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ruveyn
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13 Nov 2010, 8:40 am

auntblabby wrote:
Inuyasha wrote:
Actually, he could have gone to the emergency room and have sought treatment earlier. By law, they would have had to treat him.


only he would have been bankrupted, and probably lost his house and everything else of value. america is the only western nation that treats its own citizens in this inhumane manner.
when i get deathly ill, i hope a compassionate neighbor dresses me up in a dog costume and takes me to the vet.


Why is being required to pay for services rendered inhumane?

ruveyn



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13 Nov 2010, 12:31 pm

auntblabby wrote:
Inuyasha wrote:
Actually, he could have gone to the emergency room and have sought treatment earlier. By law, they would have had to treat him.


only he would have been bankrupted, and probably lost his house and everything else of value. america is the only western nation that treats its own citizens in this inhumane manner.
when i get deathly ill, i hope a compassionate neighbor dresses me up in a dog costume and takes me to the vet.


That really irritates me when the Right Wing go on about the so-called Death Tax, claim that this prevents people from leaving legacies to their children. Never mind it only kicked in after a couple of million dollars, thus excluding most people from the tax. The real threat to legacies is a system where one crisis and the family is totally wiped out. Everything they worked for gone in the blink of an eye. They don't even bat an eyelid about such cases. Yet they cry about the so-called Death Tax! And to think that they got away with it! They really deserve dates with Mme. Guillotine.



marshall
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13 Nov 2010, 2:50 pm

ruveyn wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
Inuyasha wrote:
Actually, he could have gone to the emergency room and have sought treatment earlier. By law, they would have had to treat him.


only he would have been bankrupted, and probably lost his house and everything else of value. america is the only western nation that treats its own citizens in this inhumane manner.
when i get deathly ill, i hope a compassionate neighbor dresses me up in a dog costume and takes me to the vet.


Why is being required to pay for services rendered inhumane?


Most intelligent people accept that nature is capricious and cruel. While there is no way for humans to 100% rectify the situation, I don't see this fact as a justification for not even trying. I guess you just can't identify with people who have been dealt a really awful hand in life. However, a lot of people have stared down the abyss just long enough that we can't help but identify. You are able to accept such a capricious reality only because you haven't personally been dealt anything beyond your ability to endure. Nature doesn't grant humans any intrinsic rights or liberties, yet people like you still want to argue that people have an absolute intrinsic right to property that precludes everything and everyone else. I don't see any kind of higher ideals in that kind of thinking. All I see is a self-serving philosophy supported by the lucky.



ruveyn
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13 Nov 2010, 4:11 pm

marshall wrote:

Most intelligent people accept that nature is capricious and cruel. While there is no way for humans to 100% rectify the situation, I don't see this fact as a justification for not even trying. I guess you just can't identify with people who have been dealt a really awful hand in life. However, a lot of people have stared down the abyss just long enough that we can't help but identify. You are able to accept such a capricious reality only because you haven't personally been dealt anything beyond your ability to endure. Nature doesn't grant humans any intrinsic rights or liberties, yet people like you still want to argue that people have an absolute intrinsic right to property that precludes everything and everyone else. I don't see any kind of higher ideals in that kind of thinking. All I see is a self-serving philosophy supported by the lucky.


Our right to property, like other rights, is a social convention, but a useful one. In propertarian societies production is at a higher lever and long term investments in both physical capital and ideas are more likely to produce rewards to those who innovate. As social conventions go, property is one of the better ones.

As to being self serving, most humans are egotistical and they care mostly about themselves and those dear to them. We are primates. That is the way primates are.

ruveyn



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13 Nov 2010, 4:23 pm

xenon13 wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
Inuyasha wrote:
Actually, he could have gone to the emergency room and have sought treatment earlier. By law, they would have had to treat him.


only he would have been bankrupted, and probably lost his house and everything else of value. america is the only western nation that treats its own citizens in this inhumane manner.
when i get deathly ill, i hope a compassionate neighbor dresses me up in a dog costume and takes me to the vet.


