Health Care Reform in the US

[Phaeton]

Peter,

You're ideas about voting are intriguing. They'll never happen. Too much stacked against them. I do think the American political system is, however, rather functional and that viewing parties as single entities rather than coalitions of smaller groups is a mistake. Timing primaries with the general elections would be a disaster. How would a party that is such a broad coalition organize itself? How would the Republican Party campaign when a vote for them could end up going to people as different as Olympia Snow and Eric Canter. Besides, why optimize when people are get fat off of the inefficiencies?

I think that third parties have served a vital role in American politics well after the Bull-Moose party. A great example of this is the Green Party. They really didn't do all that well in the last election and for a good reason. The Democratic Party absorbed the planks of the Green Party platform (the major ones at least) and made the Green Party unnecessary. This has historically proven to have occurred on multiple occasions, with the Progressives, Populists, Greenback Party, various abolitionist parties, the Know-Nothings etc.

I (despite being a democrat) worked on the Ron Paul campaign a bit in the last election. While I do think he is going a bit senile, I thought having an electoral presence in the election would be a good for the Republican party. Throughout the campaign there was a definite sense of fatalism (this guy is never going to get elected!) but there was a defined purpose of the campaign, to bring fiscal conservatives back as a voice within the Republican Party.

I wish I had a way to wrap this all up in a neat little bundle, but I don't really know where I stand on this. I think third parties are an important part of the American political system, and I think you've understated their role. I think you have a good idea that will never be implemented.

The best thing we can do as a country IMHO is throw together another third party and hope it gets absorbed enough.

[jessicasimpson]

Here is my opinion on what will happen if a federal health insurance program is implemented.
First, the federal plan will not exclude pre existing conditions, and it will automaticly pick up people not able to get private policies. As soon as this happens, the private insurance companies will do everything they can to drop any "At risk" policies that they possibly can. They will stop covering pregnancy, so everyone that gets pregnent will be droped to be covered by the gov. Anyone overwieght, or has ever been sick or hospitalized, or smoke, or related to anyone that has had cancer, gone. The goverment plan will be bogged down with people actually getting health care. This will make the program bleed. and bleed money all over the place. The private companies will only keep healthy low risk customers, and drop all catastrophic coverage, all to increase profits. Meanwhile, if you get sick, you will get dropped ASAP, and this will continue untill the gov system goes bankrupt because it is taking care of all the sick people

[Hauptman]

Originally Posted by jessicasimpson

Here is my opinion on what will happen if a federal health insurance program is implemented.
First, the federal plan will not exclude pre existing conditions, and it will automaticly pick up people not able to get private policies. As soon as this happens, the private insurance companies will do everything they can to drop any "At risk" policies that they possibly can. They will stop covering pregnancy, so everyone that gets pregnent will be droped to be covered by the gov. Anyone overwieght, or has ever been sick or hospitalized, or smoke, or related to anyone that has had cancer, gone. The goverment plan will be bogged down with people actually getting health care. This will make the program bleed. and bleed money all over the place. The private companies will only keep healthy low risk customers, and drop all catastrophic coverage, all to increase profits. Meanwhile, if you get sick, you will get dropped ASAP, and this will continue untill the gov system goes bankrupt because it is taking care of all the sick people

Has anything like this happened in any country that does have gov't health care? I'd be curious to know.

[jessicasimpson]

It happened in Tennessee, as soon as Tenn-Care became available, I was dropped by Bluecross for being 15 pounds over my ideal wieght for my hieght. this happened in less than 30 days. This happened over and over, untill tenn-care almost bankrupted the state. I am convinced it is because tenn care was the one taking care of all the sick people.

[treehugginfencer]

People deserve to be healthy independently of their jobs! Should I have to work at a heartless corporation just to have health care? Don't I have the right to subsist by staying in hostiles and playing my music for meals? Artists are suffering, and people suffer without art. How can you wish us all to be enslaved by corporations in an artless world?

