How Rights Work

ranma-official

How Rights Work

reasonandempathy

A common talking point that comes up in the healthcare debate is that having a right to healthcare is a right to the labor of another person. That you can compel a healthcare professional (shorthanded to “doctor”) to act without compensation for their labor.

This is fundamentally wrong. Rights can only compel inaction, not action.

To draw a parallel: you have the right to a gun (second amendment, yay). Does that mean that you are owed a gun? That gun manufacturers must make you a rifle? No. It doesn’t. It’s a laughable claim to make and it stands contrary to hundreds of years of American history. Having a right doesn’t compel others to action, at best it compels them to inaction.

The right to not be assaulted means you don’t get to punch me.

The right to self-defense means you don’t get to jail me for protecting myself.

The right to control my labor means you don’t get to enslave me.

The right to have kids means you don’t get to force me to have an abortion.

State’s rights compel the inaction of the federal government.

The state of a country to its internal politics compels the inaction of its neighbors from interfering with its domestic politics.

The right to a lawyer doesn’t compel people with law degrees to give you free legal representation.

Anyone trying to represent a right as the ability to force action is either a fool or a liar.

mutant-aesthetic

The right to free association means you can’t force my business to- OH WAIT LOL

ranma-official

the right to tell your free association meme to fuck off means you can’t discriminate against an entire race

bariumsulfateacetone

Except that the right to a lawyer DOES compel the state to provide you a public defender if you can’t afford your own. That’s been the accepted interpretation for centuries.

ranma-official

it compels the state to provide you with a lawyer but not to force this specific lawyer to defend you for free

mitigatedchaos

Why, that almost sounds like the state hiring doctors, who can leave the profession or emigrate, to perform medical services.

Unfortunately the actual reason there is such confusion is that rights theory is false, but under Consequentialism it’s quite acceptable for the state to procure healthcare for citizens if it does a good enough job at it. Man, it would be so nice to save 5% of the GDP.

Source: reasonandempathy politics

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What GOP Must Do to Avoid an American NHS

Alright, US Republicans, listen up.

You think your goal right now is to “Repeal Obamacare”.

But that has issues. Given your values, your goal should not just be to repeal Obamacare, but to prevent the emergence of a single-payer healthcare system in the United States, in which the US Federal government monopolizes 1/5th of the US economy in a botched attempt at recreating the NHS.

This does not mean trying to pass laws to sabotage the attempt. They’ll just get overturned, and that will be celebrated as a Democratic party victory.

You have to deflate the demand for single-payer healthcare. That is what is necessary for market-based healthcare to continue to exist in the United States. As long as the demand is there - and it is growing, as middle-class families come under increasing pressure - the desire for single-payer will re-emerge.

Yelling at people about how they don’t deserve healthcare because they haven’t worked hard enough will not help. You just picked up a bunch of rural voters that got laid off at the factories and can’t meet their deductibles. You have to focus on preserving the market-based allocation.

There is a simple way to do this.

Each year, every American receives a healthcare voucher for $2,500. (Maybe more - this is way below our per-capita healthcare spending - but even you can do this much.) You can hide this as an earned income tax credit for the poor, a tax deduction for the middle class, etc, if you have to.

The voucher can only be used to purchase valid medical services and medical insurance. We have licensing for doctors, so this shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.

Any of the voucher not spent rolls over into a no-tax/low-tax Health Savings Account, where it builds up.

Private money can also go into the account.
Tax is only assessed above a certain amount / on death.
By default, it goes to a zero-interest government account, but this can be changed by opening a suitable interest-earning HSA account at any American bank or credit union.

Hospitals are still required provide emergency care for the uninsured/poor, however, up to ½ of future vouchers can be garnished, proportional to the size of outstanding claims.
Vouchers and money from the HSA can be given to spouses or children for their HSAs, though not other relations (normally). It can also be disbursed in a will, but if so then it will be taxed as normal income.

Now, first objection is probably that this will bid up the price of medical care to the new floor. I believe that is unlikely - because the voucher accumulates and people don’t actually like randomly buying healthcare, it makes much more sense to save it up and spend it later as you normally would, or else just buy insurance.

Second objection is that people might launder the money to get it for themselves. In this case, the person they are screwing over is mostly their future self, so they have incentive not to do this.

Third objection, which I’m likely to get from my left-wing readers, is that this isn’t enough money. That’s probably true, but this is likely of more benefit than whatever the Republicans are currently cooking up. In the current situation we have some poor people buying the mandated insurance, but unable to actually get medical care because they cannot afford the deductible. Under this system, they can go get medical care tomorrow. Likewise, for pre-existing conditions, this ensures that at least the value of the voucher is available each year to pay for it.

