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COMMENTS:
Great question!
by mojo on Sat Jun 04, 05 3:02pm
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government funding help eliminate polio didnt it?
and many vaccines are free at your local health dept. plus many are required by the govt. to even start school.
As I have said many, many times here at B&W, I think we need some form of national healthcare for our poorer familes, and particularly, children.
On a practical level, it is cheaper to prevent diseases than it is to treat them. The poor end up in our emergency rooms (the only place left where you can get medical without an insurance card)and we end up paying out the nose to treat diseases which would have, and should have, been prevented.
And, even if you find a way to deny emergency access to the poor, there is a larger, more ominous reality: We all live on the same planet, breathe the same air, drink the same water, etc. Not treating one, large, segment of the population increases the heath risk to all of us, not to mention the dangers of spreading a mean, cynical, superior attitude among us.
Fire departments are supported by the most part by the local community. They may get some money for anti-terrorism funds, but that is it. Disease control is funded at the National, state and local levels. I should say underfunded. While I agree with the idea of federally funded health care, the analogy is weak.
Excellent question. Take it to your leaders!
by zig on Sat Jun 04, 05 4:49pm
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"Ya just don't get it, do ya Scott"-Dr. Evil
I think you overlook all the things the government is doing to prevent these plagues. Like health codes, water treatment, vaccinations, etc. There's a reason there aren't plagues in the US. Things we don't even think about are ravaging other nations which don't have the sanitary conditions we do, cholera, typhus, malaria, yellow fever, etc. All wiped out in the US by government programs.
But tell you what, when a plague sweeps through the US killing millions of people and the government does nothing we'll reexplore this topic.
I think you will find, that property is always valued over people.
Hence there is a federaly paid fire departmen and not a national health system in the US.
It is a good question. Exceept for the fact of when was the last plague recorded in the industrialized, western world? I quess you could say AIDS but that is one hundred percent preventable and there is more money being spent on research for that than any other thing except cancer.
If one were to be really serious about preventing plagues one would ignore healthcare and look at water and sanitation issues.
Controlling epidemic disease is not very expensive or complicated, but it is beyond the resource level of most less developed countries.
In the western world deaths from diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, dengue fever, cholera etc are rare. Less than 1% in the modern world.
According to the WHO there were over 16m deaths in the less developed world from these diseases in 1993 alone.
Now how does healthcare affect these numbers? Would it reduce it to the level of 0% of deaths? How much better could it get?
Or are you arguing for economic and development aid for the developing countries of the world? If so, check out Milenium Goals (UN).
If not, then why would the feds not care about fire that kills way, way more people than does epidemic disease?
Herzog has a point, as so does Steel_Hamster.
I support federal funding of healthcare, but not because a plague might spread.
I don't believe in state owned fire departments. That is a service that the free market would create. If people want to band together under a common health plan, let them do so but don't coerce others into joining the same plan.
By state owned do you mean the city? In my city taxes are collected and part of those taxes go for the police and fire services. That is one of the legitimate uses of tax money.
Back in the day in England, and NYC they had private fire departments and they were more of a group of extortionists than they were firefighters.
The market cannot decide in all areas because unless there is a possible profit there will be no service. In most cases police and fire have to be sponsored by the citizens through the collection of taxes, even Adam Smith accepted that as reasonable.
Steel I believe our fire departments are run by municipalities, not the federal gov't, as Inter said. There are some things that must be run by government because the private sector simply cannot or will not do it effectively, such as defense, roadways(although some a private, a system of entirely private roadways would not function remotely efficiently), etc.
ir
Those would exist even without coercion. I will admit that those fire departments are probably pretty close to what we would have in a free market anyway so they're not so bad. I'm just opposed to the principle of mob rule without consent of the individual being ruled.
thc2883. But my point is that in the free market there would be no police or fire services, and what I was trying to get at is: do you support the free market so much as to go beyond even what Smith defined as legitimate use of government power to tax?
It is a good question. Exceept for the fact of when was the last plague recorded in the industrialized, western world? I quess you could say AIDS but that is one hundred percent preventable and there is more money being spent on research for that than any other thing except cancer.
If one were to be really serious about preventing plagues one would ignore healthcare and look at water and sanitation issues.
Controlling epidemic disease is not very expensive or complicated, but it is beyond the resource level of most less developed countries.
In the western world deaths from diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, dengue fever, cholera etc are rare. Less than 1% in the modern world.
According to the WHO there were over 16m deaths in the less developed world from these diseases in 1993 alone.
Now how does healthcare affect these numbers? Would it reduce it to the level of 0% of deaths? How much better could it get?
