Comments on: That Seventies President

By: Pete Spiliakos

Pete Spiliakos — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 16:28:23 +0000

Brian, I okay with using the same word to describe different things (though Canada’s system is usually called single-payer even though it contains – comparatively small – private insurance components.)

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 16:06:13 +0000

Pete: It’s clear our differences here are primarily semantic. I assert that Medicare is not single payer. It’s a government health-payment plan, but that’s not what single payer means.

By: Pete Spiliakos

Pete Spiliakos — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 15:05:20 +0000

Brian, single-payer can coexist with some private purchase of health insurance. Medicare is a single-payer system for the elderly that coexists with private supplemental plans (Canada has something similar in many provinces.) They could even place a surcharge on private health insurance but I doubt they would bother since they would still put the private insurers out of business by making them redundant (you’re paying for the government health insurance anyway.)

I doubt that most liberals want to criminalize the private purchase of health care services as long as you pay into the single-payer system (whether through the general budget or a series of dedicated taxes’premiums collected by the government.) Those with lots of disposable income would be moe or less fine. It is everybody else I’d worry about.

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 14:32:39 +0000

Pete: Single payer means no one but the government can pay for medical care (despite lefty internet commenters, pretty much no countries have single payer systems, mostly because they’re self-evidently idiotic and counterproductive). I don’t see how that has anything to do with Social Security–it’s not like the government banned all other pension/retirement plans. It sounds to me like you’re describing a “Medicare for all” system, but that’s not single payer. The government could set up something like that, but it won’t really be single payer as long as doctors and patients can opt out (of using it, if not paying for it), which they of course would immediately in massive numbers, and I can’t imagine any court, no matter how left, saying I couldn’t pay a doctor in cash for services. You’d basically get a hugely expensive gov’t bureaucracy and have a cash-only medical provider system sitting alongside it.

By: Pete Spiliakos

Pete Spiliakos — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 22:34:36 +0000

Brian, why, absent the overturning of Helvering, would a single-payer tax-and-transfer single-payer system be struck down by the Supreme Court. Such a system would seem far more constitutionally secure than the one created by Obamacare.

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 14:57:57 +0000

1. Obama’s obsession with nuclear disarmament treaties with Russia in a world in which Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, etc., are building nukes pretty clearly demonstrate he has no ideas that weren’t drummed into his pretty little head in college.

2. I see no world in which “single payer” ever passes any congress ever, or in which it stands up in any Supreme Court ever, no matter how liberal.

3. Thankfully, the finances of the country are such that the “transformations” that Obama & Co. want to inflict won’t ever be able to take hold. There just isn’t any money left. If they had been imposed 50 years ago, things would have been different.

4. I realize that saying “We’ll manage to avoid being destroyed by Obama & Co. because we’re already completely hosed” doesn’t SOUND like the optimistic spin on current events, but it actually is.

By: That Seventies President | CATHOLIC FEAST

That Seventies President | CATHOLIC FEAST — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 14:18:10 +0000

[...] In this thread, Peter Lawler wonders if maybe Obama’s “progressivism isn’t rhetorical (like Wilson wanted) but stealthy.” Now any attempt to abstract a person is going to be of limited utility, but I let’s try this point of view: maybe Obama is, on domestic policy, a mostly unreconstructed 1970s upper Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]

By: JDP

JDP — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:49:55 +0000

sort of a rant i know, but i guess my point is, does it matter how old/new Obama’s ideas are. does the fact that there’s no Newer Deal or Greater Society mean all that much? is there much to read into a liberal referring to what’s generally acknowledged as the genesis of the homosexual rights movement? don’t really think so

By: JDP

JDP — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:46:53 +0000

comments like Lawler’s are extremely semantic and i guess i just don’t see the point. i don’t define reactionary vs. radical (or liberal vs. conservative) as having much (or anything) to do with the present vs. the past, other than existing in different forms (with ideological similarities) at different times. stuff like that’s responsible for the ridiculously ambiguous use of the word “conservative” from people who hate conservatism and goofiness like unreconstructed Communists in the Gorbachev era being referred to as conservatives.