sittingaround

Piracy. I've heard that your philosophy is that it's a useless battle*. Can you share any data or analysis you've done to back up piracy's effect on O'Reilly Publishing's bottom line?

~* I think you're right, and thank you for not making it hard to transfer the books I buy onto my tablet.

Hot shower. My time in nica I went a month without one, nothing like your stint. But damn was it the most amazing thing.

I mean it as a descriptive argument, not a normative argument.

We've already got this universal insurance scheme. Description of current state. So now we can dispense with the notion that we're creating something new, or moving the country into socialism.

Now we can ask, are the current scheme's outcomes effective? Exactly as you show, no it isn't effective: the outcomes are horrible.

Now we can ask, is the current scheme cost effective? No again, ER care is some of the most expensive care.

Now we can ask, does the current scheme align costs with benefits? Here it is perhaps the worst, this emergency insurance care largely isn't paid for by the people who receive it. It is paid for primarily by the treating hospitals, and the municipalities while also pushing the recipients into bankruptcy. This fails any test of fairness, reasonable allocation, or desirability that I'm aware of. The current allocation of costs is, frankly, unjust.

Pre Obamacare we have a system that has poor outcomes, is expensive, and pushes costs to the wrong people. We already have universal insurance through emergency rooms, and it is a disaster.

I use this argument with people on the right to tear down the wall of fundamentalism against "universal health care is socialist." And to move the debate into "we can both agree the current state is broken, what would a reasonable fix look like."

I guess what I'm trying to ask is, why is this a debate about values and not fixing a broken system? The left trying to argue social justice against the right arguing personal freedom vs "the current state is ineffective, inefficient, expensive, and the costs are unjustly distributed."

Why is/was the argument "we've already got universal insurance through emergency rooms" not more prominent?