That really irritates me when the Right Wing go on about the so-called Death Tax, claim that this prevents people from leaving legacies to their children. Never mind it only kicked in after a couple of million dollars, thus excluding most people from the tax. The real threat to legacies is a system where one crisis and the family is totally wiped out. Everything they worked for gone in the blink of an eye. They don't even bat an eyelid about such cases. Yet they cry about the so-called Death Tax! And to think that they got away with it! They really deserve dates with Mme. Guillotine.


Or when a**holes like Sarah Palin (that's right, she's an a**hole) show up at a school with some cookies warning the kids that the big bad government is trying to tell them what they can and cannot eat. When Obama shows up at a school to tell the kids to be smart, stay in school, it's "indoctrination." It's all a total diversion. OMG, not a soda tax! Meanwhile, heart disease is the #1 killer in this country, by a lot. You are 100 times more likely to die from heart disease than you are from any act of war, yet we have easily accepted the idea that government should be responsible for keeping us safe from "the evildoers." Why have we not yet accepted that health care should be a right afforded to our citizens like the other, more civilized, nations have? We aren't people pissed off that an insurance company gets to profit off of their kid's cancer? Why is it more often than not that the religious people seem to be the most opposed to universal health care? WWJD? (end rant)



marshall
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13 Nov 2010, 6:36 pm

ruveyn wrote:
marshall wrote:

Most intelligent people accept that nature is capricious and cruel. While there is no way for humans to 100% rectify the situation, I don't see this fact as a justification for not even trying. I guess you just can't identify with people who have been dealt a really awful hand in life. However, a lot of people have stared down the abyss just long enough that we can't help but identify. You are able to accept such a capricious reality only because you haven't personally been dealt anything beyond your ability to endure. Nature doesn't grant humans any intrinsic rights or liberties, yet people like you still want to argue that people have an absolute intrinsic right to property that precludes everything and everyone else. I don't see any kind of higher ideals in that kind of thinking. All I see is a self-serving philosophy supported by the lucky.


Our right to property, like other rights, is a social convention, but a useful one. In propertarian societies production is at a higher lever and long term investments in both physical capital and ideas are more likely to produce rewards to those who innovate. As social conventions go, property is one of the better ones.

Property rights are useful but they aren't absolute or black-and-white. Absolute property-rightists like yourself like to argue that progressive taxation (which will always effectively redistribute wealth) is "stealing", so you can make a moral high-ground out of an essentially self-centered position. Also, innovation is rewarded plenty even in a society without absolute property rights.

Quote:
As to being self serving, most humans are egotistical and they care mostly about themselves and those dear to them. We are primates. That is the way primates are.

Not entirely. I read a scientific article which demonstrated that even individual chimps valued a system of nominal equality/fairness over a totally capricious system, and this was true even for individual chips that weren't themselves subjected to an unfair policy. As far as human beings are concerned, we tend to abstract. Seeing other humans subject to preventable capricious suffering makes a lot of people uneasy because, even if they themselves aren't directly affected, they can still imagine themselves being affected. Also, altruism is just as evolutionary and natural as egoism.



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13 Nov 2010, 11:00 pm

ruveyn wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
Inuyasha wrote:
Actually, he could have gone to the emergency room and have sought treatment earlier. By law, they would have had to treat him.


only he would have been bankrupted, and probably lost his house and everything else of value. america is the only western nation that treats its own citizens in this inhumane manner.
when i get deathly ill, i hope a compassionate neighbor dresses me up in a dog costume and takes me to the vet.


Why is being required to pay for services rendered inhumane?


:!: :roll: not everybody is rich like you, who can easily afford to pay the exorbitant rate for health services unique to this country. not everybody has a perfectly functioning highly intelligent brain designed to enable its owner to succeed in life, especially in the realm of finances. not everybody has the good fortune to have good genes and optimal life circumstances. it is inhumane to expect defective people to behave and function as though they are normally-functioning people. i might as well be talking to a brick wall, who knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing.



auntblabby
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13 Nov 2010, 11:04 pm

ruveyn wrote:
most humans are egotistical and they care mostly about themselves and those dear to them. We are primates. That is the way primates are.


we [humanity] could be so much more, so much better than this mediocrity. all it takes is a critical mass of people to disenthrall themselves from the mundane.



