If the government's healthcare insurance is so good...

The moment I saw Obama back down on his original plan to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell, I knew concessions were going to be his style. Hillary Clinton was right. If he had asked for socialized health care then he would have had a chance to get universal health care.

Maybe I'll move to Canada so I can take part in the inferior health care and definition of marriage.
 
mallory knox said:
i see a lot of americans make that same mistake on a daily basis.
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People from all nationalities have typos, I was merely pointing out the irony.
 
Shai Gar said:
I'm with the american people on this.

Saving american lives is a shitty idea.
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FTW!

However:

Azure_Knight said:
Special interests were at work on both sides of the debate.
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The "both sides are wrong" position has a quaint Yankee appeal, but in this day and age, we need facts. Which "special interests," exactly, stand (stood?) to benefit from a public health insurance option?

And:

BenW said:
As logic would dictate, if cheap labor were available inside the US, there wouldn't be any incentive to outsource jobs.
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This really gets to the heart of the cognitive distortion (not dissonance, although that too) in the conservative argument. The incentive is to outsource jobs is greed, as logic clearly dictates; if American companies cared at all about American workers, "logic" would not be the only relevant factor (though, sadly, you're right that it seems to be).

Along similar lines, "cheap labor" is indeed "available inside the US"—unemployment's running about 10% right now, and not just because we're all too proud and entitled and elitist to take sub-minimum-wage farming and kitchen jobs that wouldn't be offered to legal Americans for the obvious reason that legal Americans might take legal recourse when being paid illegally low wages (although maybe only the litigious liberals would sue; the concerted conservatives would just suck it up and accept their slave wages).

Oh, cheap labor is available, but cheaper labor is better. In fact, in a capitalist system, logic would dictate that every company should seek the absolute cheapest labor possible.

Logic would also dictate, then, that the only way for Americans to maintain our high standard of living is to be willing to work for the world's lowest wages.

I mean, you know, logically.
 
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BickByro said:
Which "special interests," exactly, stand (stood?) to benefit from a public health insurance option?
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The American People.

We can't have that minority gaining ground over private companies and capitalism.
 
Ha! True enough...

I also wanted to comment on this:

Satya said:
Is it really selfishness? Adam Smith argued that self interested competition in the free market would arguably benefit society as a whole by keeping prices low, while still building an incentive for a wide variety of goods.
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Adam Smith is very very dead now, even if he argued for his arguable theory once upon a time. The moment the words "too big to fail" crossed conservative/libertarian lips, the so-called free market officially died. And don't anybody forget (though only in America could anyone be stupid enough to forget!) that it was Bush who bailed out Wall Street, not Obama...

Satya said:
Every individual is ultimately responsible for themselves. That isn't some heartless way of viewing the world, it is as it is. Individual humans form groups to increase their chances of survival through cooperation. Human groups then fight against other human groups for scarce resources.
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Funny; you state a point and then immediately proceed to disprove it.

Satya said:
Of course, once some individuals in a human group become more successful than the others, it inevitably comes to question whether they owe anything to the group for their success. After all, what an individual earns ultimately belongs to them, as that is the concept of personal property. Should the group coerce that individual into sharing the resources they have rightly earned for themselves? Is it not the group that owes the successful individual? Is the successful individual's continued success not the group's continued success?
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Not entirely, no. If the individual has indeed done great things for the group (as opposed to just him/herself!), then sure, the individual deserves appropriate recognition and reward. But as you almost seem to realize, "Individual humans form groups to increase their chances of survival through cooperation." To claim that one who succeeds in a society owes nothing to that society is to claim that one who succeeds in a family owes nothing to that family.

It is the purest egotism: the thought that you alone are or could ever be responsible for the preconditions of your success. Not only did you pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, but you invented the very concept of boots! You owe nothing to anyone who has come before, lives now, or shall one day be born. You are, alone, mankind.

Congratufuckinglations.
 
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I am not from USA so I have a problem with understanding this topic, what is the problem, I'll write how I understand it, please, correct me:)
Obama wants better pubblic healthcare for people who couldn't affort it with their money.
SOme people are for that.
Some are not.
My question:
Why would anyone be again public healthcare for all. Because, anyone can fall in position of being poor (credits etc.)?
I think that goverment have to take care of citizens.
In my country we all have basic healthcare. You can pay extra insurance if you want pay. Some groups of people are free from paying for some cures (jobless etc.). And even with basic insurance some people with sirious illness have problems with cures and bills.
 
