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Townhall: Questions After a Massacre

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The Isla Vista massacre on May 23 was followed by bad reporting and worse punditry. So, in my Townhall column this weekend, I ask a few questions.

Please click on over, then come back here for more food for thought. In particular:

The bad police work prior to the murder spree elicited an interesting article in the Washington Post.

The folks at Pajamas Media decry all the bad punditry (I agree, I’m with ’em) but seem to believe that the cause of the spree murderer was “mental illness,” which I’m not at all sure is correct, or gets us anywhere near we want to be:

The idea, floated by Tammy Bruce, that parents of adults who seem to be going off their rockers should have the authority to place those offspring into “some kind of psychiatric hold for some period of time” might be initially attractive to frightened parents, but seems built for horrendous consequences.

Of course, the commentator off-set made the perhaps most cogent point: an armed citizenry is better than anything else. It’s the lack of any expected defense that allowed this latest murderer to feel safe in proceeding to kill as many as he could. He admitted this in his manifesto. He selected targets on the basis of expected lack of defensive weaponry.

For a different form of punditry — indeed, for a truly detailed analysis of the “psycho killer” — see this long presentation by Stefan Molyneux:

I’m still watching this. Halfway through.

9 replies on “Townhall: Questions After a Massacre”

Or how about this:

Poland’s medical tourism clinics offer half-price treatment to the world

“It amazes me that people can be asked to pay $100,000 for heart bypass surgery in the US, but they can fly nine hours to us, they can have as good or better treatment, and pay just $15,000.”

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jun/01/poland-medical-tourism-half-price

The real reason why ACA is bad is not just because of choice, it’s because the government sets the price of medical care. It’s like Mish’s “Fed Uncertainty Principle”. The more they screw up a program, the more power they demand to fix the problems they create. Over and over and over.

The medical industry could fix itself in a few years if the government got out of it altogether and let the market find the natural level of supply/demand which would determine the price. Just like public education could fix itself in 2-3 years with vouchers giving parents the ability to leave bad schools consequently destroying them and making way for more responsive schools to students and parents needs.

Arming the citizenry is reasonable, but claiming it will drop the murder rate is a stretch. Almost every other advanced nation has a lower murder rate than we do while almost all have more restrictive gun laws than us. Certainly, their gun laws have not increased murders. Maybe we should ask ourselves how they manage to do it.

Let’s look at the rest of the world regarding health care as well. The citizens of almost all advanced countries live longer than us, their neonatal mortality rates are lower, and their medical care for ALL of them is vastly cheaper than ours was when we had a so called free market. We had fifty years or more to make reasonable changes in our private enterprise system (such as forcing care providers to post their prices), and failed miserably to do the job. Now, we’re afraid to try a system that every other advanced country uses with good results, thinking that this time, it’ll be different. I was for fixing free enterprise health care also, but that approach has had fifty years to show results. When experiencing failure, asking for more of the same is a poor choice.

Free market for healthcare in the US? You have got to be kidding, it’s regulated to death and more so everyday.

One requirement of a healthcare free market would be my ability to choose to be treated by anyone I so choose, whether or not ‘blessed’ by the government via the AMA. Another requirement of a free market is my ability to choose treatment of my choice (assuming I can afford it) whether the treatment be FDA blessed or not or whether it involves consumption of any mineral or plants that I choose.

Remember, I called our former system a so called free market, so we agree that the U.S. hasn’t had a free market in medicine since the days of…quackery and patent medicines. A free and unregulated health care market would bring us back to those days, when people commonly ingested “remedies” containing radium and mercury, cocaine and heroin, the days when massive doses of X-rays were routinely prescribed to eliminate unwanted body hair. The FDA was created because people were dying like flies from quack remedies.

For that matter, if members of a cartel actively collude to keep the prices hidden from the buyer until the purchase is already made, is that a free market? Try calling an urgent care center to find the cost of X-raying an injured ankle. I called four of them years ago and none would give me even a ball park estimate. Lack of government control does not guarantee a fair marketplace by a long shot.

The fact remains that death rates are higher in countries with little health regulation and lower in those with more. That is strong evidence. I believe in capitalism too, but history shows over and over again that totally unrestrained capitalism is unworkable.

Rincon,
I guess you’d rather pay $100, 200, 300K for a bypass operation in the US?

I’d fly to Poland. Two golf buddies of mine buy their viagra & cialis from India….for like $2 each vs $20 each here and claim they work perfectly. There’s a bit of free market starting to blossom now but you have to search for it.

Go to youtube & search for Milton Friedman speaking to the AMA. He actually tells the AMA that if he were in charge he would eliminate the MD degrees and let anyone that wants to can practice medicine. THere would be long apprenticeship and nobody would go to somebody without a background and recommendations.

You just want everything taken care of for you and you think the government is actually capable of taking care of everything for you.

Look around, the ACA is about to break the middle class. Really great overseer of medicine, the government, eh?

And what’s more, big medicine is starting to come after the family, the children of long time patients at hospitals, extended care patients(Pennsylvania Supreme Court) who rack up big bills and then have the audacity to die without money to pay $200-600k or more in bills racked up while in the final stage of life.

Nice caretaker of medicine, big government, right?

India and Poland don’t have medical cartels that refuse to divulge their prices before the deed is done. Cartels are not a product of socialism (which has its own evils); they are a product of unrestrained capitalism.

I don’t want government to do everything, but I am grateful for breathing clean air, drinking safe water, and eating safe food for example. These were not available to many of us prior to government intervention. There are dozens of other examples. Neither capitalism nor government are all good or all bad.

>>Cartels are not a product of socialism (which has its own evils); they are a product of unrestrained capitalism.

========

No, they are the result of a bought & paid for congress. Big medicine, insurance, union, banking, defense industry, etc, You elect them because they say the things you want to hear. The lobbyists dare you to bring in somebody new because they know they will OWN them in 90 days.

Everybody wants an “advantage”. The lobbyists are there to try to get that advantage. They are quite up front on their intentions. Congress is supposed to be there to guard against that. They fail miserably on virtually any issue you care to mention.

Throw in a president who has taken over the legislative process by presidential directive and we only swirl the bowl faster.

I agree that we have a “bought & paid for congress. Big medicine, insurance, union, banking, defense industry, etc.”, but cartels benefit from this because they create a lack of government regulation. I also note that Big medicine, insurance, union, banking, defense industry, etc. will all stand to benefit even more now that the Supreme Court has decided that they have the right to flood campaigns with money.

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