The Edwards Plan achieves universal coverage by:

* Requiring businesses and other employers to either cover their employees or help finance their health insurance.
* Making insurance affordable by creating new tax credits, expanding Medicaid and SCHIP, reforming insurance laws, and taking innovative steps to contain health care costs.
* Creating regional "Health Care Markets" to let every American share the bargaining power to purchase an affordable, high-quality health plan, increase choices among insurance plans, and cut costs for businesses offering insurance.
* Once these steps have been taken, requiring all American residents to get insurance.

So Edwards plan is to...

- force businesses to pay for health insurance no matter the circumstance
- give tax credits to poor people who don't pay taxes anyway
- expand the already insolvent Medicaid fund
- get SCHIP through since it is the buzzword of the day
- partake is unexplained reforms, innovation, and market creation
- once all that magic happens, force any swinging dick to have to pay into the corrupt HMO system or government nanny program.

OK.

Rick Reuben wrote:

nfurnier wrote:The Edwards Plan achieves universal coverage by:

* Creating regional "Health Care Markets" to let every American share the bargaining power to purchase an affordable, high-quality health plan, increase choices among insurance plans, and cut costs for businesses offering insurance.

Sounds Libertarian/Free Market as hell. Are you sure that's not Ron Paul's plan?

I don't know if you have heard, but apparently markets have no effect on things and people have no control over their health. We need King Edwards/Obama or Queen Clinton to save us.

Skronk wrote:Look at Dave, grabbing at straws.

Can you really get behind, or successfully refute what I quoted Paul as saying? What about the earlier quote about black criminals?

What about the above:

Only true competition assures that the consumer gets the best deal at the best price possible by putting pressure on the providers.

The words of a man who has to put a public face on an elitist agenda that aims to exclude people from state help. Who is dumb enough to believe that this guy really cares about the "consumer"? And who isn't enraged by a doctor who calls patients "consumers"?

I don't want to start taking advice in medical ethics and welfare from people who think the unemployed are idle, and lung cancer suffers and diabetics deserve their sicknesses for bad diet and cigarettes. The doctrine of 'personal responsibility' needs to be taken out and shot in the back of the head. It is just an excuse to deprive the already deprived.

Ricky says he doesn't mind Paul's insane pro-Capitalist platform, fundamentalism and nationalism so long as Paul keeps conspiracy theories in the papers. That is a nutty reason to back a fundamentalist/capitalist for Presidency. What about you? Say it ain't so.

nfurnier wrote:I don't know if you have heard, but apparently markets have no effect on things and people have no control over their health.

At last one of you arseholes is saying something right.

Think long and hard.

nfurnier wrote:I don't know if you have heard, but apparently markets have no effect on things and people have no control over their health. We need King Edwards/Obama or Queen Clinton to save us.

Markets are important, of course. They do not govern everything, that's all. They can have some effect even in arenas they do not dominate in influence, but that's where amelioration comes into play.

Housing is overbuilt in chicago, yet house prices have not come down to the level they were at prior to the housing glut. Thus, the market forces are ameliorated by the investors' recalcitrance. The price of anything is not based on supply and demand alone, but that's all a market is -- the arena of tensions between supply and demand.

And since you think such a thing is possible, please tell me which diseases you plan to get in your life, and how you chose the physicians who will treat each of them? What is a fair price to be cured of, say, liver cancer?

If I don't want leukemia, how do I not get it?

steve wrote:Housing is overbuilt in chicago, yet house prices have not come down to the level they were at prior to the housing glut. Thus, the market forces are ameliorated by the investors' recalcitrance. The price of anything is not based on supply and demand alone, but that's all a market is -- the arena of tensions between supply and demand.

I don't understand why market forces would improve or get worse for any reason. Market forces are simply things that influence supply and demand. If you meant that they cease to exist when an investor won't lower prices, I would disagree, particularly since the housing market is speculative. I would also disagree that your example isn't supply and demand alone. Obviously, when you have a oversupply of something, the demand for it won't be there. It doesn't matter how low the prices go...if you have too many homes and not a whole lot of people who can or want to pay for them, you are going to see a housing glut. The housing malinvestment was caused by government anyway through distortion of interest rates. If government gets involved you can't expect markets to correct themselves until the government gets out of the way.

And since you think such a thing is possible, please tell me which diseases you plan to get in your life, and how you chose the physicians who will treat each of them? What is a fair price to be cured of, say, liver cancer?

If I don't want leukemia, how do I not get it?

I don't think such a thing is possible and I don't recall saying so. I do think that I have control over preventing a lot of things that bring people to the hospital or doctor's office and that I should be able to choose a physician without going through any third party first. If it's humane for everybody to pay on behalf of others for diseases where the cause isn't known, why not suggest just that? Sounds like something charity could pay for. Why this overarching "you might get cancer so let's make sure everything is free?" I don't think I am entitled to a doctor's labor or somebody else's money.

And since this is a Ron Paul thread, can't we all agree that the leading democrats are putting forth the worst of all worlds by getting everybody under the HMO umbrella?

nfurnier wrote:If government gets involved you can't expect markets to correct themselves until the government gets out of the way.

I don't understand where many people's faith in the market(s) comes from. I can't be the only person receiving class action lawsuit settlement paperwork in the mail a few times a year or the only one reading/ hearing about them in the news all the time. This sort of legal initiative takes an enormous investment of citizen time and expense, and I barely have the time to read and fill out the paperwork required to receive my legally entitled restitution when the market fails to spare me from the illegal machinations of conspiratorial market forces. It seems the government could spare me and everyone else the effort, yet many people bemoan the government's merest interference as destructive to the market. Why is an unregulated market where so many goods and services are collectively presented to the consumer as Hobson's choice (i.e. you can choose overpay among various offerings or opt to take nothing) the ideal situation?

Okay, I'm sold.

Nice Wallace Stevens quote, Jesus.

Rick Reuben wrote:Look at any major new consumer product introduced in the past 25 years: PC's, DVD players, Hi-Def TV's, CD players, iPods. You see the producers competing with each other to cut prices to make it up on volume.

I notice that CDs themselves are not in your set of examples. The manufacturing cost of CDs fell from about $4 to less than a dollar, but list prices steadily rose. There was no race to the bottom there because of concerns other than market forces that were more important to pricing.

Markets work, when and where they work, to varying degrees, but they are not magic, and they don't control prices. They are part of a huge array of forces that drive money around the world, and appealing to them as a cure-all is ridiculous.