liveforphysics said:
If you keep focus of both aspirations and drive, and sacrifice as needed to keep working towards those aspirations, you can be rewarded by getting a position closer to that end-zone. Just drive/work ethic leaves you as a mule in a job somewhere. Just aspirations leaves you with a head full of dreams and empty pockets. If you generate the discipline to sacrifice whatever it takes to keep your aspirations and drive in focus, you can make it somewhere, and you should be rewarded, not punished by deeper taxing.
Don't try to discriminate against someone who isn't a genus, or has a handicap, or whatever, saying that they can't make something of themselves. Don't punish those who do climb into the position they reach by forcing them drag along others with them.
My $0.02
Absolutely true, though arguably someone making $1m/year and getting taxed at 35% is still being rewarded far better than someone making $150k/year and getting taxed at 28%.
Unfortunately your argument doesn't apply well to US health care reform anyway, because our system is so broken, we are already taxed more per capita for health care than most countries that have a simple universal health care system. In fact, Luxembourg and Norway are the only countries where people pay (slightly) more health care taxes per capita than the US.
US public health care spending per capita is higher than the average of other OECD countries' total health care spending per capita. US public health care spending is mostly just Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA.
Our costs are out of control because we are trying to apply free market principles to a situation which isn't functioning efficiently as a free market, mostly due to information imbalances.
There is no downward price pressure in many areas because most people don't make their own choices. They mostly don't choose their insurance company, they mostly don't choose what drugs and treatments they get, they don't make many of the choices that normally control quality and costs. Sometimes they don't make those choices because they don't have the information they need to decide what treatments they should get (their doctor does, but many doctors don't consider cost as much as maybe they should). Other times the choices are made for them (their employer or plan gives them very limited options). One of the biggest information imbalances is the details of insurance plans, usually described in complex legalese. Show of hands: who here read their health insurance policy cover to cover and compared it with other insurance companies' policies before purchasing? How is this a free market if most people don't even know what they're buying?
Sometimes the people don't have the option to make choices that drive costs down, and sometimes their insurance company doesn't have the option of making choices that drive costs down. Sometimes people end up with name brand drugs that aren't any more effective than a far cheaper generic option. In this case, the information imbalance favors the drug companies. Sometimes people go without paying insurance for a long time, then get sick but don't go to a doctor until some time after they've signed up for an insurance policy. In this case the information imbalance favors the patient and screws the insurance company. Another example of free market failure.
And then there's all the wasted administrative effort at doctors offices managing the regulations and billing procedures of fifty different insurance companies, all the wasted effort of all the different insurance companies figuring out what procedures should and shouldn't be covered, all the wasted effort looking for insurance fraud, none of which would be necessary under a universal coverage system.
Not to mention that we're already paying for emergency care for the poor anyway... hospitals take care of the poor in their emergency rooms, among the most expensive facilities we have. The costs are passed on to all the paying customers -- whether insured, uninsured, Medicare, whatever. The uninsured who can pay end up paying a lot more than the insured though, because they have no bargaining leverage. And not just the poor -- medical expenses are the leading cause of bankruptcies. Who ends up paying for that hidden expense? We all do, in higher medical costs, and therefore higher insurance premiums, and higher interest rates from any lending institutions that get caught holding the bag. So when someone gets sick, if they can't pay their own way, we all end up paying for it one way or another anyhow.
This is why costs are out of control, and why costs are
only out of control in the US, not all around the world. This is why Medicare is over budget. This is why we pay more in taxes just for Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA than people in other countries pay in taxes for 100% free health care for all their citizens.
I'm not a socialist, I'm a pragmatist. Communism failed because it simply cannot work as efficiently as free markets do,
in most situations. Whatever works best is obviously what we should do, regardless of whether it requires the involvement of the big scary government, or not. Does the US health care system need to cover absolutely everybody? Not necessarily. But I'm skeptical that we can come up with a free market health care system that's more efficient than all the other western industrialized nations' government health care systems which right now are kicking our butts in efficiency by about 2 to 1.
