More Infants Die Early in US than in 40 Countries, Including

[Geoff]

Zilla, this is a reminder to please play nice.

(in relation to this post: http://rationalia.com/forum/viewtopic.p ... 71#p964171 )

DP said it's not an attack if it's true.

Which means it's a personal attack.

Not referring to the post in question, or any other individual post, but it's generally accepted that a true statement is not slanderous or libellous.

[JimC]

Zilla, this is a reminder to please play nice.

(in relation to this post: http://rationalia.com/forum/viewtopic.p ... 71#p964171 )

DP said it's not an attack if it's true.

Which means it's a personal attack.

Not referring to the post in question, or any other individual post, but it's generally accepted that a true statement is not slanderous or libellous.

The devil is in deciding whether it is true or not...

[Robert_S]

Seth need not be personally greedy to embrace an economic theory that seems to end up favoring greed.

Just as not all those opposed to the State of Israel as a Jewish state are anti-Jew and all those in favor of the same are anti-Palestinian.

[Seth]

Zilla, this is a reminder to please play nice.

(in relation to this post: http://rationalia.com/forum/viewtopic.p ... 71#p964171 )

DP said it's not an attack if it's true.

Which means it's a personal attack.

Not referring to the post in question, or any other individual post, but it's generally accepted that a true statement is not slanderous or libellous.

That doesn't mean it can't still be an ad hominem personal attack. The meaning of "personal attack" is that the argument is directed at the opponent's person rather than at their argument.

The precise statement in question, "Your overt greed and selfishness has been noted repeatedly", even if true (which it's not...making it all the more of an inappropriate personal attack), was still a personal attack because it was not directed at my sarcastic statement that I'd be fine with universal health care so long as someone else was paying for it and I didn't have to.

Now, if 'zilla had said "Those who want universal health care without paying for it are greedy and selfish" it would not have been a personal attack. Of course, it also would have affirmed precisely the point I was trying to make with my sarcasm, but that's beside the point.

Another example might be if someone had said, in response to my statement "your mother was a whore," that would be a personal attack even if it happened that my mother was a whore in fact, because it's not responsive to the debate, it's just an open insult directed at my person.

So, truth may be a defense against libel or slander in a court of law, but that doesn't mean that an irrelevant and disparaging truth cannot be a personal attack in this forum.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

And you'll flip-flop on that kind of thing when it's in favor, of course.

[PsychoSerenity]

The precise statement in question, "Your overt greed and selfishness has been noted repeatedly", even if true (which it's not...making it all the more of an inappropriate personal attack), was still a personal attack because it was not directed at my sarcastic statement that I'd be fine with universal health care so long as someone else was paying for it and I didn't have to.

Now, if 'zilla had said "Those who want universal health care without paying for it are greedy and selfish" it would not have been a personal attack. Of course, it also would have affirmed precisely the point I was trying to make with my sarcasm, but that's beside the point.

Nah you've got that wrong, Seth. The whole point of universal health care is that those who can't afford to pay still get treatment, not those that don't want to pay.

You said: "I'm all for universal health care...so long as YOU are paying for it for ME and I don't have to pay anything ever, including taxes." - without any reference in this hypothetical situation as to whether you'd be able to afford to pay or not, thus making it personally about your own selfish greedy viewpoint - which is simply not part of universal health care.

If you had said: "I'm all for universal health care...so long as, if I can't afford to pay, YOU are the rest of society is paying for it for ME and I don't have to pay anything ever until I can afford it, including taxes." - then there wouldn't be a problem and we'd all be agreed that universal health care is a good thing.

[Seth]

The precise statement in question, "Your overt greed and selfishness has been noted repeatedly", even if true (which it's not...making it all the more of an inappropriate personal attack), was still a personal attack because it was not directed at my sarcastic statement that I'd be fine with universal health care so long as someone else was paying for it and I didn't have to.

Now, if 'zilla had said "Those who want universal health care without paying for it are greedy and selfish" it would not have been a personal attack. Of course, it also would have affirmed precisely the point I was trying to make with my sarcasm, but that's beside the point.

Nah you've got that wrong, Seth. The whole point of universal health care is that those who can't afford to pay still get treatment, not those that don't want to pay.

Only partly true. Yes, universal health care provides no-out-of-pocket-cost health care to the indigent and those who cannot pay, but it does so at the expense of those who do not wish to pay for such coverage. The new Obamacare health care insurance mandate is just an open example of the way every socialized medicine system in the world works: The government levies taxes on people who do not need or necessarily want health care insurance or for that matter health care itself to pay for the health care insurance or health care offered to those who pay no taxes.

