insane medical costs

But that is just a kind of....

nihilism isn't it? I mean making a situation where there is really nothing and no options except to the wealthy-which is not an unreasonable reading of such a completely unfettered market in medical care. Where do you put down some rules? There is nothing to say that doctors would have to be schooled or licensed to paractice or be subject to professional standards. Those things could be provided for privately in theory but I don't know of any long standing professions that are not, at minimum, controlled by some form of state power.
I guess my real point is that there is no bridge to a thorughgoing market solution here. Even instituting a market system would likely require state power at the beginning.
 
Well, those statements....

are indeed what the orthodoxy would demand, but there could and probably would be a lot suffering along the way, and maybe prerpetually so, who can say. And it just isn't a matter of killing your patients, that is an extreme the market might well cull, but there is a whole universe of bad practice and advantage taking that could easily be foisted on the dependent. This system would have to take care of people who are in no postiton be struggling robustly with the market mechanism, or we could just take the attitude that it doesn't matter if they are taken advantage of, that's their lookout after all and has nothing to do with us-caveat emptor we could say.
 
AFAICT, none of the ailments mentioned would be service-connected, therefore I don't see how the VA should be expected to foot the bill. I do know from helping my uncle that a lot of VA medical benefits are means tested.

What is it about military service that seems to engender a sense of permanent entitlement?

I can semi-sort of see how some people can connect the dots (but still do not agree) when the persons affected were drafted, but for an enlistee/volunteer, it goes right over my head.

(Full disclosure--I am a 15-yr vet of the US Army [12 active, 3 reserve]).
 
COTUS not build on Bedrock, or of bedrock.

It is the cornerstone of our Gov't, and its responsibility to its citizens.

You build from the cornerstone (legislation), not rely on it solely. That is why we have our system of checks and balances.
 
usta in Portland said:
Founding principles-my god what tripe. One of our founding principles was that owning another human being was OK but we darn sure want get some representation for him (3/5) in Congress just so as to bolster Southern legislative power.
Click to expand...

A political compromise made to get a bill passed.

I thought you were a fan of realpolitik.:huh:
 
Coupefan said:
My take is on the matter is pretty simple. Your medical well being should be the concern of two parties: The patient and the medical professional. The middle man (any middle man) looking to profit off of someone's misery has no business (ah hem) being involved.

My position on this topic was solidified just today. My son has a bad case of swimmer's ear. It seems my insurance wouldn't cover the antibiotic, since they don't manufacture a 'generic' version. I'm out $130.14 for a 10 mL bottle! Yes, I almost fell over too. What was I to say, no thanks? My son is in serious pain. Apparently, paying even a cent for 'the real thing' would have cut into their profit margin too much. People, not profits, should come first.
Click to expand...

I'm having a hard time with this.

#1. Unless the doctor is working for free, he is profiting off your misery. Everyone wants their medical care for nothing, but no one expects any doctor to work for free.

#2. Everyone bitches to high heaven about the cost of drugs. If there was no profit motive in the development of drugs, there would be little or no progress.

Regarding the swimmers ear situation, why not ask the Doc for the best suitable antibiotic that IS on the plan's formulary?
 
I dunno

Dan Sarandrea (Phila) said:
AFAICT, none of the ailments mentioned would be service-connected, therefore I don't see how the VA should be expected to foot the bill. I do know from helping my uncle that a lot of VA medical benefits are means tested.

What is it about military service that seems to engender a sense of permanent entitlement?

I can semi-sort of see how some people can connect the dots (but still do not agree) when the persons affected were drafted, but for an enlistee/volunteer, it goes right over my head.

(Full disclosure--I am a 15-yr vet of the US Army [12 active, 3 reserve]).
Click to expand...


My personal opinion is that our folks who have served active front line duty in combat zones ought have free medical coverage for life. There are many other areas to reduce costs.
 
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Does the military make any distinctions...

based on where and under what circumstances someone is deployed. I have a personal beef with a couple of relatives who went into the Navy, served 20 years under conditions where their biggest risk was getting radiation burns from their computer screens, went out and got jobs with the contractors with whom they had been involved and then after 10 years retired on a pension from the contractor, who in way way and another is being supported by the taxpayer.
Oh, and of course one of these guys was raised in a Navy family and schooled under ROTC for free and, of course, he is a big time anti tax proponent, which would be fine if he wasn't sucking off the public teat literally from cradle to grave. he did software for the Navy-probably alot paper cuts from packaging in that theater of operations:p

Meanwhile what does some poor guy who gets shot up or even just shot at get if he is regular combat soldier or Marine? I don't know.
 
I am a fan......

I just don't think there is much point in acting like it is anything else, that is to say just because it is in the Constitution doesn't make it any less than mere expedient politics. That's all. the Constitution is what it is and not some heaven sent, infallible or an even particularly applicable document after 225 years. I just can't work up any teary eyed sentiment about our 'founding principles' knowing that they are not all that principled to begin with. :)
 
That may be true....

but of that group how many actually see how much is going out in premiums. The constantly rising cost of insurance and its partial invisibility to employees is cited often as one of the causes of flat wages and salaries for the past 30 years. I don't know if I think it is that big an influence, but don't you think people's satisfaction might take a dip if they were actually writing out a mortgage payment sized health insurance check month after month.
This is probably the best argument for detaching health care from employment, the market pressue to reduce costs might be greater if individuals saw that money exiting their bank accounts constantly.
My wife and I were happy with her insurance until we retired and were presented with a $1000/mo bill.
 
We disagree... I know... surprise!

