My Initial Response
Rasmussen
Generally speaking, do you strongly favor, somewhat favor, somewhat oppose or strongly oppose the health care reform plan proposed by President Obama and the congressional Democrats?
Favor: 38%
Oppose: 56%
Quinnipiac
While 44 percent think the proposed health care changes "go too far," 29 percent say they do not go "far enough" and 17 percent think the health care changes are "about right." The "not far enough" and "about right" total 46 percent.
Point One:
The poll does not support your opinion as much as you make it out to. It breaks down that 46% you were talking about into those who don't think it goes far enough and those that think it is right where it is. When you look at that break down, you can see very clearly that the largest group by far is the group that thinks it goes too far. That group is 50% larger than the next largest group which says it doesn't go far enough. The middle ground group which likes what you claim to be a watered down bill as it is shouldn't be so easily lumped in with one side over the other. In the end, only 17% like it as it is and nearly half of the country falls on the "it goes too far" side. The group on the other side isn't nearly as big.
Going back to your original point that Democrats would be better off making the bill more liberal... how exactly would that work, assuming this poll is close to accurate? It is easy to see that the bill is already too far for nearly half of Americans. The further you go to the left, the more people are going to jump ship to the right and be clumped in with that "goes too far" category.
My point from the beginning was that the reason we have the bill we have right now is that it was the most liberal bill that Congress and the President could afford to put out there because if they go any further, the people will massacre them in the polls. This poll demonstrates that perfectly. If anything, they might have already gone too far.
Point Two:
Even if you think the American people are wrong and it is a shame that you can't pass this healthcare bill, here is what I have to say.
You and everybody else on the left have tried so hard to make this a moral imperative. Guess what, it's not. This is not a healthcare bill. It infuriates me the way people continue to use that as the reference for this bill. This is a healthcare payment and regulation bill. It does absolutely nothing to ensure that one more person gets access to medical treatment. Not one thing.
My mom is a retired Pediatrician. My fiance works in a hospital and worked in a Pharmacy for years. They can both tell you that NOT ONE PERSON gets turned away when their health is at risk from a hospital. Hospitals don't turn people away that don't have health insurance. They can't and they don't.
That is one of the reasons why the cost of healthcare is so high. So many people without insurance are already getting treated and those costs are being shoved off on those that can pay. There are already government grants for hospitals to treat those patients to cover some of those costs.
There are some drugs that people without insurance do not have access to, I will grant you that. They are expensive and it is simply too much to give away to people when there are people out there that can pay for it.
It is tragic but the absolute worst thing for that situation is for this healthcare bill to get passed. Those drugs are expensive for a reason. More than likely, they are either brand new and still covering the costs of research or they are made from rare ingredients, or they are just simply costly to make. This healthcare bill won't change any of that. It will not increase the number of these medicines produced one bit. It's not like they are sitting on a shelf somewhere rotting away because nobody can afford to get them. They are being used by the people that can afford them.
In the long run, though, because of the high prices and the profits that these evil medical companies run off of, there is incentive to increase the production of successful drugs. That is how the greatest medical system in the world operates. That is why we are able to outclass the rest of the world in cutting edge medical treatment. That is why my mom, who was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, is still alive today. A research hospital in Little Rock (founded by Sam Walton of Wal-Mart fame by the way) is kept alive by that profit incentive. That is where she got her treatment. The drugs that she has taken since for both her Multiple Sclerosis and her cancer were developed because of that profit incentive.
In a government-run system, that profit incentive is gone and decisions are made in Congress who gets what money. It is entirely inefficient. Instead of somebody making decisions with their own money regarding what is an effective solution, it will be prescribed to them by Congressmen in Washington.
Right now, people take their kids to the hospital every day with a runny nose. It's completely ordinary and most of the time it is absolutely nothing that the doctor needs to be concerned about. Most of the time, the parents will overreact, but they will back off when they find out that they will have to pay whatever they have to pay for the cold medicine for the infant. Imagine now a system where the government places that medicine on an approved list and now there is no additional cost.
Let's bump it up another level. Imagine somebody who has a very light case of diabetes. The first suggestion of any doctor would be to go on a diet before going to any kind of medication. The first time they see the cost of Insulin shots they are more likely to listen to that advice. Obviously, there are lots of people out there who really need that Insulin. The government would have no choice but to put that on an approved list of medications and the decision would become much easier for the average patient: go on a diet and lose weight or take a free shot. That will place an enormous strain on the medical industry which simply cannot pump out enough medicine for everybody. They would have to shift their focus from the long-range cutting edge stuff on the mundane everyday stuff that everybody is going to be asking for. Future growth and research is sacrificed for today.