[erik_blank]

Since we have TDD... Errr I mean THF.. trolling for more responses, I figured that I'd post this bit from the SEIU spam mail I just got:

This weekend, the same groups that organized anti-Obama "tea parties" around the country are putting together another round of July 4th tea parties. This time, killing health care reform is at the top of their agenda.

Naturally, HAARM wanted to get in on the fun. Check out the video of HAARM's anti-health care reform protest: www.haarm.org

[Inquartata]

I finally have some time to get back to this thread.

Originally Posted by jeff

If that method could be done, and was effective, then ducky. But I expect that regulations that compel full disclosure is even more quixotic an endeavor.

Well, of course full disclosure is neither possible, nor necessary, nor advisable. If nothing else, it would do harm by forcing the revealing of justifiably proprietary information such as manufacturing processes and formulas---trade secrets which would damage a given firm's competitiveness. Nor does the consumer really need to know every single detail about a supplier in order to make a rational decision.

I grant you that deciding what information they did need and which they did not, and what should be protected as a trade secret and what should not, would be a thorny issue. But I'm not sure it would have worse results than regulations to mandate outcomes...

Seriously: I agree with DonnaP's descriptions.

OK. But how, again, are her interests actually aligned with those of all the agencies and forces against whom she inveighs?

How about 'pertinent' regulations.

I'll settle for that ( and restrain myself from asking for a definition of 'pertinent' just to continue the argument ).

Teddy Roosevelt signed the law that created the FDA in 1906. What regulations did you think applied before that?

There have always been laws regulating things like weights and measures, purity of metals and so forth. These are basic not only to commerce but to government ( in the regulation of currencies, for instance ).

As for food and drugs, apparently there were also laws governing these going back to colonial times:

http://www.foodsafety.gov/~lrd/history2.html

Do you suggest that they wanted ground up rats in their sausage meat?

No. I suggest that they cared more about price. Consumers make decisions based on what they most value in a commodity. They can of course value several things, but the main one tends to be price. For example, even today you will see comparatively few consumers buying organic food products, even though they are told that the quality is much higher---because the prices are also higher...or simply because they don't care. Or even prefer not to know.

I recall having a discussion about milk with a football player I was tutoring back in college. I was trying to explain the various additions to price caused by the costs incurred during all of the stages of production, from cattle feeding though dairy operations to packaging and marketing. And he really resisted hearing anything about the real source of milk. Finally I asked him whence he thought milk came. His fervent reply: "From the STORE!"

I suspect that this sort of attitude is much closer to the norm than that of label-reading and careful selection on the basis of quality...

If they knew all these things (or to dcmdale's recent post, that insurance companies routinely deny claims because it's lucrative to do so - nice job of alignment of interests there!), perhaps they would have had different buying patterns.

Or perhaps they wouldn't. ( See anecdote above. )

Analysing all of this information is time-consuming, and time has value. Making decisions can be costly, and the average person probably does not care to put much effort into it. ( Although one might essay the argument that this is because they have come to trust in the basic safety and healthiness of products because of regulation. )

Parallel to the beneficial effect on the markets caused by post Great Depression regulation.

Eh?

Always? Y'all got proof of that?

Yes.

Oh, wait---did you mean that you wanted to see it?

I'd show you some of my tablets from the Sumerian version of the USDA, but you'd have to be able to read cuneiform.

Seriously: what governmental standards where their on environmental damage pre-EPA?

From the EPA itself:

http://www.epa.gov/history/topics/regulate/01.htm

According to Wikipedia, "The first statutory environmental law was the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899". There's also an entry for the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918...

Or on automobile safety pre-Pinto?

Again according to Wiki, the first safety regulations came in in 1940.

Or on tobacco pre-1964 Surgeon General report?

I'd say that's a different question altogether, inasmuch as it's a poison whose desired effects relies directly on the poisonous ingredient. However:

http://www.druglibrary.org/Schaffer/...es/nc/nc2b.htm

Of course, all of this speaks less to an historical commitment to consumer protection than to the insatiable urge of government to interfere in the marketplace out of a variety of other, mostly much less noble, motives...

[Inquartata]

Originally Posted by Phaeton

There's a lot to know. All relevant and useful information has a name. It's called lots of personal research, time, and most likely med school.

