to the mandate, no, i don’t like it either, but with the goal of providing more access to, and lower costing health care, it does play a role. if no one can be denied via outright denial or over priced denial due to existing conditions then there is clearly more access to insurance which provides greater access to health care (this is just an assumption based on comparing the times in my own life that i’ve been insured and uninsured). i also agree there will be price manipulation, without a mandate it will lead to more uninsured people as those with low premiums drop out as they see the premiums go up), with a mandate prices stand to rise if there isn’t a threat of competition, be it interstate exchanges, co ops, public options, or single payer, the threat of increased competition will remain so long as insurance companies continue to increase price.

if the remainder of the bill won’t work with or without the mandate, i don’t see the reasoning behind taking it out, since it seems the health industry at large will be put at risk by removing it and leaving the preexisting condition portions in the bill, without which we don’t expand coverage in any meaningful way.

and the government failure was under regulation of an industry that lies behind everything in our economy, so if by that you mean that the government should address it’s failure and apply more regulation i agree completely. yet that’s not what you mean. i suppose the answer to your question would be that we do at the ballot booth during the next election (though in fairness we could do the same thing against a private business by not being customers anymore, i doubt those answers will satisfy either of us, but they were the first thing that popped into my head).

and i am open to other ideas, but the reality is we’ve been doing nothing for some time now, and we see where this is heading. health care costs are rising faster than income, so not only is the problem how expensive it is today, it’s how much more expensive it will be next year. it’s not about caring about what i want more, its that i don’t see how what you want (no government, no taxes) will ever work. so it doesn’t seem like a viable option at this point. if you can convince me of otherwise, well, i’m open to you trying to explain how it will work. until that happens though, health care is something that needs to be addressed, i’ve stated what i think is a good solution, but remain open to other options (it’s just that some options need more back story explaining, since your underlying premise to me seems like anarchy).

now your questions a- nothing, but i’m not the person that would be doing it, our elected officials will, and i have as much sway over them as you do, just one vote. policywise what gives you the right to decide what others do with their life, those that support the public option won’t be getting it because others are telling them what they can and can’t have right? the fact of the matter is in our society we have laws that are intended to direct us toward the betterment of the lives of the members of the society. people will have disagreements over where that path leads, as we are having here, so the best thing you can do to support your ideology is get more people to have it, then you’ll have more representation in government, and can enact the ideology in legislation. realistically that’s what we both should do, neither of us are getting what we want here, david’s coming the closest, but the mandate is still intact for the time being.

b- see answer to a

c- uh, well, no, though i’m sure you’ll find some way to correlate the two, but arguably you could make a bigotry/injust argument against pretty much anything that’s ever happened in history if you were inspired to do so. which in this case you are because you’re anti government and the policies i advocate involve the government doing something.

b-

By what principles to do arrive at that conclusion?

Right, so since I hold a principled stance on taxation, the question isn’t worth addressing. Nice.

– “market failures that cause adverse effects to the public at large are something that the government should address”

What about government failures that cause adverse effects to the public at large? Who should address those (i believe there was a problem with the banking industry along these lines recently).

– “i’m open to other ideas, but doing nothing doesn’t seem to be working for us”

Oh totally, you seem REAL open.

The reality is “doing nothing” is the option we haven’t tried, and it’s the only option that even allows for mutual success for everyone.

It’s literally disgusting to me that so many people who think like you refuse to take the responsibility for how immoral their political punditry is. You seem to care less about what anyone wants but yourself, and when I give you the opportunity to explain your justification for utilizing force, you ignore it out of hand because you disagree with my beliefs on taxation.

Let me restate the question more directly, in a few different parts. A) What gives you the right to decide how I have to live my life? B) If you believe you’re justified in doing so, does that mean that you’d be perfectly willing to have me decide how you get to live your life? C) Do you see any correlation between the bigotry and injustices of the past and the legislation that you advocate?

I’ve made it clear that I think the individual mandate is bad (we all agree on what I believe about that) but I also believe that the rest of the bill still won’t work with the individual mandate. This whole bill aims at the wrong target in many ways, not the least of which is that it does not actually address the reasons that the cost of care is rising at multiples of the rate of inflation.

overall you’re saying the individual mandate is bad, but without it the rest of the bill won’t work. and the argument you’re hearing from the left right now (myself included) is without a public option the mandate won’t work. it’s the same reason auto insurance is required, insurance industries will only work if the pool is big enough to cover expenses being paid out industry wide. discouraging people by allowing them to choose when they get in (ie not denying preexisting conditions, hence no reason to maintain coverage, along with possibly increased costs for healthy people if the pool shrinks, which without a mandate it most likely will, or at least the insurance companies will assume it will when they determine their pricing) shrinks the pool. how else do you address that other than throwing the bulk of this bill our, or an individual mandate?

This is only party the case, In order to prevent insurance company’s from pricing people with pre-existing conditions out of insurance another part of the reform is Community rating. The most an insurance company can charge for a policy is 3 times more(house bill) or 5 times more(senate bill) for the same plan.

Both community ratings are way way to high, and the senate bill is slowly being loaded down with loop holes and other nonsense. Ole Joe Libermann(I-Aetna) is basically pushing democrats into a position where their only option is going to be reconciliation.

I concede that you are more likely to get government run single-payer than I am to get a free market, but my claim was not that the free market will fix all as it was that if we don’t recognize how not-free the market is we can’t make educated decisions about the actual causes for our current dilemma nor can we accurately arrive at effective solutions.

if you’re right and this can’t be fixed via the insurance market, then everyone’s missed the boat on this one

That is precisely my argument. We have missed the boat on this one. We need to look at what’s actually happening, not what the insurance companies, or the politicians, or the drug manufacturers are telling us is happening. When we do that we find that most of the health care proposals we have heard rarely even brush up against the causes of our systemic failure.

The problem is that virtually every actor in the system has outsourced their responsibility to other actors. Individuals accept whatever costs their doctor or hospital charge because the insurance company pays the bulk of the bill. Individuals simply choose their insurance policy – except they don’t in most cases. Individuals only pick among the policies offered by their employer. Insurance companies outsource their decisions about what care merits coverage and payments to governments and outside experts rather than to individual patients and doctors. Doctors outsource part of their decisions about what treatments to prescribe to pharmaceutical reps, government and insurance industry bureaucrats, and patients who have only the expertise of the most recent drug commercial they have seen.

The system is out of joint at every turn due to inappropriate outsourcing of decision making by all parties and our solution is to outsource the definition of what is insurance and whether to buy it to the federal government.