That is the kind of problem that you run into in the long-run implications of this healthcare bill. It's the same problems you run into any time the government tries to get involved for everybody's "best interest."
In the end, the capitalist system is the best system to handle situations with limited resources. It is much more efficient.
If you want to see what the country would look like in ten years after passing this healthcare bill, look at the state of Tennessee after Tenncare took effect. The medical system and the state government both nearly went bankrupt. Doctors began to refuse to treat patients who were on Tenncare because they simply couldn't afford to take patients that the government could no longer afford to pay for.
You want to improve the health care system in this country? Work on tort reform. The cost of medical malpractice is killing medical practices all across the country. The cost of malpractice insurance is going through the roof.
I've heard rumors that there is some tort reform buried in this healthcare bill somewhere. If there is, then it is a shame the Democrats don't have the sense to put that front and center where it should be.
Ok... I will finish my rant for now.
To summarize:
1) Publically-funded health insurance is bad
2) Government intervention in the healthcare industry is bad
3) Many more Americans agree with me that this bill would go too far than agree with you that it doesn't go far enough
4)The Democrats have completely lost this policy battle
My Friend's Rebuttal
1. Yes, the fact that our broken healthcare system results in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths a year (see http://www.harvardscience.harvard.edu/medicine-health/articles/new-study-finds-45000-deaths-annually...-linked-lack-health-coverage ) touches a nerve with me. You can crow all you want about how you don't think that suggests a moral imperative for whatever reason, but you sound like someone who's trying to convince himself of that more than anything else.
2. I don't need you to explain polls to me. A plurality does not represent a majority, and if you're going to dismiss the HCR bill and its goals as some "liberal fantasy," you're going to have to do better than less than half of people thinking it goes too far.
And don't dismiss my polls about the public option as outdated and fail to provide any evidence of your own. I did my homework; I don't see you finding four polls that show opposition to the public option. The fact is, the public option has been consistently shown to be popular.... See More
3. The suggestion that Democrats are unpopular because Obama is attempting to follow through on healthcare reform, part of his PLATFORM that he ran on and WON with only months ago, is ridiculous. You don't have a republican victory in Massachusetts without deeply depressed Democratic turnout. This is about Obama's liberal base becoming disenchanted with weak healthcare and economic policy.
4. Nothing I posted suggested I thought "the American people are wrong."
5. The fact that members of your family work in the healthcare profession or have gotten sick doesn't make you any better informed about this issue. My dad's a doctor and my grandmother died from cancer, but I know what I know about this topic because I inform myself about it.
6. This isn't about people being turned away from a hospital when their health is at immediate risk. This is about people not being able to afford treatment that could drastically prolong their lives. A person without health insurance, or who is underinsured, simply is not going to have access to the same resources a fully insured person would. Why should rich people deserve to have a better shot at surviving? That's not the way it is in other places.
Read this article, and tell me why this woman deserved to die sooner because she didn't health insurance: http://tvguide.ca/TVNews/Articles/100120_survivor_contestant_dies_GD . Read this part, specifically: "The blond competitor had detected lumps on her breasts in 2004... but didn’t follow up with a physician BECAUSE SHE DIDN'T HAVE HEALTH INSURANCE." Even if this were a case of of her not having health insurance because she didn't bother with buying it rather than not being able to afford it, a single-payer system clearly would have allowed her to see a doctor and might have saved her life.
And even if the poor could manage to get a decent amount of treatment through whatever grants and charity they might be able to find, you're defending a system that frequently forces people to go bankrupt because they're unfortunate enough to get sick and can't pay.
7. "There are some drugs that people without insurance do not have access to, I will grant you that. They are expensive and it is simply too much to give away to people when there are people out there that can pay for it."
Other countries do it. You're going on and on about protecting drug companies' profits while you're willing to let it slide that some people can't get the medicine they need to survive. I simply cannot understand those priorities.
And you sure are awfully quick to dismiss a system of healthcare shared by nearly every other developed country. Guess what: they've had the National Health Service for decades here in the UK. And Britain isn't some horrible communist dystopia; the people here like their system. The country's had its conservative leaders, but not even ultra right-wing Margaret Thatcher would touch the NHS, nor did people want her to.
8. I would never expect Tennessee to produce the best solution to anything, frankly.
9. Medical malpractice accounts for a very small portion of U.S. healthcare spending (see http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=az9qxQZNmf0o ). Tort reform is a red herring. Removing a corporate health insurance system with all the money it wastes on overhead, advertising, etc. would save far more money.