Well...you can make that argument about a lot of things. How can the average person make an informed decision about the safety of an automobile he is considering buying, for instance, unless he is an engineer? Answer: Someone who is or employs engineers will go into business to give him the information he actually needs. In this case, Consumer Reports, or Motor Trend. In the case of medicine, I am confident that an equivalent would arise...in fact, if you will check the internet and television and bookstores and the library...

That's the point: A consumer need not be himself an expert on everything he buys or uses. Indeed, in a modern economy he cannot be. There is simply too much information to process. So he employs others to do it, and to give him their recommendations.

There have been a few steps in the direction of doing this with doctors, hospitals and health plans. Most are government efforts, but if these did not exist and were perceived as necessary I am confident that private solutions would arise.

The fact of the matter is that weighing coverage and medical procedures is of a lot more import than car insurance, and a lot more complex than measuring car insurance plans or the difference between two different laptops.

And yet, how many of us do it?

I really don't know how much a layman can understand about medical procedures and how the medical insurance industry works.

But he could seek out the recommendations of experts. Sadly, usually he doesn't.

This, however, is his decision. It is not IMO up to the government to protect him from his own laziness or carelessness. The economist's position is merely that he has the choice. If he chooses not to exercise it, then that is tacit evidence that his utility is best maximized by not undertaking the effort. The state is not around to save us from ourselves, but from the depredations of others...

[Inquartata]

Originally Posted by I_luv_saber

In fact, this is how my family ended up in the poorhouse for awhile. My father blew a disk. Anyone who knows anything about back surgery can tell you it's a long, expensive process. Here's the thing... these guys have good lawyers... very good lawyers. Any decent lawyer can get the proceedings held up for a very long time. After 6 months of no income and bills piling up, you start to get to a point where you desperately must accept any amount of money they throw your way, regardless of how small it is. This is fundamentally not right, but insurance companies do it all the time.

Now, see, you are extrapolating one---one---anecdote into "they do it all the time".

That's why the singular personal experience is a poor way to make a decision about policies which will affect millions. I mean, I can tell you that I have never had any such experience with my health plan. I have never had a claim denied or fought in this manner. Does that prove that "they never do these things"? No. No more than your experience proves that "they do it all the time"...

This isn't even mentioning the dirty practices of finding ways to cancel their customer's policies once they become sick, or their other ways of rigging the system in their favor.

And your proof---from an objective source, of course---that this is in fact SOP, and not merely an opinion created as the result of hearing a few individual horror stories or reading a few scare pieces in magazines or on the net---will be forthcoming soon, I am sure?

Regulate the insurance and pharma companies, and you fix a big chunk of problem.

Or drive them out of business, leaving only a mammoth public monopoly to take its place. Or make them find loopholes in all of your regulations, the cost of searching out and exploiting which would of course be added to the prices charged to their customers. Or...

How do you know which would really happen? How can anyone think that they can scry the future in this way? How can anyone believe that they are exempt from the law of unintended consequences?

[Inquartata]

Originally Posted by fencerchica

Hello?? There is ALWAYS rationing in play, not only with healthcare but also with all other goods. In the absence of coverage, the rationing mechanism is one's own financial resources -- when you look at a dollar bill, you are in essence looking at a ration coupon. It is disingenuous (to use the more mild term which springs to mind) to employ the word "rationing" here in an effort to imply that the effect will somehow be more insidious than if one were on one's own.

Quite.

However, the market rations without cost and without bias, because it is an impersonal force. Rationing by bureaucracy is costly and open to bias, corruption and simple human incompetence or laziness.

To the economist, the choice should be clear: Lower cost method=better method of allocating scarce resources to their most highly valued uses...

[Inquartata]

Originally Posted by jeff

Anyone paying the least attention to how healthcare already works - including examples in this very thread - knows that rationing is already in effect in private-sector healthcare. And not just rationing ("there's not enough to go around so we ration what we give out") but simple denial of service when the services are in fact available ("if we actually cover you, which we could, it would make our profits lower, so get lost").