Or are you arguing for economic and development aid for the developing countries of the world? If so, check out Milenium Goals (UN).
If not, then why would the feds not care about fire that kills way, way more people than does epidemic disease?
ir
Market forces would create police and fire departments. One of those is already partially satisfied by security firms, which I am sure would expand in the absence of police departments.
Okay, I'll bite here. I don't think that those private security guards/companies would go to work in the ghetto considering what the ghetto might be able to pay. In the poorer, yet not ghetto, areas would be the same problem. So, in those cases you would still have to have the government step in and pay, or would you be satisfied by the lawlessness that would necessarily occur in the absence of law enforecement?
Now in the case of the fire departments those have been tried. When I was in Yorkshire there was all these old houses near the wall, that had these really cool plagues on the outside and they were to signify that these people had paid for their private fire department. On one stretch of the road there were three different insignia. So the problem came about that there was a fire and three departments would show up to the scene. Not only did was this not an efficient use of resources, (no economies of scale) it didn't allow the kind of space that was needed.
The same thing happened in NYC and was made popular in the movie "Gangs of New York". Granted DiCrapio as a ganster is hard to accept but there was a very real extortion racket run by gangs who "owned" private fire companies.
Also there is the issue of prisons, there has been some successes but there are as many failures.
Schools also have been privatized to mixed reviews at best.
I don't disagree that in some cases there could be a more effective public service run by private companies, but when there are failures ala Enron, then what? If someone absconds with the money that was to be used for a town's sole fire engine? The money would still be coming from the town.
There is further the problem of the free rider.
ir
I'd have to know more about how exactly those departments were formed and managed. But I can tell you for a fact that some "privatized" schools failed because the government was still highly involved in their operation. It is very common for government to pseudo-privatize and then blame the failure of the business on the free market rather than their meddling. Maybe ghettos wouldn't have services as good as they do now in a free market but that's better than the alternative of stealing other people's money to pay for that service.
Well, I don’t think everyone here bothered to read the analogy before commenting, but nonetheless there were a few good points made before all the suppositious B.S. that pretty much dominated this page.
Sure, no one is denying that we have suppressed many plagues in America but that is not to say that the diseases we encounter in the future are going to be anywhere near as easy to repress as malaria, tuberculosis or cholera (easy is not a good word for it but in modern times it has proven to be ‘easy’ to repress in industrialized nations). AIDS is a retrovirus and in the modern world we are finding much stronger viruses to counter our vaccines. Had we had a federally funded healthcare system in the late 70’s and early 80’s then perhaps the impoverished heroin users and homosexuals that went untreated could have been made aware of their illness and thus prevented the disease from spreading as far as it has and make no mistake about it the disease is still spreading in America and there are poor people going without treatment or even tests for detection because conservatives don’t want to divert money from our war defense and use it in our public health defense. Did you ever consider that terrorist might use germ warfare on the American public or was the anthrax attack not enough of a lesson? Diseases evolve and some of these retroviruses that are killing the poor will one day become airborne and kill a whole lot of people. The black plague killed 2/3rds of Europe archeologists believe that the Mayans were wiped out by disease. How many more people have to die before we do something about it?
healthcare's not free for everyone in your country? Every child and old lady doesn't get all the HEALTH they need for FREE?? :p Ha what a bunch of idiots.
by Jyl on Tue Jun 07, 05 9:54pm
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oh no, I'm sorry fellas, I forgot that's MY country!!
:p
by Jyl on Tue Jun 07, 05 9:54pm
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Robin
If the government was as involved in healthcare in the 70s as it is now we'd be in even deeper sh_t. Remember the human genome project? The government was going to take forever but a private company came in and forced them to keep up. btw, I've read some archaeologist speculate that the Maya were wiped out by drought. What was that about suppositious?
RobinGaylord, how can you accurately predict what will or will not happen in the future.
Any health system whether the best private or public care would be overwhelmed in any case in the event of a disease of the magnitude of the black plague. But you don't even have to go back that far. There was the influenza epidemic that occured after WWI that killed millions of people. It wouldn't have mattered, regardless of the scope of the healthcare system to stop or stem the tide of such epidemics, and to believe otherwise is foolish. There are no absolute protections in the game of life, you roll the dice and take your chances. The mentality that government can protect you from every possible contingency is the disease of the left's mind. It wouldn't matter if the most beneficient model of government were in place in other words.
I do agree that it is hyperbole to say that there is no money for national healthcare, yet we can find (to date) 400 billion dollars to depose Saddam. Before this is over it will probably run into at least 2 trillion dollars. So the way to achieve that is to frame it in the sense of a monumental threat to natioanl security.
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