Nope, the actual answer is a heck of a lot of money. Every time someone uses the ER because they don’t have access to cheaper medical care, every time some kid gets a quarter of a million dollars thrown at him to save his life, every time someone takes medical bankruptcy, every time someone takes a medical deduction from their taxes, every time the system has high overheads because of the plethora of insurance companies drs have to deal with the cost blows back on everyone else. Sorry, but defaulting on medical bills that are too ridiculously high to pay is part of the reason why medical costs are so ridiculously sky high.

The US health system – is the most expensive in the world – with on average the worst health outcomes in the developed world. Not very efficient.

Now, who is responsible for that and can we get to discuss some sort of new way of finding a solution besides the only one that’s been tried for 50 years (more money, more schools, more teachers, more centralization)? Because, I’ll be honest, I don’t want the same gov’t that has given us the DMV and what now gives the nation dolts with diplomas, deciding what surgeries I’m eligible for. Or that I’ll get to pay for the ointment for that 18 year old’s crabs that he got from whoring around….yeah, responsibility DOES mean something.

BTW, I was going after the ‘causation’ thing because the author noted in that link definitely did just that and even went so far as to do the ‘vote for liberals you get health care, vote for GOP you’ll get dead kids’ thing, much like John Edwards “if you vote for us people like Chris Reeve will walk”, which is why I said it was disgusting because IMO it was a rather sick and ill-conceived post….it drips with hatred. Not condemnation, not disdain, hatred.

I never looked at the in’s & out’s of HC – I don’t know if it would have been good policy or not. The point is that Bill Kristol thought it would and wanted to kill it because it might perform what it was designed for and give Democrats an edge.

No – you aren’t following the logic correctly. It isn’t a matter of blame being assigned based on whether you support this or that solution. It is a little more radical than that, because the blame goes equally – all the way around – to everybody in the society, no matter which solution you support. Now, knowing that we are falling down on the job of creating a working health care solution, the question is will that blame – that responsibility – and the real-world fact that we are failing in it – motivate us to change what we think & do about it?

I’ll have to read about the GA program later tonight when I have more time. I don’t know if GA’s plan is working better than any other plan. If it is, then great. If it isn’t then let’s keep looking.

My point is that we are responsible – I am even if I support a national solution (because why would I want to short the people who live across the state line from me). You are, if you support a national, state or no solution. We are responsible. The job isn’t getting done. So let’s get off our political dogmas and do something about it.

And then he turned around and said that whatever merit the people might find in HillaryCare was not worth the possibility of losing Republican electoral advantage.

There was no Republican electoral advantage back then. Hillary is what gave the GOP the congress & along with Clinton’s tax hikes caused something like 400 party switchers acrosst he nation. Bill Kristol had little to do with HillaryCare’s demise, because he was a pundit. The Dems ran the show and the reason Hillary’s plan failed was because Democratic senators saw the tidal wave that was coming and Democrats killed her plan. That the author of the blog was oblivious to this tells me that he’s more than likely someone under the age of 25 & thus relying on blog-blog rhetoric for his news. There was no GOP power, there was no GOP filibuster, there was no GOP anything. They were the minority. Moderate Dems killed Hillarycare, primarily because the nation didn’t want it. It would be more accurate to state that Robert Byrd killed the health care plan:

A key legislative exception is what is known as the reconciliation bill, the last stage of the annual budget process, which, under Senate rules, requires only a simple majority for passage The Byrd Rule was adopted by the Senate in 1985 to combat budget deficits. Anything not germane to the budget and, significantly for Bush’s plan, anything that adds to the deficit, cannot be included in reconciliation under the Byrd Rule. Byrd warned the White House in 1993 that health care would not pass muster as part of reconciliation, and Clinton abandoned the strategy.

http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/003538.php

I’m just looking at the situation & recognizing that (as the aforementioned link notes) Bill Kristol – and if one goes to the logical conclusion, anyone else who is against universal health care – is responsible for the death of that young man. Responsible. Death. Killed. Died. Responsible. But, oh, Kristol didn’t stick to the merits of the health care discussion…he was too busy allowing people to die. Obviously, like the starving-children campaign of ‘96, claiming that your opposition is willing to kill people is acceptable and meritable rhetoric.

Anyone else notice the blatant dichotomy?

BTW, I was typing about this back in 2003:
http://blog.rjwest.com/?p=713

As I noted then, if someone is truly seeking to make health care access expansive to those in need, they’d look at something like what GA has adopted. It works. That is, if seeking improvements over politics is what they’re really looking for, instead of a political advantage. Why aren’t there state leaders across the nation using such obvious successes – and if the very-red GA can like it, anyone can – to use in their own localities? Why isn’t this being looked at first instead of the immediate conclusion being a national system? I think Prince George’s county & MD would be a better place for the government to provide assistance to the family of that young man than something Nancy Pelosi or Bill Frist helpee design.

