POLITICS & DONALD Annoying Orange MEGATHREAD

[Jairo]

don't know why you're making this out to be radical or extraordinary

I literally hold that opinion

>implying

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[Poliwhirl]

don't know why you're making this out to be radical or extraordinary

I literally hold that opinion

you're literally wrong then lmao

like seriously that shouldn't even be a political divide that's just the difference between basic knowledge of the economy and not knowing things

[PhantOS]

don't know why you're making this out to be radical or extraordinary

I literally hold that opinion

cancer treatment costs between 50-150 thousand dollars every year. In order to cover that cost, you'd need to hold a career in the same class as CEO or executive.

The idea of 'get a better job and you can cover the cost' is handicapped and doesn't work for most people. So yea, its handicapped. And before you say 'i never mentioned cancer' consider that most common health issues cost around 20-40 thousand a year

[Poliwhirl]

[IkeTheGeneric]

I literally hold that opinion

You're also historically rash and impulsive on your political opinions. What should we trust, here?

[SeventhSandwich]

don't know why you're making this out to be radical or extraordinary

I literally hold that opinion

The thing I don't get is that it's fully within our power to make access to healthcare a basic human right. It's not like the economy will suffer appreciably if we choose to do so, and it means we'll save literally billions on treating people for more advanced diseases that require intensive care.

Like what the debate actually boils down to here is this: Should people be straight-up dying because they aren't as good at winning the green paper game as everyone else in society?

[Bisjac]

so libs dont understand that the entire medical and pharmaceutical industry needs a fix to stop inflating sham prices of products and treatments.
no lets just print more money and hand out more money. and force people to have insurance regardless of the costs.


if stuff worked, you could out of pocket that cancer treatment.

[SeventhSandwich]

so libs dont understand that the entire medical and pharmaceutical industry needs a fix to stop inflating sham prices of products and treatments.

The prices of treatments are a direct result of market principles. You either use the government to intervene or the market will price the drugs at whatever people are willing to pay and whatever their competitors are unable to undercut.

As far as I know there's no third option here.

[Bisjac]

the market will price the drugs at whatever people are willing to pay

there is no market. there is a monopoly in drug companies, and people are forced to have insurance without options.
the insurance will keep rising because drug companies are allowed to charge anything. there is no regulation on either side and the people are trapped without choice.

that is not a market. that is the scam of obamacare and the forgeted up drug companies.

[SeventhSandwich]

there is no market. there is a monopoly in drug companies, and people are forced to have insurance without options.

There's no way to fix the monopoly in certain drug markets. For certain diseases, there are literally only a handful of viable treatments on the market, and lots of the time only one firm holds the patent.

I don't think opening the insurance market up to more competition is the solution here. The entire reason Obamacare exists is because there was a huge mandate to subsidize insurance from the millions of people who, regardless of market competition, still can't afford a good health plan. The goal was to sacrifice part of the insurance market's efficiency to expand the number of people who actually have health insurance - which it did.

I might be biased here, but I think the best way to address the whole drug company monopoly is to expand funding for institutions like the NIH and approve more grants for medical research. At least that way there will be more competing drugs on the market and it'll be less viable for one company to charge $10k per pill.

[Red Spy]

The thing I don't get is that it's fully within our power to make access to healthcare a basic human right.

Healthcare isn't a right anymore than housing or education is. You don't have a right to make somebody build you a house or give you medicine. Until someone invents the replicator from ST it'll remain a commodity

[SeventhSandwich]

Healthcare isn't a right anymore than housing or education is.

Education is literally a right in our society lol. We've guaranteed free public education from K-12 since, what, like the beginning of the 20th century?

I think I've posted this somewhere else, but like, a 'right' is just whatever we say a right is. Access to immediate care at an emergency room wasn't always a right either, but our society chose to foot the bill on that one so that poor people wouldn't have to just die in the streets whenever something bad happens to them.

You don't have a right to make somebody build you a house or give you medicine.

Either you're intentionally being misleading here, or you maybe misunderstand how universal healthcare works. Doctors, surgeons, and drug scientists do not make any less money in a single-payer system. It's just that instead of the money coming from a single person or a health insurance company, it comes from a government program that everyone pays into.

In other words, nobody is 'making them' give you medicine. They are exchanging medicine for money, like they do right now.

[LeisureSuit912]

Healthcare isn't a right anymore than housing or education is. You don't have a right to make somebody build you a house or give you medicine. Until someone invents the replicator from ST it'll remain a commodity

We do have a right to education in the US, what's the difference between that and healthcare?

The whole "healthcare is a commodity" thing is dumb wordsmith bullstuff that amounts to "I don't think poor people deserve access to a doctor".

[Tactical Nuke]

You're also historically rash and impulsive on your political opinions.

I started out as left-leaning and Bernie-supporting before I started posting on this forum so IDK what you're talking about when you say I have "impulsive" political opinions.

To be fair, I understand it's not so easy to "get a better job", but healthcare is like a cell phone. It's a commodity, and even if the government is paying for it, it's still a service. You shouldn't be getting it free like all the super-socialist Sanders Democrat types say you should. By the same logic of "you need healthcare in this day and age to function", you could insinuate that you need food, electricity and housing, and not even Bernie will suggest that those be free.

There are better ways of lifting people out of poverty than creating more subsidies that incentivize learned helplessness. The poverty line was going down by a lot before the "War on Poverty" began and the government started subsidizing everything. It's literally fixing something that wasn't broken and then trying to fix your fix to the unbroken (now broken) thing with more fixes that require fixing. If you want to lower the cost of drugs, then deregulate the market so that researchers don't have to swim through absolute stuffting bureaucracy to find the cure to cancer. Not ever pharmaceutical worker is Martin Shkreli.

[HellHound]

poor people wouldn't have to just die in the streets whenever something bad happens to them.

except that's how it should be. they can't keep expecting handouts from the government.