Unfortunately, this is not true marketplace rationing. This is rationing by a sort of proxy.

If you have the cash, you can still go out and get virtually any medical service you wish. No one will "deny" you, if YOU are paying for it. THAT is the "rationing" of the market: if you can afford it and I cannot, then the market "rations" the good to you.

And IMO a lot more of us could afford these services had not the distortions introduced by constant and pervasive government meddling in the medical marketplace artificially inflated prices and damaged natural allocative mechanisms.

[Inquartata]

Originally Posted by jessicasimpson

Is there anyone on this board that pays for there own health insurance? I mean no group discount, no employer co-pay?

I looked into it at one point. I would have been able to afford a Blue Cross/Blue Shield individual policy. In the end I chose not to buy it, because I was healthy and able to afford occasional isolated medical outlays such as doctor visits and prescriptions out of pocket for less and was willing to run the risk of a major injury or serious illness based on my assessment of my health.

Not everyone would be comfortable doing that, but I would be grateful if someone could explain to me why on earth the government should either be able to forbid me to make such a choice or fine me for not buying the policy!

How on earth is that freedom of choice?

[Inquartata]

Originally Posted by lindajdunn

.
I pay $352.26 every other week (13 times a year) for a family plan and that's on the high end.

I assume that your employer also pays a given amount. If so, in reality you are paying a bit more than you think, because as a government entity your employer "pays" these amounts from tax revenues. So if you are a taxpayer, you are paying part of your employer's share. If you count the opportunity costs of those payments---that is, the services which the government cannot provide because it has used the funds elsewhere---the amount rises yet again...

At least private firms pay their portions of health plan premiums out of revenues they have actually earned by producing something.

[Inquartata]

Originally Posted by migopod

How about the feds just funding the crap out of public universities and really work to develop research programs therein. Not just for new drugs, but for the sciences in general.

You do realize that "the feds" is---you? And me?

You are already free to do this. Its called a donation. No one is stopping you from making one whenever you choose.

The key, for me, is "choose". You should also have a right to choose NOT to make a donation.

The government produces little of tangible value. It subsists on taking the fruits of the productive efforts of others, through taxes, tariffs and duties. Why do people behave as though somehow "the feds" can give them things without cost to them?

[Hauptman]

Originally Posted by Inquartata

And your proof---from an objective source, of course---that this is in fact SOP, and not merely an opinion created as the result of hearing a few individual horror stories or reading a few scare pieces in magazines or on the net---will be forthcoming soon, I am sure?

Surely a man of your vast knowledge, and experience is aware of the numerous fines handed down by regulators, and the many successful lawsuits filed by individuals and states attorneys general?

I know that you're trying to make a point regarding evidence, but on the other hand, I find your arguing another point that you know to be false somewhat counter-productive.

[Inquartata]

I do not "know it to be false". The evidence does not show this.

Let us say that there have been 10,000 of these court judgements and 100,000 fines. Let us further stipulate that all of both were completely proper and for demonstrable cause, and perfectly fair.

Now, if that's out of a universe of 200,000 claims, yes, it would appear that improper denial of claims is a widespread thing, probably even a deliberate policy.

If it's out of 100,000,000 claims....neither appears to be the case.

I do not argue that such things do not occur. I simply question the knee-jerk assumption that they are the norm, or are so common as to "prove" the existence of an SOP which produces them. I question statements like "they do it all the time" and "they rig the system".

I even question the "they", frankly.

This is just too much conspiratorial thinking for me. In my experience people and organizations are not competent enough to pull of conspiracies and keep them from being exposed as conspiracies.

[jeff]

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Unfortunately, this is not true marketplace rationing. This is rationing by a sort of proxy.

If you have the cash, you can still go out and get virtually any medical service you wish. No one will "deny" you, if YOU are paying for it. THAT is the "rationing" of the market: if you can afford it and I cannot, then the market "rations" the good to you.

And IMO a lot more of us could afford these services had not the distortions introduced by constant and pervasive government meddling in the medical marketplace artificially inflated prices and damaged natural allocative mechanisms.