10. I look forward to gloating on your facebook page when healthcare reform passes.
Now, I'm sorry to have to pull an O'Reilly here and cut your mic, but I really have no more time to spend on this argument. This is my facebook page, not Poly Sci class. Besides, for all your protesting about "spouting off party lines," I've actually taken the time to dig through far more outside sources to backup my claims than you have.
So I hope you will consider the links I've posted and ponder why you're defending a system that allows 45,000 unnecessary deaths every year. If this were a forum thread, I'd lock it at this point, but it's not and I can't, so I'm just going to delete anything else that's posted here (because it's my facebook page and I'm tired and busy and have a project due soon and other things to do, etc., etc.). Maybe we'll pick it up again another day.
My Response
1. That "study" does not pass the looks test. They claim to compare uninsured versus insured taking into account things like income and education. I'm sure you would agree with the point that people who are insured and peo...ple that are uninsured are almost entirely exclusive groups in those categories. Access to health insurance is entirely dependent on income, so how exactly do they get an accurate cross-sectional sample comparing similar income levels? Even if their findings are accurate, it doesn't negate what I said originally. There are some drugs and treatments that the uninsured can't get, but if you read my original post you can see very clearly that this bill would do nothing to change that. It would, in fact, slow down if not ultimately cripple the cycle of profit incentives that lead to more efficient production of medical supplies making cutting edge treatment more readily available to the very people this bill is meant to help. I am infuriated that there are people dying of things we could have cured. I still would like to use reason to create policy that will help the long-term prospects of the issue, not jump to a short-term solution that hurts long-term efficiency. Liberals are all too quick to judge conservatives as self-interested and heartless individuals when really we are the ones looking out for everybody's long term interest by using our heads when our hearts call us to action.
2. Your attempt to dismiss my analysis of the poll I gave you is amusing. You continue to diminish the importance of a plurality. Your original status that spawned all of this was that the lesson from Massachusetts is that the Democrats needed to "grow a pair" and pass healthcare. Your insinuation is that they were too concerned with compromise and were watering down the bill, to the point that many grew frustrated with just how watered down it was. My poll demonstrates this is patently false as the number of people who find it to be too far right is incredibly small compared with the number who find that it goes too far left. Basically, when you break it down in that dimension, your argument is completely unfounded.
As for your polls, yes they are old and, yes, that matters. You have to be careful with polls that pick out specific parts of bills, especially when it is something like the "public option." Many people don't know what the public option is and even when they do the question doesn't really get at whether or not they think it is feasible. In fact, the following comment on the Reuters poll you posted says it well:
"I dont agree. You have to look at this holistically until these other issues are resolved through amendments. A public option that runs efficiently and covers everyone's medical needs with out ultimately raising premium costs, funding elective abortions, or raising the taxes (and federal deficit) of the average American would be great but people are rightly concerned that these goals are not realistic or attainable based on the historical record of government administered programs. Focusing on a public option only is like saying a person can have the option of receiving a Cadillac (who cant normally afford a Cadillac) without considering the purchase cost, insurance, registration, long term maintenance and fuel costs, and annual taxes. It just is not a realistic or a relevant understanding of public sentiment on the issue. That is why I believe the Reuters poll is misleading unless you resolve the other key contentious issues of the bill."
Don't think that I haven't done my research, though. That poll I gave you is not by any means the only poll showing the opposition to the healthcare bill. In fact, the RealClearPolitics.com average right now of all major polls shows that 50.4% oppose the Democrats' Plan and only 40.3% favor.
3. Certainly there is lower enthusiasm among Democrats right now than there was in the election of 2008. I am not contesting that at all. To pretend that is the only or even the primary thing in play though is entirely misleading. Polling indicates that Scott Brown's victory was fueled by "a whopping 41% margin among independents... Independents were also the deciding factor in the Virginia and New Jersey governors' races recently won by Republicans." (http://www.usnews.com/blogs/mary-kate-cary/2010/01/19/scott-brown-fueled-by-independents-anger-at-liberal-arrogance.html)
4. Try to follow this logic... 1. You believe that the Democrats should have tried to pass a bill with more teeth. 2. The poll I showed you indicates that far more people think this bill was either good as it was or too far to the left than in your position that it is too far right. 3. You believe that the Democrats should have done what a majority of people disagreed with and moved it further left. 4. You believe the American people are wrong."
5. So there is no value whatsoever in asking somebody who has worked in a pharmacy who has access to drugs and which drugs they don't have access to and why? Yeah... makes sense. The internet is a much better source.
