Don’t worry, we’ll all get teeth like that when socialist healthcare comes a knockin’…

I hate to break it to you, but dental has always been a very expensive add-on to “capitalist” healthcare insurance in the US. Many families here go without dental coverage just to be able to afford their primary insurance.

Unless Wiki is lying to me (always a possibility), couch is a general term and sofa/settee/loveseat are all names for couches with a specific number of seats (3/2.5/2 respectively).

This strikes me as a very one sided representation of events by the BBC (which surprises me; I thought the BBC upheld higher standards).

I’m also surprised that BoingBoing have decided to reference a story which at least appears to be lacking in factual and proportional integrity.

People form opinions and make judgements as a result of information like this, and if that information is not accurate then neither is the opinion it’s based upon.

“Whether “medicine” or “poison” / “healthy” or “unhealthy” is ultimately a subjective evaluation” …I must disagree. There are perfectly practical ways of determining whether, for example, a particular substance prevents infections; this determination has nothing subjective about it, and if health care decisions are being based on some other means of finding these truths out, something that yields only subjective results, what would that be?

Think of the definition of “disease” or “parasite”… we actually have more “parasitic” cells in our body than we do ones with “our own” DNA. What we consider “healthy” is actually a subjective assessment… it has to do with how we prefer our bodies to function.

But there’s an entire popular culture, much like religion, where a “priesthood” claims a privileged domain of expertise over our bodies. These are the doctors who claim we’re too ignorant to make decisions about what’s best for our own individual bodies. Sure, we may not all have the accumulated knowledge of a medical school, but ultimately we must make decisions for ourselves — not the tyranny of the experts (imbued with the force of law). We may choose to pay for experts to consult us, but cannot allow them to dictate to us.

I can never understand this conceptual blind spot about funding health care. You pay taxes. You get stuff because you pay taxes. Roads. Armies. Aqueducts. Why can’t you get doctoring when you need it too?

Why not do that for everything?

Again, the problem is who decides. When you pay taxes (which are not voluntary, i.e. theft), and bureaucrats spend your taxes, you face the aforementioned principal-agent problem — particularly moral hazards.

…and the Wikipedia article you linked to on Negative and Positive Rights really spooked me – it was like reading a philosophical essay to which no one would attach their name. Eerie.

No one except… Isaiah Berlin?

I don’t understand why you feel spooked. Would you elaborate?

If health care is a right, then does it follow that each of the dozen can demand free treatment from the doctor? If that’s the case, what incentive does the doctor have to continue this arrangement? I suppose the dozen could hold the doctor captive and rely on the doctor honoring the Hippocratic Oath.

Ugh, no no no. Do not frame this in terms of incentives; that betrays the informational value of a small-model analysis (and encourages Machiavellian manipulation). The issue is perhaps subtly but importantly actually about signaling. True, the baker bakes bread for his own benefit (not immediately for the hungry), but he does so in voluntary trade — mutual exchange for both-benefit . The baker knows that he can do something that others are willing to do things for him in return for.

And the old? The disabled? Those who can provide no return service? Do we euthanize?

Which is alright in that, in my province at least, if it was handled by healthcare getting a filling would be labeled “optional” and it would take six months on a waiting list to get the root canal you eventually need.

Really? Here in the land of the not-free, the job I worked for neglected to re-obtain dental insurance after they merged with another office.

I waited three months for a root canal, with an infected root swelling my cheek, as they waited for the insurance carrier to give them a bid. And at the end, I gave up and paid for it myself – so far, I’ve spent USD1800 and will pay more out of pocket. The coverage we finally got wasn’t retroactive and certainly did not cover pre-existing conditions. Since you live in a province and not a state, perhaps an explanation is in order for that term: it means any condition you had prior to the beginning of the contract is never, ever covered.

Isn’t it great to be part of the free market medical insurance system? My boss’s explanation for the coverage gap: She didn’t know so many people used our dental coverage. So she didn’t make getting it activated a priority.

She got a raise.

Maybe it’s just me, but if I heard a noise that sounded like someone falling in the apartment above me, I wouldn’t think “Crap, gotta call the po!” I’d think someone more along the lines of “Oh that sounded like it hurt” or “Guess the neighbors are having relations” or both of the above.

The police arrived. They listened to me, told him to get lost, and then shoved my brother and I aside – literally to the floor in my brother’s case – and casually walked through my home as my brother yelled at them to get the hell out. No provocation. They just wanted to. The dogs went insane, as I recall; thank FSM that they were tied up that day.

