Leftists realize their positions are in-defensible. And they realize conservative positions are threatening to the leftist orthodoxy.

Therefore, they inevitably resort to schoolyard taunts such as, "we're smart, and you're stupid !"

That's why they worked so hard to smear Palin as dumb---they were threatened by her record of achievement.
And that's why they're working so hard to establish that Sotomayor is the smartest woman in the galaxy---because her record is indefensible.

I for one can't wait for public healthcare! I might even move into public housing, I heard its really nice.

How could things be worse? I dunno. Got a buddy from Canada - I'll ask him next time he swings by for an operation.

Cohen is an absolute fool. First of all, he pulls a John Kerry and throws out his military experience, as if it somehow qualifies him more than anyone else to make a point. Then he segues into a non sequitur about "mess sergeants" "pillaging" food. In normal parlance, that's called "eating." Combat men need, you know, lots of calories.

He talks about "mostly private" health care when in fact a third of health care comes from government programs like Medicare, Medicaid, MediCal, etc., which distorts the market pricing of the other two thirds. Cohen also fails to mention that if a hospital accepts a penny of federal money, then their emergency rooms can't turn anyone away regardless of their inability to pay. That is why so many emergency rooms are overwhelmed. Like anything the government messes with and makes "free," you'll have demand outstripping any possible suplly.

The irony is that his statement "The emergency room has become the equivalent of the family doctor" is the single true sentence he writes in the whole piece, except that he didn't mean it in the way it is actually true.

Let me think: I've been to the emergency room two times. Several years ago, someone sailed through a red light and T-boned the front of my car. Being just a tenth of a second faster would have actually meant my death. The EMTs were afraid my neck vertebrae were broken, so I got taken to the ER to be checked out. They were overwhelmed, and for a time I was "forgotten" when strapped down on a wheeled stretcher and taken outside the MRI room.

Then a couple of years ago, I had an ear infection that became horribly painful late on a Saturday night. I waited an hour while the staff tended to everyone else, and I heard someone ask, "What's wrong with that guy there?" BTW, I was actually sitting down on one of the beds.

This is a matter of triage. These were emergency rooms, for crying out loud, and though my ear was hurting like hell, neither time was I in critical condition. Therefore, the limited staff had to tend to others with more pressing needs, like severe bleeding and broken bones.

What is the government going to do, wave a magic wand and hire more doctors and nurses? What it could do, but I have yet to hear any of the bastards in D.C. suggest this, is that the AMA stop limiting the number of licensed doctors.

I picture government-run health care as having all the inconveniences of private health care without the marginal customer service required to keep me from switching providers.

Perry, to be fair, the argument about people using the emergency room as their source of primary medical care is a valid one. Some of those people you were waiting for probably wouldn't have been there at all if they'd been able to see a primary care doctor earlier in the progression of whatever problem they have. It's a lot easier and cheaper to treat someone with mild diabetes than to treat that same person in a diabetic coma.

Seriously, Eric, a person in America who is low-income can always find a low-cost clinic to go to for a check-up in order to get that hypothetical diabetes diagnosed.

Is that really true? I'm not really in a position to judge, myself, but there seems to be a lot of disagreement on that point.

Eric,
Yeah, it's true.
And if you admit you're not sure about that, then you're disingenous for arguing otherwise.

We all go to work to pay for our own subsistence. There are a lot of low income people in this country who have money to pay Doritos, Budweiser, Verizon, Toshiba, Nike, and 50 Cent, but when it comes to paying Dr. Welby, they all of a sudden don't got no money !

A person should get a second part-time job, and buy his shoes at a discount store rather than paying $100+ for name brand sneakers at Foot Locker.

Actually, Eric, both occasions seemed to be a TV stereotype of the emergency room: car accidents, broken bones and such. I didn't see anyone who seemed to be there for a non-emergency, although we know it happens.

If I don't want to be shot and have my wallet taken anyway, should I just schedule smaller but regular payments to my robber to avoid any "inconvenience" for us both? That's effectively the "lesser of two evils" argument behind advocating socialized medicine's supposedly superiority in prevention. (Which in fact is not true, because people will actually become more reckless in their health, knowing they can go to a doctor "for free." For the same reason, seatbelts and auto insurance make drivers less cautious than they'd otherwise be.)

What I've been saying all along is that ultimately any form of socialized medicine comes down to my paying for others' care. If they want to depend on the charity of others, that's fine: I'd be willing to help someone out, knowing a charity receiving private money will scrutinize candidates carefully, making sure they're true hard luck cases and not just leeches-for-life. But when people start depending on government to take from me by force and give to them, it's immoral. On the practical side, it doesn't work anyway. Government dependency is breeding successive generations of indolents on one side and excessive risk-takers on the other, because those recipients of public benefits know that they'll be bailed out.

There are some low-cost clinics, but not as many as there should be. This is in no small part because of the AMA and government regulations that limit the number of health care providers, make medicines harder and more expensive to bring to market, and otherwise drive up the costs of care. If you're poor and desperately need care, do you care about a license, or about competence? The two are not always synonymous.

Like with the financial crisis, it's solely government's failings for creating the problems in the first place, falsely blaming "the free market" (when there's nothing free market about it), then telling us the only solution is effectively a full takeover of the industry by big government. Sorry, but I don't trust an arsonist to be an effective firefighter in saving a building he torched.

There was a melodramatic movie back in the 80s, "Jessie," with Lee Remick. It was based loosely on the true story of a nurse charged with practicing medicine without a license, though there were no doctors anywhere near the remote community. She wasn't plying her trade by force, either: people were going to her voluntarily, and as far as I know, she never misrepresented herself. Yet people grew to trust her as competent, licensed or not. It was their choice to accept her services. We could have a lot more low-cost clinics with qualified volunteers, if only government didn't create all these barriers to market entry.

Then there's the motivation to open low-cost clinics: there aren't enough saints willing to open them in the low-income, high-crime areas that need them most. Unfortunate but true, and government cannot legislate us into being saints.

Diabetes is a poor example of preventitive medicine. It's largely a disease that Americans bring upon themselves, so they should take responsibility for their health in the first place, rather than picking my pocket for medicine and treatment. Walrus and I had the same thought: get a part-time job to pay for your needed care. If someone is in a coma, he should have flipped burgers for a weekend to buy his own blood monitoring device and pay for insulin shots. Even better, he should have stopped eating so many burgers that brought diabetes upon himself in the first place.

The job market for IT professionals was still pretty bad in 2001, even before 9/11. The job I did find wasn't paying as much as I needed for all my expenses. So guess what: I got a part-time job. It sucked to lose my evenings, but I recognized that I wasn't as valuable as I once was. I didn't demand that government force an employer to increase my pay, or give me subsidies redistributed from "the rich."

This entire plan to socialize American health care is deviously devised to drive private insurers out of business, making everyone dependent on what will be DeathCare. Already the bureaucrats are talking about calculating the worth of a procedure in terms of "life-years," meaning how long it will extend someone's life. This isn't about some elderly family member, facing a terminal disease, deciding not to try because of the costs to the family. This is some bureaucrat saying, "Sorry, but the resources are needed on others, because for the same dollars we can get six life-years for 10 people instead of five life-years for you." Insurance companies are widely villified as reducing people to mathematical calculations, but government will be far worse.

Personal note: I know all about the former. My father knew something was wrong but deliberately didn't tell us, let alone go to a doctor. We found out only a few weeks before he died, the pain from cancer was just too great for him to keep hiding. However, this was his own personal decision to stop burdening the family.

Thanks for the even-tempered argument, btw -- let this be a lesson to the anonymous trolls about how to engage me in conversation.

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