Oh sure, you may be able to afford checkups and screening, but only the wealthiest among us could afford to pay out of pocket if something goes wrong with us. A hospital stay is ferociously expensive, and government has a lot less to do with it than one might think, despite being the default punching bag that they are.

But that's not what I was talking about. What I was talking about is the well-known phenomena of HMOs rationing access to expensive services even when medically indicated, the equipment and staff were available (no "scarcity" in the normal meaning of the word), and the patient has paid for coverage.

[jeff]

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Well, of course full disclosure is neither possible, nor necessary, nor advisable. If nothing else, it would do harm by forcing the revealing of justifiably proprietary information such as manufacturing processes and formulas---trade secrets which would damage a given firm's competitiveness. Nor does the consumer really need to know every single detail about a supplier in order to make a rational decision.

I grant you that deciding what information they did need and which they did not, and what should be protected as a trade secret and what should not, would be a thorny issue. But I'm not sure it would have worse results than regulations to mandate outcomes...

Gee, Inq - I don't know why you need to disagree with me when I was essentially agreeing with you Replace "full" with your original text of relevant and useful information needed for a consumer to make sound, self-interested decisions and that will convey my intent.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

OK. But how, again, are her interests actually aligned with those of all the agencies and forces against whom she inveighs?

Her interests are aligned with them in so far as she needs them to be paid for the work she does, but they sharply part because it's in their interest to pay her as little as possible, and to deny care to her patients regardless of their need for care. That's a substantial difference.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

I'll settle for that ( and restrain myself from asking for a definition of 'pertinent' just to continue the argument ).

Good, or we'll never get anywhere Just like I didn't ask you to define the elevant and useful information you referred to previously!

Originally Posted by Inquartata

There have always been laws regulating things like weights and measures, purity of metals and so forth. These are basic not only to commerce but to government ( in the regulation of currencies, for instance ).

As for food and drugs, apparently there were also laws governing these going back to colonial times:

http://www.foodsafety.gov/~lrd/history2.html

Yet those laws were so fragmentary, incomplete, and ineffective that they were of little practical value, especially with the societal changes described in that link.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

No. I suggest that they cared more about price (snip)

Are you seriously suggesting that the consumers would buy the food that had the ground up rats in it if they knew about it? I know people like to save a few cents here and there, but this goes back to that relevant information we just discussed. You and Miltie might prefer regulation to disclose information rather than specify standards. To me it is obvious that specifying standards of what is safe or healthy is by far the better policy - and it fits right in with your comments about Joe Public not understanding scientific data. Otherwise, they are presented with information they don't have the ability to reason about (so, just how many PPM of rat doo doo is okay?). We chose IMO the better way - and both of our positions are - what's that word? - normative?

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Or perhaps they wouldn't. ( See anecdote above. )

I don't see why. You explained the costs of the supply chain. You didn't say "this product is POISON!" (old joke "and such small portions, too!") That would get more attention from the typical consumer.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Analysing all of this information is time-consuming, and time has value. Making decisions can be costly, and the average person probably does not care to put much effort into it. ( Although one might essay the argument that this is because they have come to trust in the basic safety and healthiness of products because of regulation. )

Absolutely. That's an effect I've previously mentioned. The right amount and type of regulation increases a market. I alluded to that recently with the FDA and food sales, and previously with the stock market. Consumer confidence resulting from trust in basic safety stemming from regulations helps markets.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Eh?

The stock market became viable as the engine of capitalism because regulations made it other than a way to gull the rubes. Really.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Yes.

Oh, wait---did you mean that you wanted to see it?

I'd show you some of my tablets from the Sumerian version of the USDA, but you'd have to be able to read cuneiform

I'll just pass it to my linguist friend, Rosetta Stone. She's good at that sort of stuff.

Seriously - that "always" is the kind of sweeping claim you always ding people for. What's good for the goose is.... well, you know!

Originally Posted by Inquartata

From the EPA itself:

http://www.epa.gov/history/topics/regulate/01.htm

According to Wikipedia, "The first statutory environmental law was the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899". There's also an entry for the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918...