Care to guess what would have happened had we tried to stop them? Criminal record for me, I’d say. Some jail time. Who’ll the judge or jury believe?

Seriously, since then, I’ve always designed my future home plans with steel doorframes, heavy steel doors, and airlocks that jig back and forth a bit to slow down charging idiots with SWAT door killers. If I have a chance, my home will not be kicked into without major league firepower. I don’t have the sanguine adoration that most white suburbanites have for the men with the body armor. The majority are cool, but eventually you WILL meet up with a psychopath with a gun and a uniform. And they come in pairs, sometimes in squads. Remember, killers look just like everybody else…

I also get a whole lot of stuff I would not want even if it were free.

* Airports that resemble outposts of the Iron Curtain.
* A “War on Drugs”, to include crime created by a black market on narcotics, the funding of DEA and narcotics divisions, the clogging of the court system, and the cost of incarcerating buyers and sellers of narcotics.
* Not being able to legally obtain Cuban cigars.
* Having to play book keeper / accountant all year for the IRS.
* Farmers not growing things.
* Increased cane sugar prices.
* Not being able to purchase a five-gallon flush toilet.
* The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
* Police officers whose sole duties consist of hassling prostitutes, their customers, and those who violate the state’s monopoly on gambling.
* Foreign aid to countries that will hate America in ten years.
* The “War on Terror” with unprovoked attacks on two countries.
* Having to store my trash cart and recycling cart in my garage, or having to deal with the municipal trash police. Leaving them outside the garage means a $300 ticket and mandatory attendance to “garbage school”.

I could go on, but you can get the point. And for the stuff that could be considered a useful, I either get far too much of it (military), or it is of inferior quality (roads).

What we consider “healthy” is actually a subjective assessment… it has to do with how we prefer our bodies to function.

Allow me to elaborate on this further in one example that I imagine is immediately sympathetic to a “stereotypical Californian liberal”*: transgendered people.

(*Presuming that such a political stereotype would also favor “single-payor” i.e. socialized healthcare.)

Point is, when you are covered by a private company through your job, you are at the boss’s mercy. Private carry is a recipe for abuse, and they waste no time. Screwing us over for three months for the absurd reason given saved them tens of thousands of dollars. Since I paid out of pocket, the dentists charged the moon. Standard practice here for doctors and hospitals – no coverage? They gouge. And a fun side fact is one of my dentists – my regular, not the specialist – mentioned that her husband and the other dentists downtown met once a year and fixed their prices, privately. I don’t think that was part of the Free Market System as I understand it. No shopping allowed, secret unions for the professionals.

And the old? The disabled? Those who can provide no return service? Do we euthanize?

Of course not… if you haven’t noticed by now, I’m opposed to collective action (the “we” part of that statement) and I’m opposed to murder (even when it’s wrapped up in a flag or in the guise of “justice”).

As for the old… it’s called planning for retirement.

As for the disabled… some mix of planning/insurance, family, and charity, depending on the particulars. And with a rising knowledge economy, how many disabilities preclude thinking for a living? Stephen Hawking seems to do alright.

Care to guess what would have happened had we tried to stop them? Criminal record for me, I’d say. Some jail time. Who’ll the judge or jury believe?

Axis networked embedded Linux cameras aren’t prohibitively expensive, and can be mounted in the home for evidence in exactly such an invasion of your home by police. You can even stream the MPEG-4 to offsite hosting in case your equipment is “seized”.

If we’re thinking of the same story, he didn’t call the cops so much as bust into the apartment on his own with a samurai sword. And then got arrested.

I suspect this is a “vary by state” thing, or perhaps you are enough younger than I am to qualify for significantly cheaper insurance. Or perhaps you are fortunately enough to have your insurance paid by your employer. I’m older, but comparatively healthy, so my individual rate for insurance is a bit under $400 per month. Dental add-on is $50 per month, and I turned it down because the maximum payable benefit is $1000 annually. That is right: the dental plan offered wants $600 a year for $1,000 maximum in benefits. I double checked. No, that does not exclude preventative care, not even routine exams. Third party dental is even worse.

Where I live in the quasi-capitalist / often corporatist United States, routine dental checkups (every 6 months) cost $50 without insurance, and each cavity costs $250 to repair. I hear if you can go south of the border into Mexico and trust the competency of the work, cavity repair is closer to $50 each.