But the problem is that it's not just the indigent and truly poor who cannot afford either insurance or health care who take advantage of socialized medicine's redistribution of wealth, it's many other people. If it were only those who cannot afford health care, that would be one thing, but it's not. We could provide all of the approximately 5 to 8 million people who cannot afford health care with Congressional-level platinum-plated HMO coverage for a tiny fraction of the costs of Obamacare. Obamacare, you see, is not about providing those who are destitute with basic health care, it's about Progressive administrative power and control and socialist egalitarianism and asinine notions of "fairness," not the actual availability or cost of actual health care services.

One of the primary reasons that health care is so expensive is the law of supply and demand. Prior to the Progressive era, specifically FDR's reign, when wages were frozen by FDR, people paid for their health care out of pocket, and so they wisely and carefully shopped for such services and made sure that they negotiated the best deal with the best provider, just as they did for every other commodity they purchased. They did not go to the doctor for frivolous reasons and therefore did not over-consume health care assets. Competition kept prices down as it always does in any capitalist economy.

Health care "insurance" began to be offered to top-level employees during FDR's administration because federal laws enacted by Progressives controlled how much a company could offer a desirable executive, which made it difficult for companies to recruit and keep valuable employees. So, businesses created partnerships with doctors and insurers and offered "free" health care as a perk that the government was not controlling as a way to increase the take-home benefits of executives and thereby keep them from leaving.

It wasn't long before the Progressives decided that offering executives, but not common laborers, "free" health care was unfair and discriminatory, notwithstanding the fact that it was merely another form of pay raise and that the costs of providing it counted against the company's bottom-line profits.

Thus, laws were passed mandating that large employers (more than 500 employees) offer "health care programs" to all employees at a discounted rate. Thus was born the "HMO" industry, as a function of federal meddling in the wage/compensation structure of American business.

The problem with HMO's is that you aren't paying for "health insurance," you're paying for "pre-paid healthcare." This distinction is vital to properly understanding why health insurance costs are out of control right now.

When you buy insurance, you pay a premium to be covered against a specific set of perils, and your premium is based on the insurer's estimation of its financial risk in covering against that peril. The greater the likelihood a customer will suffer the peril, the higher the premium.

But "health care insurance" doesn't operate on that principle. By federal mandate, HMO's are required to cover a set of health-related perils as mandated by government, usually in the interests of "fairness" and "non discrimination" that completely reverses the entire insurance underwriting paradigm, which is all about discriminating when it comes to assessing risk.

So, we ended up with mandated HMO coverages that massively increased the risk exposure of the insurer, which translates directly into higher premiums for everyone (since they can't "discriminate" in pricing based on your risk as a medical patient). It also results in the overconsumption of actual health care resources as patients, who pay a monthly premium of hundreds or thousands of dollars, figure that since they have paid for the service, they might as well take advantage of it and go see the doctor every time they get the sniffles or a splinter. This results in supply and demand increases in the cost of the actual medical care as people clog clinics with minor complaints that historically people simply endured or treated themselves at home, to save money.

The medical care provider and supplier market naturally responds to this demand by supplying it at the highest cost the market will bear.

So people who complain about the high cost of health care insurance are largely themselves responsible for those costs, which are in direct proportion to the amount of health care services the insurer must pay for by government mandate.

I, for example, could buy a health insurance plan much more cheaply if I could choose a la carte from a list of medical perils I want to be covered against while excluding others. An example is lady-parts medical services. I'm not a lady, and therefore I don't need or want coverage for female reproductive medical issues. But by law, I'm forced to pay for that coverage whether I need it or not, because the Progressives think it's "discriminatory" for women to have to pay more because their plumbing is more complex than mine is.

Such government mandates have nothing to do with medical necessity, they are pure socialist redistributionism. Women get a substantial discount on their female reproductive anatomy medical needs because the government mandates that a health insurer charge the other half of the population more than they need to pay, all in the name of socialist egalitarianism.

And the same argument applies to every other mandate: cancer coverage, psychiatric coverage, coverage for children, HIV/AIDS, and every other bit of meddling government has engaged in to skew the free market for health care insurance, including state mandates that forbid the interstate provision of health insurance. That stifles competition, which would bring down prices, by making it illegal for me to shop for medical insurance in another state where it might be cheaper. It's all a giant government-supported scam and the insurance companies loved it, right up until Obamacare came along. Their response now is to simply quit the business of offering health care insurance, which is exactly what Obama and the Progressives want.

Their plan is to drive the private health care insurance industry out of business by larding it up with mandates and regulations that make it impossible to make a profit, and by creating a "public option" which is simply government-funded universal health care in a thin disguise. Very quickly private health care insurance will be a thing of the past and the Obamanation will have "no choice" but to set up socialized medicine in the US.