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13 Nov 2010, 11:06 pm

marshall wrote:
Most intelligent people accept that nature is capricious and cruel. While there is no way for humans to 100% rectify the situation, I don't see this fact as a justification for not even trying. I guess you just can't identify with people who have been dealt a really awful hand in life. However, a lot of people have stared down the abyss just long enough that we can't help but identify. You are able to accept such a capricious reality only because you haven't personally been dealt anything beyond your ability to endure. Nature doesn't grant humans any intrinsic rights or liberties, yet people like you still want to argue that people have an absolute intrinsic right to property that precludes everything and everyone else. I don't see any kind of higher ideals in that kind of thinking. All I see is a self-serving philosophy supported by the lucky.


moral mediocrity only understands itself and cannot know any better.



ruveyn
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14 Nov 2010, 3:03 am

auntblabby wrote:
ruveyn wrote:
most humans are egotistical and they care mostly about themselves and those dear to them. We are primates. That is the way primates are.


we [humanity] could be so much more, so much better than this mediocrity. all it takes is a critical mass of people to disenthrall themselves from the mundane.


All it takes is to cease being human. Perhaps an evolutionary change which requires genetic modifications.

ruveyn



psychohist
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14 Nov 2010, 3:23 am

auntblabby wrote:
only he would have been bankrupted, and probably lost his house and everything else of value.

You're mistaken. You can generally keep your house in a bankruptcy, less anything owed on a mortgage, which you would have owed anyway.



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14 Nov 2010, 8:37 am

psychohist wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
only he would have been bankrupted, and probably lost his house and everything else of value.

You're mistaken. You can generally keep your house in a bankruptcy, less anything owed on a mortgage, which you would have owed anyway.


You are making a false assumption here. In my dad's particular case, we didn't own a home, but we did pay a very high rent because we lived on Long Island. Had we gone into serious medical debt, we would have had to probably move off the island entirely as the cost of housing has been and remains absurdly high. Although in hindsight, that might not have been a bad thing. But I'm moving away from my point.

I had another loved one who got very sick and needed a liver transplant. She had reached the cap on her insurance and they would not pay for the transplant which she needed to survive. The hospital would not perform the operation without the cash. She had to sell her house to pay for the surgery. She and her family did lose absolutely everything, except, thankfully, her life. (she did die many years later from an unrelated cancer)

Medical bankruptcies are very common and the current system destroys both lives and livelihoods of those who are unfortunate enough to become sick. It doesn't just affect the low income folk either. A middle, or even upper-middle class family can easily loose it all, depending on the severity and long term prognosis of the illness/injury.



ruveyn
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14 Nov 2010, 9:44 am

number5 wrote:

Medical bankruptcies are very common and the current system destroys both lives and livelihoods of those who are unfortunate enough to become sick. It doesn't just affect the low income folk either. A middle, or even upper-middle class family can easily loose it all, depending on the severity and long term prognosis of the illness/injury.


Does the need of person A constitute a duty for person B, if B could fulfill that need?

ruveyn



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14 Nov 2010, 9:49 am

ruveyn wrote:
number5 wrote:

Medical bankruptcies are very common and the current system destroys both lives and livelihoods of those who are unfortunate enough to become sick. It doesn't just affect the low income folk either. A middle, or even upper-middle class family can easily loose it all, depending on the severity and long term prognosis of the illness/injury.


Does the need of person A constitute a duty for person B, if B could fulfill that need?

ruveyn


Not, if, like you, he doesn't give a damn about anybody else.



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14 Nov 2010, 10:29 am

ruveyn wrote:
number5 wrote:

Medical bankruptcies are very common and the current system destroys both lives and livelihoods of those who are unfortunate enough to become sick. It doesn't just affect the low income folk either. A middle, or even upper-middle class family can easily loose it all, depending on the severity and long term prognosis of the illness/injury.


Does the need of person A constitute a duty for person B, if B could fulfill that need?

ruveyn


If you'd like a healthy and strong nation, both physically and financially, then yes. We have no problem with this line of thinking when it comes to having a military.



ruveyn
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14 Nov 2010, 12:10 pm

number5 wrote:

If you'd like a healthy and strong nation, both physically and financially, then yes. We have no problem with this line of thinking when it comes to having a military.


No problem there. Joining the military is voluntary. Being taxed is not.

ruveyn