Thomas Sowell – Obama’s Health Care Reform
Wednesday, July 6th, 2011 at
8:08 pm
Thomas Sowell discusses the proposition that government can operate a health system more efficiently than the market. www.LibertyPen.com
Video Rating: 4 / 5
Tagged with: Care • Health • Obama's • Reform • Sowell • Thomas
Filed under: Videos
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“cos” – not an Americanism.
SteelGeneral, if there is such a failure, why should things be otherwise?
There is no reason why the rich should be compelled to give to the poor. It should be voluntary, like service in the armed forces is voluntary. That way we’d cut out the huge govt bureaucracy that eats up 90% of the revenues confiscated from others.
@TheSteelGeneraI Give me a good reason for why the system should provide to the poor. If private charity wants to do something like that, I wouldn’t stop it, but please don’t force rich people to pay for poor people. what have the poor done to earn healthcare?
And the failure of the US system to provide for the poor, and the success of ALL the other rich nations to do DO just that, is not some vague unproven conjecture. It’s proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt.
About those surgeries: even if we believe Sowell claims about waiting times, which I don’t, the point AGAIN is that Europeans, Commonwealthers, Japan, CUBANS and a host of 3rd world nations are able to PROVIDE those surgeries to their poorest ciizens, while the us system isn’t able to do so. Nobody’s is saying that US health care isn’t able to produce quality, but NOT for the poorest. ALL other countries CAN and DO provide that. other countries that don’t do that, don’t do it at all.
@TheSteelGeneraI Obviously, you don’t live in America, and only read propaganda. The “poor” in America live at a higher standard of living — more likely to own an automobile, live in larger homes/apartments, have better food choices — than Europe’s middle class. And, the poor get MEDI-CAID, taxpayer funded free health care.
Just cos Sowell can’t think of anything that the Govt runs better than the market, it doesn’t exist? Huge faulty logic right there. And the govt runs defense better than the market, even KKKons agree that.
That 30,000 Canadians come here doesn’t prove a thing. Canada/europe takes better care of it POOR, rather than 30,000 richies who can afford expensive health care. Cos this is the point: Americas health care is failing the POOR, not the rich, which was never our point anyway.
@Nerfball6 NO. They did try it in Switzerland. For years Friedman and Hayek argued that if only the AMA would get out of the way and let the “Free Market” work we could have this model of for profit health insurance provide coverage for everyone. Well there was no AMA in Switzerland and they had for profit health insurance and in 1994 they reformed their system and outlawed for profit health insuracne for primary care. So you have Switzerland as the test lab confirming the failure of this system
@MsZeitgeist85 Ridiculous. The reason it isn’t tried in other countries is because you can not undo hundreds of years of government control to try it. Not because it hasn’t worked. Those countries will probably never adopt a free market system short of an uprising, because the governments do not know how to (and are unwilling to) give up centralized control.
Peter Robinson looks like an awesome, non-pathetic Keith Obermann, and Thomas Sowell looks like an amazingly intelligent skeleton.
@MsZeitgeist85 Single payer isn’t the answer, I’ll just have to agree to disagree with you at this point. It’s clear we aren’t going to agree but I will say that personally, I don’t perceive single payer as a success. I certainly don’t perceive our current system as a success but out remedies are different, fine with me.
@s0beit Zeitgeist is not just the movie it is a German word for movement.
My point was that the verdict is in on this and for profit insurance for primary care is outlawed in every country except the USA becasue they make profits denying coverage.
Switzerland learned this lession and thats why they fixed their system in 1994.
Outlaw for profit HMOs and get Single Payer. Problem Solved.
@MsZeitgeist85 You haven’t explained why it wouldn’t work, I know you Zeitgeist people, you’re utopians with absolutely no grasp on the purpose of money or profits in the first place, Marxists with a robot fetish, there see I can make fun of your retarded ideology as well. Attacking your ideology however isn’t a valid argument from me, just like it isn’t one from you.
Negotiating prices is fruitless when you’re the only purchaser, it’s monopoly money. It means nothing.
@s0beit Medicare and Medicaid do not negotiate lower prices like Canada does with their system.
Your so called free market doesn’t exist in any other country because it doesn’t work.
@MsZeitgeist85 Yes there is such a thing as a “Free Market Solution” for healthcare, you just refuse to see it. You see medicare, medicaid, corporate protectionism, and all the things I’ve mentioned earlier and see, “Look, look, free market failure!” I know your kind, the system wasn’t even remotely in peril until the 1970s and before medicare and medicaid programs it was FAR from under peril. Look at the data before making your claims.
@s0beit Then why is it that for profit health insurance has failed everywhere it has been tried?
Not one single country in the world uses this system because it doesn’t work. There is no such thing as a “Free Market Solution” for health care.
@MsZeitgeist85 No, the profit motive is perfectly fine, the real issue is the cost of actual medical care, not so much as the cost of insurance as people take at face value. It’s easy to attack the seen and not the unseen, but the fact is because of government intervention in the marketplace, licensure, regulation, medicare, medicaid, tax incentives for employers, they have completely ruined the system that had reasonable costs up until 1970 and was even cheaper before medicare came along.
@pretorious700 No it doesn’t. That was not even my main point. The fallacy of Sowels argument is that the profit motive makes things better when it doesn’t. No other country in the world uses this model for health insurance because it doesn’t work. For profit health insurance for primary care is by its own definition a scam and that is why no other country in the world uses it.
@MsZeitgeist85 Longer life expectancy and infant mortality rate? That’s the data you use to support such a broad assertion? Proves you’re insufficient intellectually and factually to argue this point. I lived in canada for 12 years, my wife worked in the medical profession, and everything Dr. Sowell says is 100% correct. Real life experience always trumps shallow statistical bullet points.
@mmac382 Then tell me why is it that no other country uses this so called Free Market model?
@MsZeitgeist85 Its ironic how you can first use Stossel as a referance and then in the next breath call him stupid. Also you say it has no merit without an explanation of why. Both characteristics are typical of a blind liberal idealog. Someday as you become older and wiser you’ll see the light. “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, they left me.” That pretty much holds true in my case. You never had the chance to see how the Dems used to be. Its a shame.
@MsZeitgeist85 Its ironic how you can first use Stossel as a referance and then in the next breath call him stupid. Also you say it has no method without an explanation of why. Both characteristics are typical of a blid liberal idealog. Someday as you become older and wiser you’ll see the light. “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, they left me.” That pretty much holds true in my case. You never had the chance to see how the Dems used to be. Its a shame.
@mmac382 I alredy saw that and it holds no merit and does anything but refute the claim about how our system is inferrior to other countrys. Knobody said that Canada’s system is a free lunch because it is not it is payed for with tax dollars. Stossel tries to say that non profit health insurance will be a slippery slope to having grocery insurance.
Only in America can someone as stupid as John Stossel have their own show.
@MsZeitgeist85 Stossel
westernstandard.blogs.com/shotgun/2009/07/john-stossel-on-canadian-health-care-and-free-lunches.html