Healthcare, unfortunately, is a market
And that's the single, utterly crucial, point on which we differ. My view is that healthcare shouldn't be - indeed, in a society that cares about its citizens, can't be - "a market".
It should be a market, and here's why -- markets reflect the reality that humanity's natural state is not altruism. Humanity is a mass of self-interested individuals. Socialists and progressives are effectively color-blind when it comes to this most basic of human characteristics; they see only greed. If you have children, you want the best for them; you won't normally sacrifice them for the sake of all the other children combined. Is that evil? No, it's just natural. But socialists want to create societies that
require people to be altruists -- and this is why they always seem to devolve into authoritarian police states -- you need a police state to force everyone to sacrifice for everyone else. Shoehorning humanity into socialism's vision of what humans should be like has resulted in horrors such as Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' (which led to somewhere between 10 to 40 million Chinese dying from starvation) to Stalin's purges (at least 3 million dead).
Ask a mechanical engineer to design a waterwheel under the assumption that gravity draws water upwards. It doesn't make sense -- we need a system that doesn't require men to act like angels. And we do have a mechanism that works: markets.
Socialism is just authoritarianism with a thin PR veneer saying, "we're doing it
for the people."
[Healthcare is] a fundamental need which should be provided by and for a society in its entirety. Treatment should be available on a basis of need rather than on profitability and ability to pay. A fully "market led" system puts profitability ahead of patients.
The problem with socialists is they don't understand markets. They see every transaction as a form of conflict; exploitative in some way. No transactions occur (in their minds) in which there is not a 'winner' or a 'loser' in some way. They believe that market economies represent zero-sum games; that wealth is finite. If there are four pieces to the pie, and someone has 2 slices, then the remaining people must share what remains. They seek to equitably (they decide what "equitably" means, natch) split the static, finite pie among the number of people who need a slice. To them, it's not possible to make more pies.
Anyone so ignorant of these two basic facts (human self-interest, and that wealth is not static) should have nothing to do with politics.
Most (but not all) market transactions are win-win -- ideally both parties benefit from the transaction.
Healthcare is a basic need. It has a cost, and that cost should be borne by society as a whole. The more wealthy in society helping the most needy.
This is the creed of a thief, a burglar, a mugger. If I have something you need, you believe you have the right to take it. Cloak this in whatever political crap you want, it's no different from a mugger in a dark alleyway demanding a "contribution" while brandishing a weapon. You're asking for a "contribution" but it isn't.
Would you not agree that the money spent on sending young Americans overseas to be blown up and shot would be better spent on bringing the US up from its current 51st place in the league table for infant mortality?
I won't discuss the morality of warfare with someone who can morally conflate American civil rights abuses with North Korea's wholesale operation of death camps.
I want you to use the critical thinking skills you boast about to really think about what you just said here.
I fail to see the disconnect. The NHS /has/ been underfunded since it was created.
There's never enough money, never. Tufty has mastered doublethink. The NHS is a mixture of malevolence and incompetence, but they're
underfunded. I don't know, but when these two qualities cross paths in the market, generally they don't get more funding, they get
less. If Politics is just Hollywood for ugly people -- why give them more power? Why entrust them with providing for "basic needs" at all? Is society so infantile and helpless that we cannot provide for ourselves without government? Let government do the things which they can do well (build roads, act as a referee for the market) but stay out of the market itself.