And just how effective was that, eh? It kept LA from having smog, or GE from putting PCBs in the Hudson, or mining companies from leaving cyanide in ground water? The "interference" you cite was negligible.

Besides, I thought you abjured use of Wikipedia!

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Again according to Wiki, the first safety regulations came in in 1940

Uh-huh. And see above.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

I'd say that's a different question altogether, inasmuch as it's a poison whose desired effects relies directly on the poisonous ingredient. However:

http://www.druglibrary.org/Schaffer/...es/nc/nc2b.htm

Of course, all of this speaks less to an historical commitment to consumer protection than to the insatiable urge of government to interfere in the marketplace out of a variety of other, mostly much less noble, motives...

Where's the "IMO" that goes with that kind of sentence, huh?

[PeterGustafsson]

Originally Posted by Phaeton

Peter,

You're ideas about voting are intriguing. They'll never happen. Too much stacked against them.

Well, I did not write them down in order to change the US. constitution - I do not have such a grand opinion of myself. Instead, I wrote them down in order to enlighten people of the root of the problem. Somewhat mre realistically, I hope that repeated writing on election systems will cause someone, somewhere, to try out a better system in a real election (probably not a political one, baby steps first) than the incredibly bad Anglo-Saxon method of First-Past-The-Post.

I agree with you that they will not happen - I strongly believe that this problem (US. political system being easily swayed by lobby groups) is causative of many ills, and unsolvable. Optimism, Swedish-style.

Originally Posted by Phaeton

I do think the American political system is, however, rather functional and that viewing parties as single entities rather than coalitions of smaller groups is a mistake.

"rather functional" ??? I beg to differ. Which other democracy has more voter apathy? Numerous other examples could be listed, but I will limit myself there.

[quote=Phaeton;807293]Timing primaries with the general elections would be a disaster. QUOTE]
Why would it be a disaster? Is is because the present way of running US. elections would not work under my suggested system? Are we to suppose that Axelrod, Rove, and all they way down to the most junior of campaign workers will not be able to adapt, and find a better game plan when the rules change?

Remember, no matter how bad game plans the political parties come up with, some party will win the majority (if not 51%+) of a given congressional chamber.

Originally Posted by Phaeton

How would a party that is such a broad coalition organize itself? How would the Republican Party campaign when a vote for them could end up going to people as different as Olympia Snowe and Eric Canter?

For starters, any party which wants to win an outright majority must field candidates of all major, and many minor, demographic groups. Expect the GOP to commandeer in Condi Rice in order to garner the AA female vote. Any party which leaves a significant demographic uncovered would lose all indentity voters of that demographic, and that would be a untolerable liability. Furthermore, the candidates of a party should agree on the major planks of their party, but on several issues there should be intra-party variations in candidate positions, in order to catch as many voters as possible.

Under my suggested system an individual voter would be able to voter for both Olympia and Eric, or for one and against the other, or in any number of different ways. However, no matter how the indivudual voter votes, he will know that his votes - both of them - will directly and predictably influence the outcome of the candidates on his vote slip.

However, this predictability (own action is followed by a reasonably well predicted consequence) does not apply to the political parties or the lobby groups. If Olympia Snowe is good at getting votes from outside Maine, that can lead to any number of consequences. She might take them from GOP voters who previously were constrained in voting for local GOP candidates. In that case, the party balance is not changed, but she is diminishing chances for some other GOP candidate - from a place which most Mainers do not care all that much about. In another scenario, she might might take votes cast by people who otherwise voted for a local Democrat that they did not care all that much for, only because the local GOP was completely unacceptable. In that case, she helps the GOP on a national scale. Also, any number of political views which have acceptance by at least 1/435th of the population but are in the minority everywhere might finally get a chance in getting representation. Any small group can run two candidates, and instruct its followers - in all 50 states - to give one positive vote to each.

