The Trump Presidency - how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Hair

What do you think you do now?
 
You said it yourself. Insurance is about spreading the risk. It was always that way. Long before the ACA.
 
Is it your basic human right to force someone else to pay for your healthcare?

Yes. Because you're paying for your own, as well, and someone else is paying for yours. I sense a lot of anti communist propaganda has taken hold of your brain. You already do this for many other services. You pay for the police to go to attend someone's emergency, even if that someone had to call them 3 times last month and you haven't had to, ever. You pay for firemen to do exactly the same. You pay for libraries to have books available to everyone whether you use it every day or once a decade, you pay for everyone to have a decent education for free.
 
Anything can work great, if you throw enough money at it.

I don't mind the idea of socialized healthcare, but I have little tolerance for the idea that we can have it without substantial tax increases across the board. None of this "only tax the 2%" bullshit.

The ACA was designed to fail and put the American people through so much misery that they'll welcome socialized healthcare with open arms. The complete failure of the Republicans to repeal the ACA, like they spent years promising, has sealed the deal. Socialized healthcare is inevitable.

I know I'm late but it would seem that if the US could what every other developed country is doing, you could exactly save money.

https://data.oecd.org/chart/4SKU
 
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Any way you see it, healthcare -is- an expense. You can't "make money" on healthcare if not by taking it away from people who are suffering. It's like firefighting, you can't make money on it, if not by making people whose house has burnt down pay for it.

What you can do is -invest- in it, knowing that you might get more back than what you are paying, if you do things properly.

Like firefighters saving a house, a block, a city from fire or water.

And you can invest in prevention, if you pay money to save more money later on.

Like fire prevention.

Healthcare is not a business, it is a social smart move. Like firefighting.
 
Some people can't see there being a profit to providing healthcare without an actual profit. The same can be said about education.
 
Some people can't see there being a profit to providing healthcare without an actual profit. The same can be said about education.

Which is horrifying. The profit of a school is educated kids. Not making old people rich. Any profit should be reinvested.
 
Public schools have always been pretty terrible. Those parents that can afford it, voluntarily enroll their kids in private schools (that make a profit) because they're better. It's also why charter schools are becoming so popular so quickly - they're significantly better than public schools with the test scores to back it up. Yet again, you're not making a very strong case for government monopolies here.

Things you're ignoring:

  • Charter schools are taxpayer-funded but not accountable like the public schools
  • That funding comes at the expense of the public schools - there were recurring issues in our district where the public schools had to hold fundraisers to afford printer paper
  • Charter schools can choose their students; public schools cannot
  • Know what that means? All the special needs students are rejected and put into the public schools
  • Schooling in general has gone to shit due to the increased testing requirements, what with No Child Left Behind, expansion of PSSAs[sup]*[/sup], introduction of Keystone[sup]*[/sup], etc etc, resulting in a solid two weeks per semester of nothing but testing, on top of just teaching to the test instead of actually teaching since the state pins so much on the test results; on top of the state continuing to dick around with education requirements[sup]*[/sup]: between my girlfriend going to get her master's in education and deciding to quit trying to become a teacher, the state requirements went from a bachelor's in relevant field + master's in education, to a master's in relevant field + master's in education. I'm not even getting into the shit they pull with funding student teachers.
[sub]* These are obviously Pennsylvania-specific, but take a look at your own state and you may see similar things happening[/sub]

And so on. You're willing to discard complex issues because on the face of it, it matches your narrative. But I leave you with an anecdote: I went to a public school from grade 3 to graduation. One of my classmates the entire time was the daughter of the head coach of the Steelers. He could afford any public school he wanted to and sent her to a public one. Always failing?
 
I don't know about other states but in MA this is absolutely not the case. Charter schools here are basically on a random lottery system and they do end up with special needs kids, minorities, and so on. All of those kids end up doing far better than public school graduates because the quality if education is higher and because teachers actually have to earn their living because they don't have a union protecting their lazy asses.

Here's an anecdote of my own: my algebra 2 teacher in the best public high school in my city once drew a number line that had the following numbers: 3, 2, 1, 0, -0, -1, -2, -3, etc. When I questioned the obvious issue, he defended it.

Way off topic at this point but as someone who knows many teachers, biggest problem with public schools is the common core, no child left behind and standardized testing. And to a lesser extent school funding being tied to property taxes, so you end up with a huge disparity in funding between more affluent and poor communities. I'm anti union in general but teacher unions are the least of our problems.
Charter schools fail left, right and center and are pretty far from the perfect free market solution you think they are.
Generally speaking biggest impact on a child's success in school and life is parental involvement. Personal example: we are teaching our 2 year and 8 month old to read, and do basic science experiments at home. It is very likely that those charter school kids are more successful because the type of parents who will take extra steps to get them into those schools are also more likely to be involved in education. Same for private schools btw.
 
It's also why charter schools are becoming so popular so quickly - they're significantly better than public schools with the test scores to back it up. Yet again, you're not making a very strong case for government monopolies here.

Charter schools as I understand it are very suspicious in character because they're not 100% privately funded and depend on certain subsidies which again depend on how well the students are doing, which makes it profitable to report students doing better than they actually are.

Second point, nobody is arguing for a monopoly on healthcare by the government. But there must be a baseline for everyone, the same as education.

Are private schools better than public schools? Probably, not the point. The point is what if you just did away with public education? Just have a whole strata of society grow up without education? Enjoy your populist uprising in 2 or 3 generations time. Stupid people are easy to manipulate and to bring to political extremism.
 
Public schools have always been pretty terrible. Those parents that can afford it, voluntarily enroll their kids in private schools (that make a profit) because they're better. It's also why charter schools are becoming so popular so quickly - they're significantly better than public schools with the test scores to back it up. Yet again, you're not making a very strong case for government monopolies here.



I want to see proof for almost all of that.

The only reason Charter schools have become popular is people want a choice. There is more than a little recognition that public schools have not always done as well as they should. A good portion of that blame goes toward the parents not being involved at any level. Most of those then want a quick fix, like a bandaid on a cut. Well the cuts that the school system have taken over the last 60ish years will not be fixed that easily.

Chater schools are not that great either. How do you expect some industry to pop up overnight and do better than a public school while not even requiring the same credentials from teachers or the textbooks that they use? They fail at an incredible rate.

 
I know, CNN has been doing it for years :tease:

Trust me you don't want an uneducated poor strata of people. Leads to fun things like populist governments. If you wanna know where that leads, look at Venezuela.
 
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