Medical cost inflation due to over-reliance on insurance from employers not only creates overwhelming rigidity in the labor / knowledge market (i.e. fear of losing/changing jobs), but also prices the services so high that those with jobs that do not include dental insurance benefits have resorted to pulling teeth at home with pliers rather than having a proper root canal done.

This is the fundamental problem with focusing on insurance (which is a subsidiary racket of the Wall Street fractional reserve scam — one which all medical industries seek to fleece), rather than focusing on cost of service.

I sincerely hope that Obama’s language in the election doesn’t shift too much from his previous “the problem is medical cost” to trying to appeal to Hillary’s “we need government to provide insurance for everyone” (which would cement a medical-industrial complex, just as we have a military-industrial complex). I don’t mean to proselytize for any particular candidate, but rather on the (already tangential) subject of cost of dental care, if you’re genuinely worried about this issue, examine the political language carefully for whether a candidate talks about “insurance” or whether they talk about “medical cost”.

I was thinking more about how such a system was not much different from some folks who got a free boat ride and an “opportunity” to work in the field of agriculture in the New World.

BTW, what is the proper technique for quoting a previous post?

Pausing live TV is the best invention since the VCR. That way you don’t have to rush to get in a bathroom break during commercials and you can get your popcorn when the nuker go ‘beep’ all without missing a single one-liner.

But more likely I’d go upstairs and knock, or just whack the ceiling with a broomhandle a couple of times and yell at him to knock it off.

Isn’t it great to be part of the free market medical insurance system?

Medical insurance as it’s popularly thought of today is nothing like a free market. Genuine insurance can only work for catastrophic (i.e. unforeseeable) injuries. The current way people think of health “insurance” today (and why I’m insisting that it’s a red herring issue, when the real issue is medical cost inflation) is a scheme born out of taxation loop-hole legislation and the regulations of the banking and finance industry. For a brief history of how this disaster came into existence, I recommend The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care by Dr. David Gratzer.

Not even “the bit where I lost it,” but “the bit where I lost it the most.”

Sounds to me like there was an argument over whether the police would come in (reasonable), guy slams the door (maybe not reasonable, but probably legal), police stops the door from being slammed in their face (may or may not be reasonable, depending on the situation), guy goes ape-shit, possibly violent.

It’s a funny story, as it started with hysterics, but not necessary an example of police brutality unless we know the actual story.

We promptly fell about laughing. I’m glad they didn’t pepper spray us then!

This was about 14 years ago, maybe nowadays they would have just handcuffed us just to be sure.

I was thinking more about how such a system was not much different from some folks who got a free boat ride and an “opportunity” to work in the field of agriculture in the New World.

I figured as much, but the cognitive framing with the use of the word “incentives” has been the excuse for quota systems and outcomes targeting behavior by governments either for the distortion of existing real markets or in the faux-market systems created inside government service sectors in an attempt to make them more “efficient”. As I said, it’s a Machiavellian pursuit, and for anyone genuinely interested in a descriptive model of market action runs a grave danger of committing the equivocation fallacy.

So, while you may tacitly understand this, by experience I’ve found it extremely important to vocalize this distinctive point in discourses on economics.

BTW, what is the proper technique for quoting a previous post?

The blockquote tag in HTML.

…and answering the door for police who are concerned for the well-being of someone who might be hurt inside the residence and who might think the fellow at the door simply wants the cops to go away so he can continue to do his will against the person he is keeping captive.

The reason this guy got crapped on is because it’s in someone’s interest to keep those of his class down. The reason that health car doesn’t work very well in the US is because it is in someone’s interest that it not work. It’s the same with education and with everything else.

The goals and objectives come first, the political or economic theory is simply the means by which you justify your preconceived ends.

Example – The corporation as legal person. The way this came about was that some psychotic control freak CEO wasn’t able to do whatever the fuck he wanted to do. He ran into the Law and the law said no. But these sociopathic fucks don’t take no for an answer and so levers were pulled, favors called in or whatever it took until the laws were changed. Then you just backfill. You buy an intellectual, useful idiots can always be found, to write some bullshit theory to justify your bullshit actions. But make no mistake about it, the end is always to grab more power and keep others from getting what little remains, period.

We are a troop of primates on a dirty rock in an empty universe. The only imperative is to get more bananas than the rest and if that means genocide well then that’s just tough shit.

It’s a deeply cynical even poisonous view but if the last eight years have taught me anything it’s that it is probably not cynical enough.