Later administrations could raise the amount, but the benefit for the Republicans here is the preservation of the market mechanism. This is likely to be a popular program.

This could be coupled with a variety of other reforms to reduce overall healthcare costs, such as requiring hospitals to post information about their prices, success rates, etc. Don’t just cross your fingers and hope the market works. Education alleviates information asymmetry and lubricates markets. Create the right framework for suitable informed competition to take place in.

policy politics healthcare republicans flagpost

Although, if anything, that post about healthcare costs is perhaps a better summary of my current politics than any.

Efficiency - in government, in the private sector, anywhere - doesn’t just mean some nice bonus that lets rich people we don’t care about have more sports cars.

As efficiency and production increase, you stop having to triage. If one unit of sovereign services costs $1.00 to deliver and you have $1.00, then you can purchase only one unit. If one unit of sovereign services costs $0.50, then you can purchase two.

If there were two of you and you collectively only had one dollar to spend, then in the first case you have to fight about who gets that one unit of sovereign services, and in the second case you don’t.

The adequate planning of cities and efficient distribution of resources are absolutely vital. Surplus regulations don’t just have a cost in corporate bureaucrat annoyance, but in bus stops.

Private property, government regulations, wealth redistribution… these are tools, not moral imperatives.

Now I know many people would say “sure, but my politics is about using them correctly as tools,” and for some people that’s true. But a lot of the time that’s not what we see in practice.

So the great question, I think, is how we can make systems of governance better, to promote better and more accurate approaches to policy that more effectively accomplish what will benefit people.

politics national technocracy ideology my politics

argumate

Remember: capitalism and white male supremacy go hand in hand.

I don’t know why I feel compelled to push back on this statement every time I see it, but I guess maybe because it’s irritatingly wrong?

Presumably capitalism has been in steady decline since the emancipation of women and the civil rights act and the end of apartheid and

mitigatedchaos

Capitalism is nothing but a tool of the Chinese to suppress ethnic Malaysians! It is absolutely inherent that it happens to favor that racial group specifically! There can never be such a thing as Capitalism that doesn’t favor the Chinese!

Uh, I mean, uh, white people, right…

politics shtpost

argumate

Thanks to this healthcare debacle I’m feeling slightly vindicated in my feeling from last year that while Trump might be unprecedented in some ways as a presidential candidate let alone president, the sheer institutional inertia of the state and the gloriously recalcitrant nature of American politics would stymie his ability to radically reshape the nation. I mean it’s still early days, but yeah.

garmbreak1

politics shtpost

mutant-aesthetic

Anonymous asked:

If American soldiers didn't give Nazis a fight in World War II do you think they would have stopped? Or what about the Civil War or the Civil Rights Movement? You say what they're doing is bad behavior like their little children throwing a temper tantrum. They're not. They're grown men who even if we didn't give a fight would still escalate violence until everyone they disliked was eradicated. Sometimes the only way to end a fight is to fight back.

mutant-aesthetic answered:

Stop comparing major military conflicts between nation-states and armies with street fights between civilians.

Also, WRT the civil rights movement, there’s a reason no normie knows who George Lincoln Rockwell was, and that’s because his antagonistic antics were essentially ignored during that period.

mitigatedchaos

This is the error of the Left’s thinking. They think white nationalism grows when not opposed with violence because they see it never completely goes away. This is incorrect. There is a natural background level of racism. White nationalism needs certain conditions to grow above the level supported by the background racism.

politics

mutant-aesthetic

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Julian Assange 🔹 on Twitter

“10/ Here's Singapore's long term prime minister Lee Kuan Yew:”

a-sleepygoldenstorm

What neither side of US politics wants to admit: the promotion of identity politics combined with the declining white super majority has led to turbo charged white identity politics. Since Dems catered for non-white identity politics, Trump and the GOP took hold of white identity politics.

Most countries that do not have a 70%+ super majority ethnic group have ethnicized electoral politics.

mitigatedchaos

Yes, my fear is that Lee Kuan Yew is right.

Source: a-sleepygoldenstorm politics torches in the night racepol

argumate

Health insurance must pay for exoskeletons #1yrago

mostlysignssomeportents

An independent review board has ordered an unspecified health insurer in the northeastern USA to reimburse a patient for a $69,500 exoskelton from Rewalk, whose products enable people with spinal cord injuries to walk.