The dearth of competition in the private health care insurance market (having nothing to do with the actual availability or cost of actual private health care providers) will be used as an excuse to exercise "emergency" powers to impose socialized medicine and drive a stake through the heart of the best health care system in the history of mankind and substitute an inferior, underfunded, discriminatory, ineffective and bureauracratized public system that's "fair" in that everybody suffers equally from the low quality of medical care and rampant rationing and denial of care seen in every other socialized medical care system in the world.

You said: "I'm all for universal health care...so long as YOU are paying for it for ME and I don't have to pay anything ever, including taxes." - without any reference in this hypothetical situation as to whether you'd be able to afford to pay or not, thus making it personally about your own selfish greedy viewpoint - which is simply not part of universal health care.

What does it matter whether I can afford to pay or not, except in the tiny minds of socialist swine who think that someone's ability to pay is justification for taking MORE money from them so that someone else can get something for nothing?

If you had said: "I'm all for universal health care...so long as, if I can't afford to pay, YOU are the rest of society is paying for it for ME and I don't have to pay anything ever until I can afford it, including taxes." - then there wouldn't be a problem and we'd all be agreed that universal health care is a good thing.

Er, that's rather the point of the sarcasm. How are your health care problems, over which I have absolutely no control, suddenly my responsibility? Why should I pay for your health care problems in the first place? What advantage does it give me that makes it worth my while to labor on your behalf? Rationally, it's better for me, in a tight labor market, for you to drop dead as quickly as possible, thus opening up a potential job for me to profit from. And then there's the environmental arguments. Why should we keep sick people who are a drain on society and an unnecessary carbon-production unit alive longer than nature would have them survive on their own? And what about the evolutionary argument? Shouldn't the sick and weak be quickly culled from the herd, before they have a chance to reproduce and pass on their defective genes? Why should such inferior examples be permitted to waste precious medical resources only to perpetuate their defective genes? Where's your Greenness gone? Where's your atheistic, science-driving acceptance of nature and evolution disappeared to all of a sudden?

And why should those who can't afford their own health care be exempt from the responsibility to pay for my health care? Why shouldn't they be enslaved to my financial interests rather than me being enslaved to theirs?

And if I am to be compelled to pay for your health care needs, then I demand control of your lifestyle and activities, so that I may reduce my risk of having to pay for some expensive medical treatment caused by your failure to use due care and diligence to look after your health, thereby reducing the costs to me?

Do you really want me in charge of your life, in detail? Do you want me to tell you when to wake and when to sleep, what to eat, whether to smoke, how, when and where to exercise, what activities and recreation to avoid as being too risky?

Is that what you want, because that's what you're agreeing to when you support government-run socialized medicine, whether you realize it or not.

I don't know about you, but I don't want government, or anyone else, to have that sort of power and control over me. If I choose to live an unhealthy lifestyle by chain-smoking and eating deep-fried Twinkies three times a day, that's my prerogative and my right. If it makes me sick or kills me, it's my responsibility, not yours, to deal with those consequences, and unlike socialist thieves, I would not presume to demand that you labor on behalf of my medical needs or contribute money to treating my bad health.

But if you need medical care and cannot afford it yourself, you are welcome to ASK ME for assistance. And if I judge that your medical needs are legitimate and are not simply the consequences of your bad decision making and lifestyle (like diabetes or heart disease), then I may choose to assist you out of a sense of altruism, charity and enlightened rational self-interest.

On the other hand, if you're suffering from diabetes, gout, high blood pressure and kidney failure because all you do is eat Twinkies, smoke crack and watch soap operas on TV all day, I feel no sense of responsibility whatsoever for your medical plight and I believe it's necessary and better for society that you drop dead, thereby relieving the community of one more unnecessary burden and providing a graphic example of the wages of the sins of gluttony and sloth, and improving the gene pool.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

[PsychoSerenity]

Did my post give you the impression I'd care to read your reply to it? And after all the effort you went to as well! I am sorry, Seth.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Did my post give you the impression I'd care to read your reply to it? And after all the effort you went to as well! I am sorry, Seth.

"Excuse me, sir, but what did you read in my posts that gave you the impression I gave the slightest fuck about a reply from you."

I read that somewhere.

[Seth]

Did my post give you the impression I'd care to read your reply to it? And after all the effort you went to as well! I am sorry, Seth.

Did I give you the impression that I give a flying fuck whether you read it or not? You're just my foil, I'm playing to an entirely different audience than you think I am.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Did my post give you the impression I'd care to read your reply to it? And after all the effort you went to as well! I am sorry, Seth.

Did I give you the impression that I give a flying fuck whether you read it or not? You're just my foil, I'm playing to an entirely different audience than you think I am.

Of course you are.