Kevin B (Asheville said:
COTUS not build on Bedrock, or of bedrock.

It is the cornerstone of our Gov't, and its responsibility to its citizens.

You build from the cornerstone (legislation), not rely on it solely. That is why we have our system of checks and balances.
Click to expand...

To say that the Constitution is a "living and breathing document" (I use quotations, because it's a common phrase)... and I may be wrong, but that's my interpretation of what you're implying, facilitates an arbitrary and lawless sort of activism. One can't interpret it in this manner without deserting its elemental principles.

If its meaning can be removed or rewritten and the Framer's objectives disregarded, it is no longer a constitution, but instead a contrivance that will serve the tactical agenda of whichever political party or leaders are in office at that time. It can work both ways and that would seem to be a fairly obvious danger... again, just my opinion.
 
With the rise of....

an activist Supreme Court it probably already has become, more or less, a contrivance for partisan tactics. At least this is how it appears to me since the Warren court onwards. The impartiality of the SCOTUS has to be suspect at minimum and at that point the ambiguities, even the useful ones, of the Constitution become a political battleground.
It seems obvious that this would happen given the very nature of SC appointments. The veil of legitimacy thrown over the whole procedure of Senate consent can only lop off the extreme outliers and not the more conventional and moderate appearing party appartchicks. Too bad too.
 
July 17th: This Day in Judicial Activism

2007—Campaigning for president, then-Senator Barack Obama delivers a speech to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund in which he states that what really counts in a Supreme Court justice is “what is in the justice’s heart.” Obama promises that “the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges” is “who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/270680/day-liberal-judicial-activism-july-17-ed-whelan
 
July 14th: This Day in Judicial Activism

1983—In a separate concurring opinion (in State v. Hunt), Judge Martha Craig Daughtrey of the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals offers her view that the Tennessee constitution is best read as protecting obscenity. Daughtrey recognizes, alas, that the state supreme court has rejected her reading and foreclosed the path she would pursue if the question were “open for me to decide.” Ten years later, President Clinton appoints Daughtrey to the Sixth Circuit.
2005—By a vote of 4 to 3, the Wisconsin supreme court, in an opinion by chief justice Shirley S. Abrahamson, rules (in Ferdon v. Wisconsin Patients Compensation Fund) that a statutory cap on noneconomic damages in medical-malpractice cases violates the state constitutional guarantee of equal protection (which supposedly derives from the declaration in the state constitution that “All people are born equally free and independent”). Purporting to apply deferential rational-basis review, the majority concludes that the cap is not rationally related to the legislative objective of lowering malpractice-insurance premiums. The rational connection between caps on noneconomic damages and lower premiums ought to be obvious. Further, the dissenters complain, the majority “ignore the mountain of evidence supporting the effectiveness of caps.”
2009—In the opening day of questioning of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy tells Sotomayor that her critics “have taken a line out of your speeches and twisted it, in my view, to mean something that you never intended.” Leahy then proceeds to misquote Sotomayor’s notorious “wise Latina” line to eliminate the very elements of the comment that render it controversial: “You said that you ‘would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would reach wise decisions.’” Here’s what Sotomayor actually said (in a prepared text that was turned into a law-review article and that she repeated, in substantially similar form, on other occasions):
I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.
​
Not to be outshone by Leahy in the category of brazen mendacity, Senator Schumer accuses Sotomayor’s critics of “selectively quot[ing]” an April 2009 speech by Sotomayor “to imply that you will improperly consider foreign law and sources in cases before you.” Schumer then selectively misquotes Sotomayor’s speech to obscure her blanket defense of freewheeling resort to foreign and international legal materials in determining the meaning of American constitutional provisions. Sotomayor colludes with Schumer in an effort to bamboozle Republican senators and the public about her views on this controversial issue.


http://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/270677/day-liberal-judicial-activism-july-14-ed-whelan
 
July12th: This Day in Judicial Activism

2009—In an interview in the New York Times Magazine, Justice Ginsburg offers this, er, interesting comment why she was “surprised” by the Court’s 1980 decision in Harris v. McRae, which ruled that the Hyde Amendment’s exclusion of nontherapeutic abortions from Medicaid reimbursement was constitutionally permissible:
Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.
​
Gee, Justice Ginsburg, would you like to tell us more about your views on those “populations that we don’t want to have too many of”?



http://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/270675/day-liberal-judicial-activism-july-12-ed-whelan
 
July 4th: This Day in Judicial Activism

1776—The Declaration of Independence is a stirring statement of America’s creed, but is it also a sexist and xenophobic document? Defending the Supreme Court’s increasing use of foreign law in support of its rulings on the meaning of the Constitution, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg titles a 2005 speech “‘A decent Respect to the Opinions of [Human]kind’: the Value of a Comparative Perspective in Constitutional Adjudication”. Obtusely appealing to the Declaration of Independence to justify the Supreme Court’s dependence on foreign law, Ginsburg cannot resist the urge to purge the gender bias she perceives in the Framers’ observation that “a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind” requires a declaration of the “causes which impel them to the Separation.” Nor, apparently, does she notice that one of those stated causes was that King George III “has combined with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution.” (See here for more on Ginsburg’s embarrassingly shoddy speech.)



2010—Days after Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan can’t bring herself to express her personal agreement with the “self-evident” truth set forth in the Declaration of Independence that all human beings “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” the same Senate Democrats who ardently push for her confirmation head outside the Beltway to profess homage to the Declaration in Fourth of July celebrations with their constituents.


http://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/270669/day-liberal-judicial-activism-july-4-ed-whelan
 
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