Quote:
Originally Posted by lookout123
I know you're joking because... well you're Flint, but there are two very good points in your post.
1) socialized medicine is bad. It isn't bad. Good and bad are subjective labels thrown at things we either like or don't like. I don't like it because I don't believe it is consistent with the focus on the individual that our country was founded on. That's just my opinion. Socialized medicine has some excellent points and under different circumstances I would support it. It would have to operate in a vaccuum free from personal agendas and political maneuvering, and the other important part takes us into your second important point.
|
I would just like to make the point that many people pay for insurance, but when they get sick, they are denied coverage. So private insurance ain't all that either, sometimes. The thing that would actually be GOOD about socialized medicine, is that it wouldn't be about profit. That would reduce a TON of waste, and leave more for the actual practicing of medicine.
Quote:
2) The government can't do anything right! While a truism it isn't really the truth. The government can't do anything efficiently - and sometimes that is right. When we are making international agreements I don't want a quick efficient process with too much opportunity for mistakes and misunderstandings. As frustrating as it is, the slow, seemingly unproductive nature of international interaction is useful in that each government has time to choose words and positions carefully with plenty of opportunities to clarify and reclarify until they reach a point where noone is really happy, but each can live with the agreement.
Things like the military, legal system, and currency are areas which ONLY a government can do right.
It is in every other area that the government falters. While intentions may be good the tendency to build up personal empires for the sake of personal power is what makes the government horribly inefficient at most tasks they take as their own. It isn't the idea but the execution that is flawed usually.
|
You may be right about international contracts, but as far as the government being inefficient, I don't completely agree with that. The Post Office works pretty damn well. Some state colleges are very good, better than private ones. Some public schools are very good, others, not so much. So the system needs to be revised, but it is not completely bad and inefficient. (and I realize you didn't say it was.)
Honestly, I don't know why people pick on the government so much. I wonder how things would run if we had NO government. I don't think privitization of everything is good, because there is always greed involved, and that is never good for the people as a whole. the whole problem with health care right now is beause of the greed and corruption of insurance companies.