The board found that the exoskeleton was “medically necessary.”

https://boingboing.net/2016/02/19/health-insurance-must-pay-for.html

argumate

this is awesome but you know, anyone still wondering why healthcare eats up more and more of GDP

anaisnein

Not that I’ve looked at the math or anything, it’s 2:40 am and no. But unless there’s a digit missing in that pricing, the health economics of that thing have got to be a total slam-dunk. I don’t doubt the payor resisted paying because resisting payment is what payors do. If it’s a novel device that isn’t on approved formulary lists, which probably if new thing and not many candidates, that alone is plenty for at least one line of nope. It doesn’t require an actual rational objection based on the value proposition. SOP would be bog-standard automatic bureaucratic obstructionism framed as a best practice in cost consciousness. It’s only a story because someone got pissed off enough to deploy the courts and a journalist thought the device looked cool.

Try pricing five days in the critical care unit on a ventilator for a dying eighty-seven-year-old with advanced dementia, heart failure, and chronic kidney disease, found short of breath and tachycardic in bed at the nursing home, rushed to the hospital, and admitted with sepsis and pulmonary edema. Including imaging and cath lab. Then get back to me about unjustifiable Cadillac expenditures on luxurious medical devices that enable (a very small number of) paralyzed people with normal life expectancies to walk again, for less than it costs to put a remote monitoring device into a heart failure patient’s chest, which, statistically, costs less than *not* doing that because it reduces hospitalizations by just a tad.

Source: mostlysignssomeportents healthcare politics

ranma-official

one example of Americans’ cultural obsession with people getting things they don’t deserve (I think it’s partially @bambamramfan’s favorite Lacan stuff but not fully) I want to bring up is indeed healthcare related

when you bring up the topic of universal healthcare, people insist that universal healthcare is bad actually because it covers people who are fat and people who smoke. not necessarily that they’re a drain on the system to such an extent that they’ll break it, but that these people negatively impacted their health and will benefit nonetheless

there’s a lot of counterpoints you can make here. what’s a decision that ruins your health that means you need to go bankrupt because of hospital bills? Moving to a city and breathing poisonous air? Buying a car? Serving in the military?

Isn’t that just an intentional slippery slope towards “pre-existing conditions” nonsense?

Doesn’t free healthcare also cover free dietology advice so people don’t become fat in the first place?

Isn’t it absurd to think the only reason people don’t become fat or take up smoking is the expensive hospital bills, or that it even factors into the equation?

but honestly I want to focus on this ridiculous assumption that the real problem with healthcare is making sure people who access it “unfairly” stop doing so, and breaking the system completely to spite them

ranma-official

and honestly I’m no HAES blogger, but if you think that people reading wikihow guides to stiching their own wounds in order to avoid going to the doctor, number one bankruptcy cause being hospital bills, and hundreds of thousands dying from preventable causes is optimal because some of them are fat, your view has some glaring issues

mitigatedchaos

This is partly an intuitive normie understanding of the free rider problem and incentives.

The issue is that while normies are picking up on a real issue, normie understandings are all running at level N=1. There are ways to manage the incentive issues, but only at higher levels of contrarianism/synthesis.

Also, I really ought to dig up that article showing that the effects of the US being some weird mix of developed and underdeveloped impacts the costs of healthcare. It may be a tougher nut to crack than it looks. (But man, would I love to save 5% of GDP.)

politics

“Hell, we can’t even get the working class to agree Healthcare is a right and not a privilege.”

Found in the wild. Here, again, the language of “rights” obscures, rather than reveals. After all, if it’s a “right” then that tends to be fairly absolute and imply unlimited healthcare spending, unless deliberately qualified. It also implies that it would have been “a right” even back before healthcare in any modern sense even existed.

So this is part of why I think they’ll fuck it up.

“Healthcare is not a right. You don’t have the right to force a human being to provide you their service with a gun to their head.”

Follows in response, which is similarly clueless for other reasons.

politics

I actually suspect that the switch to identity politics over class politics may have been based on a growing ineffectiveness of class politics.

“BUT THE POOR!” lost ground as more cached arguments were built up against it, even if it wasn’t entirely justified.

“BUT RACISM!” still had a lot of bite and could circumvent some of those cached arguments. So, it’s natural to shift to it and build the platform around it.

It had a lot of bite, anyway.

There was always the focus on what was morally right, even in the minds of people who claimed they didn’t believe in morality, over what was effective policy, so now we get a lot of talk about guilt, or about pie in the sky ideas of “dismantling the systems of X oppression requires dismantling capitalism” (and people remember how “we need to dismantle capitalism” went last time), and not so much about “we should distribute multivitamins to the poor.”

I mean, that does sometimes get through, but the zeitgeist doesn’t seem to care about it as much as it cares about language policing and thinks that beneficial policies will just naturally unfold once everyone acknowledges their sin.

politics

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

How Rights Work

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What GOP Must Do to Avoid an American NHS

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Health insurance must pay for exoskeletons #1yrago