MD is run by Dems…why wouldn’t they look at something like what GA has? It helps the poor kids & the citizens like it because it’s not too intrusive & doesn’t cater to the welfare state notion.

So, unless I support Hillarycare, I’m partly to blame for a child’s death (and any other person that the ‘collective’ doesn’t cradle)? Am I reading that correctly?

You’re certainly not reading it generously. If you want to sum it up – we are all responsible for one another in terms of creating a situation where basic needs can be taken care of as well as technologically feasible. When we fail to do that, we fail in our responsibility, and we are rightly to blame for the results, which in this particular case was the failure to avoid an easily avoidable death for a child.

The fact is that there will always be failures, whether anyone is *trying* to create a better system or not. This just happens to be a stark example of such a failure in the real world, and the reason I relayed it is to remind people that there are real world results of any given theory. The hope would be that a reader such as yourself would say, “well free markets are great & everything, and they do some jobs well, but it looks like we might need to think about a better system for health care,” … where they might have otherwise thought of it purely in terms of conservative political theory that says the market will take care of it, so we need not worry.

Bill Kristol? He wasn’t exactly thinking about conservative theory and rejecting other approaches on the basis of that theory. He implicitly endorsed Hillarycare (which is what he was talking about there): He thought that it would work well enough that it would please voters and therefore provide an electoral advantage to liberals. And then he turned around and said that whatever merit the people might find in HillaryCare was not worth the possibility of losing Republican electoral advantage. That’s pretty rotten. Do you really blame me for pointing that out?

If we (collectively) don’t take the responsibility, then we – you, me, that kid’s mother & Bill Kristol – all get to share the blame.

So, unless I support Hillarycare, I’m partly to blame for a child’s death (and any other person that the ‘collective’ doesn’t cradle)? Am I reading that correctly?

BTW, the chain ended at the link over Kristol’s name in your post.

The point is that Bill Kristol was more worried about political advantage, at least in this case, than in the merits of the political question.

Did he use “unilateral” as a backdrop? Sorry, but that’s pretty much what I was saying about the usage of that word…..it was pure politics, not the merits of the case at hand (since it cannot be logically argued to be a legitimate point since it is, welll, false).

I read your comment, and I see speculation that it was all the kid’s mother’s fault. Reading the article, I don’t get that sense at all, and I don’t “refuse to believe” that she had trouble getting her son’s problem taken care of. I’ve been around people who have raised kids while poor, and I’ve had plenty of testimonials about the difficulties of getting needed care for them. Maybe it wasn’t impossible for her to do, but it was difficult to the extent that the care didn’t get taken care of. To me, that’s unacceptable, and I don’t care if, in some cases, the mother shares some of that blame? Fixing a tooth rarely seems like a life-or-death issue, and if she couldn’t find a dentist who would trust her credit – something probably easier for you or I to do than for her – then I’m not going to blame her for putting that on the back burner … *if that’s even what she did – which is pure guesswork on either of our parts*.

Maybe to you, or Bill Kristol, or Neal Boortz, it’s ok that the system works so poorly, as long as it is “capitalist” enough and you can make sure that Oliver Willis never gets any benefit from it. That’s fine – argue that on the merits.

“Blame” is just the pejorative word for responsibility. If we (collectively) don’t take the responsibility, then we – you, me, that kid’s mother & Bill Kristol – all get to share the blame. That may disgust you, but that doesn’t change the fact of it. When the facts are disgusting, you either learn to tolerate disgust, or you start changing the facts.

I’m almost finished with my taxes…this will be the 6th consecutive year that we qualify for the medical deduction, meaning we pay a pantload in medical expenses, and yet for some reason I’m still not out there expecting that everyone else pay my way. Question: how much of his personal money does the author donate to pay for his neighbor’s medical bills? I’m sure if I asked I’d get the usual weasly “I pay medicare taxes” stuff, but the actual answer would be zero. In THEORY, he wants me & him & others to pay for his neighbor’s bills & for it to be mandatory and the gov’t should force it to happen. In PRACTICE, he sits at his computer and blames others when someone’s parents let their child die because they were either too ignorant, stupid or lazy to go to the dentist and set up a medical payment plan.

It is the law that medical expenses are not due immediately & you can set up monthly payments to take care of the expenses (someone reading can try to go find some Gene Lyons or Glenn Greenwald entry that disputes it, but I know the law. Not in theory, in practice). You can setup the payments to be very low, the providers will work with you. I paid off a many-thousands-of-dollars bill in monthly increments of as $50 with zero interest involved. The law allows that.

I refuse to accept the notion that a dentist wouldn’t have setup a payment schedule where $5/month would’ve caused the bill to have been eradicated within 16 months. Yet, apparently, people are willing to believe that such a thing is unbelievable….but that Bill Kristol or people who actually think that they shouldn’t pay for Oliver Willis’ impending heart attack are somehow ‘evil’.

Really, that was disgusting, if I can be so bold.