Not at all.



Well, my argument is a philosophical and ideological one, not a practical one. When you reason from a particular set of core principles, then once those are well understood I imagine it could seem "robotic", but I prefer to think of it as deductive.

There are practical arguments both ways, I get that. To me, the practical side of the argument is really two-fold:

1. "Insurance" is for risk aggregation of large impact, but rare events. Since nearly everyone is guaranteed to become sick and require increasingly expensive (and magical!) treatments, almost everyone will have the opportunity to spend frightful amounts of money to stay alive a few more months, unless they die quickly from an accident or something. There is nothing rare about getting sick. Specific diseases, perhaps, but in aggregate everyone will eventually have something that could break the bank. So, there is no "risk" here, properly understood. As a result, insurance is the wrong model. Nearly everyone will have the opportunity to spend more than their entire fortune on medical care, and nobody wants to have to spend their own money on it. This is the core problem. The only thing to do is to let people decide for themselves how much of their family's fortune they want to spend on treatments. Yes, the rich will have more options, just like they do in nearly every other aspect of existence. That's life. It's also a good reason to try to become rich (and yes, I understand not everyone has that opportunity). Life is not fair. But in our outrage at that injustice, we can't simply ignore economic reality that everyone can't spend more than they have.

2. A free market on medicine would lower costs on average. There is a valid point to be made of collective bargaining and leverage that a national plan would have, but my veterinary example is intended to show that the exact same treatments (drugs mostly) are available for a small fraction of the price than they are with human healthcare. This is primarily due to government bureaucracy and regulation. MRI scanning is also used for animals, despite Bitt's funny comment, and the costs are way lower than for humans. But the machine is also smaller. If you look at the exact same treatment for animals vs. humans (drugs allow this comparison), the free market system is always dramatically cheaper.

I don't think that this particular bill means we have a totalitarian society. I believe that it removes important checks and balances against totalitarianism and that it is fundamentally not the role of federal government. I gave another practical standard: 95%+ agreement from the public and no ability to deliver it through a market mechanism and you probably have a genuine "public good" on your hands. Roads fall into that category. Prescription drugs and seeing a doctor do not.



That's extremely naive in my opinion. What government bureaucracy works this way? Even if you can name one (someone mentioned the post office), that would be a very rare exception. In fact, the exact opposite happens. Perhaps I misunderstand you - you ARE really saying that the government will *remove* administrative overhead and waste? Where WERE you that you didn't have DSL? Mars?




That's funny as hell. However, it's based on a gross misunderstanding of libertarian ideas. Libertarian philosophy has a place for things like fire departments and roads and national defense and even taxes. We do not, generally speaking, ask the federal government to provide fire departments for every citizen, do we? That would be stupid. Communities organize this for themselves.