6. Of course somebody with more money is going to have a better chance of living longer! There is no disputing that. Whether it is healthcare access or dietary concerns or education or crime rates where they live, that is going to be a co...nstant. This happens for a reason. There are limited resources. An economy is an instrument used to distribute those limited resources. The capitalist system is built around profit to expand production so that the number of resources is maximized over time. The socialist system is built around distributing the resources that exist as evenly as possible. I know that you are not a socialist and that the healthcare bill is not a socialist bill. I do think, though, that it falls into the same near-sighted flaw of the socialist way of thinking. It's predicated on the here and now. In the long run, a system based on profit and on requiring money to have access to medication (which is distributed at today's maximum production either way as this bill wouldn't change how many pills are made just who has access to those pills) will in the end increase the medication available. In the long run, more people have access than is currently possible. The alternative leads to a slowed growth in capacity which hurts the everybody in the long run, the rich, the poor, and everybody in between.
It is terrible that something like what this article describes happens. I still don't see what it has to do with this debate though. She chose not to go to the doctor. She could have gone. She had access. She chose not to because of the expense. There is a cost to healthcare treatment and somebody has to pay for it. Her life could have been very different had she chosen to go to the doctor when she first noticed it.
Yes, I am defending that system because it is that system that has taken us from a world where people would go bankrupt and die of diseases that today they have access to medication at their local pharmacy for next to nothing to prevent. It is that system that makes new treatments possible for diseases once thought to be a curse from God. Yes, I am defending that system.
What I want is for somebody to tell me how this healthcare bill is going to help the healthcare system in the long run.
7. Those priorities are due to everything else I have said. Profit drives innovation. Innovation is the very reason our system kicks all those other countries out the door. When people have a medical condition that requires the most cutting edge treatment available, they don't go to Canada and they don't go to Europe. They come here. It's because of innovation. It's because of profit. Oh, and it's because of those evil drug companies.
I had a chance to talk with several people from Great Britain this summer at the Young America's conference in Washington, D.C. There are plenty of them that are incredibly unhappy with their healthcare system. We even had multiple British speakers tell us to do everything we could to not let our country go down the same miserable road they did with their healthcare system. So, obviously, there is some disagreement when it comes to the success of the NHS.
8. So, obviously Tenncare didn't work because Tennesseans are just bad at everything. Great response.
9. Yeah, Republicans just want to do tort reform because it sounds good:
In 2008, medical malpractice costs totaled $29.8 billion. Since 1975, medical malpractice costs have increased at an annual rate of 10.3%. (http://www.instituteforlegalreform.com/issues/docload.cfm?docId=1044)
Despite winning 7 out of 10 suits brought against them, 89% of OB/GYNs report having had at least one claim filed against them with an average of 2.6 claims per OB/GYN. (http://www.acog.org/from_home/publications/press_releases/nr11-03-06.cfm)
According to a 2003 AMA survey, 45% of hospitals lost doctors or emergency department coverage due to liability crisis. 39% of medical students said that the current liability environment would effect their decision regarding what state to complete their residency training in. (http://www.ama-assn.org/ama1/pub/upload/mm/-1/mlrnow.pdf)
For every dollar of tort costs, only 46 cents goes to compensating plaintiffs for their losses. (2009 Economic Report of the President)
Since passing tort reform in 2004, including capping select non-economic and punitive damages, Mississippi has seen the following results:
The number of medical malpractice claims plummeted by 91% from its peak. The state's largest medical liability insurer dropped its premiums by 42%, and has offered an additional 20% rebate each year since tort reform went into effect.
(http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Heres-your-demonstration-project-Mr-President----its-called-Mississippi-59990137.html)
Helped to create 60,000 new jobs within the state in four years (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121037876256182167.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries)
Oh, and don't believe me, believe the Congressional Budget Office which predicted that tort reform at a national level would result in the following:
Total national premiums for medical liability insurance would decrease by 10%.
Mandatory spending for Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and Federal Employee Health Benefits program would be reduced by roughly $41 billion over the next 10 years.
Federal tax revenues would be increased by an estimated $13 billion over the next 10 years.
Federal budget deficits would be reduced by roughly $54 billion over the next 10 years.
Yeah, tort reform is nothing, just a myth made up by Republicans... (I can do my research to. This is all stuff I have been putting together for a report at my job.)
10. It is going to be incredibly tough to pass healthcare at this point. Nancy Pelosi admits they don't have the votes to pass the Senate version which means they will have to start over again. With Scott Brown in office and the prospects of more elections coming up in a matter of a few months, other Democrats are going to start jumping ship. If healthcare does pass, it will be an even weaker package than the current bill. I certainly don't think you will be in a gloating mood.
I hope that you have taken the time to read through my response. I look forward to any rebuttals you may have.
He did not reply any further and that is where the discussion ended. I have to say... pretty good for a Facebook discussion thread!
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