Satya said:
The moment I saw Obama back down on his original plan to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell, I knew concessions were going to be his style. Hillary Clinton was right. If he had asked for socialized health care then he would have had a chance to get universal health care.

Maybe I'll move to Canada so I can take part in the inferior health care and definition of marriage.
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sorry what?

besides i don't know if you're thick or pretending to be, by ignoring the fact that the existance of public health care does not forbid private.
 
He didn't say that. He said that if he had asked for more than he wanted, he could have conceded until he got what he really wanted.

Also, Satya is gay, so moving to a nation that has "an inferior definition of marriage", would mean allowing him the right to marry another man.
 
isn't that a good thing?

because he kind of sounds like he needs a good man to marry.
 
He was being sarcastic about it being inferior. Note that he was defending the universal health care, and canada already has it.
 
Shai Gar said:
Not an ad hominem. I actually agree. I'm not being sarcastic. America just doesn't Deserve a socialist healthcare system. While it's forcing the rest of the world into Pro-American trade agreements that destroy economies, it ought to be stuck with its capitalistic unregulated "insurance" system with no government sponsored alternatives.

It might deserve such a system later, but at the moment I really don't see the point in saving american lives. They're just not intelligent enough. After all, in god they trust.
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The problem is that the ones who are most active in destroying other economies and in the position to make the most influential decisions are the ones with the best access to health care. The ones without access also have less of a voice in those other matters. The self-punishment is directed in the general direction of those responsible, but it is like firing a shotgun and barely wounding the target, but taking out half a flock of birds.
 
Azure_Knight said:
47 million statistic is both misleading and inflated
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You are using an article by an editor from an organization that was formed to defend conservatives? Could you provide a less biased source?

Nothing in that article is cited. All links are to other media stories from that conservative organization.

Do you really think that using the media is really an objective way to go about an argument?

For all the bickering about the "uninsured" are we not forgetting about the "undersinsured"? There is probably about 50 million people living in this country with inadequate insurance when you combine those two numbers together.

And frankly, the whole free market ideology behind your arguments is really shining through right now. And until I stop paying 4 times less than Texas does for power, I'm not too inclined to jump on the deregulation boat.
 
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Satya said:
You are using an article by an editor from an organization that was formed to defend conservatives? Could you provide a less biased source?

Nothing in that article is cited. All links are to other media stories from that conservative organization.

Do you really think that using the media is really an objective way to go about an argument?

For all the bickering about the "uninsured" are we not forgetting about the "undersinsured"? There is probably about 50 million people living in this country with inadequate insurance when you combine those two numbers together.

And frankly, the whole free market ideology behind your arguments is really shining through right now. And until I stop paying 4 times less than Texas does for power, I'm not too inclined to jump on the deregulation boat.
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I provided another source directly below it. If you would like, I will try to find other sources. I used that particular source because it addressed the long term uninsured (a population that I consider very important).

I think that the media reports on the news. If you want to be objective, studies are usually the way to go. The Census study seems to have underreported the number of citizens that have health insurance.

If there are indeed 50 million uninsured and underinsured in this country, it's going against the claim of 75 or 80 million that was brought up earlier.

I believe in a 'free market with government oversight and some regulation'. I have said nothing about deregulation though.
 
screw the uninsured and the underinsured... what about those who're insured, and don't get help from their insurance companies?
 
I'm sorry for necro-ing this thread...although admittedly I don't see what's so wrong with it. I just have to say, the amount of anti-american sentiment in this thread is both alarming and saddening. A lot of you seem to feel secure and logical in making overarching broad sweeping generalizations about americans...americans don't travel, americans are naive, americans are lazy, americans are tools fed by the media, americans are stupid, etc.

I know this may come as a surprise to some of you, but americans are actually just humans -- just like you! They aren't any more naive or lazy on average more than their culture promotes it...and here's the thing, america doesn't have a very set "culture". Sure, there are some traits that americans may share simply because the fact that they, you know, all live near each other and deal with the same political issues--i've noticed from my visits to europe that americans seem to be a lot more busy and a lot less relaxed than in the european countries I visited(Switzerland, Hungry, Spain, England, France)...but i'm sure there are all kinds of people in these countries.

I guess my main point is that to ascribe attributes like lazy, stupid, easily deceived, etc. to a majority of a nation is hateful, illogical, condescending, and downright stupid of you!

Thank you for your time =)
 
Oh, I'm pretty damn certain most Americans are just ill-informed. But that's not near as funny as calling them what you just did.

Ever considered an account on Sickipedia? Remove the Self-Righteous overtones, throw in a paedophile joke and that'd get a few hundred points right there.
 
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