way medical insurance works.
3. All insurance carries what is called a "moral hazard," which means that people with insurance policies will tend to behave in certain ways simply because they know that the insurance is there to protect them. A person with a brand-new car is likely to be a far more careful driver if he has no collision insurance, and a person with no medical insurance of any kind (even government-funded care) is more likely to keep himself in relatively good health (I'll leave hereditary/genetic conditions aside, since they aren't relevant to this point). It is no coincidence that the incidence of almost every physical and mental pathology has risen dramatically since people have been covered by medical insurance plans of one kind or another.
There have always been lepers. And vagabonds. And beggars at the temple gates. So your linkage makes no sense.
What you ignore about health insurance is that you use very little in the first 50 years of your life, much in the next 15, and a lot in the last 10. So a mandatory plan that included young people in the risk pool would avoid the problems of adverse selection. The only way the risk can be bearable for an insurer is to include lots of young people.
And don't ignore the fact that "reasonable and customary" involves a continual dialogue between insurers and health care providers. Insurers routinely game the system by saying to doctors, "If you settle for 70% of your fee you can have it right now but if you want the full amount the bill will have to go through a lengthy review process." Generally the doctor says, "fine". It's a game they play in billing. So don't assume insurers are in any way at the mercy of health care providers. The insurer, after all, controls when the health care provider sees his money and that is a lot of leverage.
True. This goes back to the pre-WW2 days when the Democrats enacted a New Deal that was really a massive redistribution of wealth from the Northeast to the South in this country. If this is the kind of thing you have in mind for the Republican Party, then you might as well shut the party down because you've turned it into nothing more than a tool of economic leverage.
But then again, Clinton carried several Southern states. So don't assume that if cultural values can be neutralized (say, by a conservative Supreme Court that will not impose California values on Georgia or vice versa) as a national issue that a Southern democrat talking economic populism couldn't repeat that.
The very nature of Bill Clinton's election in 1992 should always be seen as an anomaly, and we should avoid deriving any conclusions from that election. Clinton won the following Southern states in 1992: Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri (I'll consider this "southern" for the sake of this discussion), and Tennessee.
Of these states, Clinton only received a majority of the vote in his home state of Arkansas (53%). He won all of those other states simply because of Perot's third-party influence on the election (including Missouri, where Clinton got 44% of the vote and Perot got a very high 22%). The Clinton-Gore ticket couldn't even win a clear majority in Gore's home state of Tennessee (they got 47%).
To illustrate just how odd those election results were, just consider this: in at least two of these states (Missouri and Tennessee) Clinton actually got a smaller share of the votes in winning the state in 1992 than Gore got in losing it in 2000.
Excellent analysis.
Oh goodie, yet another forcible transfer from the relatively poor young to the relatively wealthy elderly. No thanks.
Well yes, but that's because of perpetual lies from Democrats and the media.
Let's talk about Perot.
Perot pointed the way to the politics of the future. Economic nationalist, culturally populist. The William Jennings Bryan of the late 20th century. If the Dems are smart enough to let the sodomites and decadents split off into the Greens and restore economic populism as their centerpiece (in effect, admit the McGovern reforms were a terrible mistake) they could get it back.
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