Most people would probably vote for their local mainstream candidate anyway, but by now the politicians and the lobby groups would have to consider all sorts of effects. Under my suggested system, all congressional races would instead of being 435 paralell races turn into a giant set of coupled races, with significant interaction. Lobby groups would not be able to make the neat distinctions between safe, contested and no-hope races. Instead, there would be mostly contested seats, and it would be difficult to predict what would happen if a given lobby group poured money in a given candidate. That might cause that candidate to siphon off votes from another candidate positive to the lobby group in question, it might help the lobby group, or it might help a completely different cause.

For politicians, the problems would be similar. They would have difficulty in figuring out whether to be vocal about one specific part of their platform will mostly help them locally, help them locally but hurt them nationally, help them but hurt a valuable friend/party ally, or whatever.

For both lobby groups and politicians, the suggested system will serve to make calculation of the most rational/vote maximising strategy exceedingly difficult. In a real-time game with several thousands of players and millions of possible interactions, calculation of the best possible strategy becomes som time-consuming so that it can not be modeled even on strong computers in time for the strategy to still be useful - by the time is has been found, it has been overcome by events in the meanwhile.

That is the beauty of my suggested system. Voters have a disadvantage in being currently constrained in space and time, but candidates and lobby groups can to various degrees save ther resources for when they are most needed. Under my system, voters would still have individually simlple predictability and thus a easily-figured-out game plan, while that would not be the case for the other two groups in the election game.

Put otherwise: Today, lobby groups can play whack-a-mole with candidates that they dislike, only that each whack-a-mole machine has only two moles, they have several machines but can assign one player to each machine, and many of the machines are nonfunctional. Under my system, there would be one huge whack-a-mole machine with thousands of moles, and several other other WAM players playing their machine concurrently - nad moles hopping up and down in a completed unpredictable way!

Put otherwise, take #2. Imagine that you would take part in a sabre bout, only that:
1. The piste is big and round
2. There are 6 sabre fencers
3. All of them are wearing blindfolds
4. ROW is discontinued
5. All six fencers are fencing completely for themselves, no teambuilding

What would be the best game plan for that? Well, nobody knows, but one can be fairly certain that no matter what game plan is used no fencer could hope to win consistently - there are far too many unexpecteds which can happen. That is the situation which lobby groups would face in my suggested system.

Originally Posted by Phaeton

Besides, why optimize when people are get fat off of the inefficiencies?

Bingo!

Originally Posted by Phaeton

I think that third parties have served a vital role in American politics well after the Bull-Moose party. A great example of this is the Green Party. They really didn't do all that well in the last election and for a good reason. The Democratic Party absorbed the planks of the Green Party platform (the major ones at least) and made the Green Party unnecessary. This has historically proven to have occurred on multiple occasions, with the Progressives, Populists, Greenback Party, various abolitionist parties, the Know-Nothings etc.

Would not more planks be laid if those who come up with them would have a reasonable chance of representing them in elected bodies?

Your description is akin to a situation in which anyone might come up with a new invention, but the two market-leaders in the industry to which that invention pertains may help themselves to any such inventions at no cost. What would that do for inventive activity?


Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[I_luv_saber]

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Now, see, you are extrapolating one---one---anecdote into "they do it all the time".

Simply including it for a simple, easy to explain example, nothing more.

And your proof---from an objective source, of course---that this is in fact SOP, and not merely an opinion created as the result of hearing a few individual horror stories or reading a few scare pieces in magazines or on the net---will be forthcoming soon, I am sure?

I'm not sure what proof I could put forth that would be considered "objective". In a case like this, where there is one party accused of doing something wrong, there is no real objectivity as the only ones who would have evidence of this are those... doing the accusing!

However, I will do my best. Firstly, need I really point out the GOBS of commercials for lawyers with the SOLE PURPOSE of fighting insurance companies? You don't think this huge volume is filling some need?

Here's some links... none of which I'm sure you'll opt to believe. However, I'd not that NONE of these situations should happen in the first place because there should be regulations in place preventing companies from doing it. Even a handful is inexcusable.

MSNBC Article

Berkley Parents Network - I particularly like the one about Kaiser revoking a pregnant woman's insurance because she was "misrepresenting herself". Pretty typical.

Tons more. Give a quick Google. Auto insurance has some wonderful stories as well... (I would note the big problem is the insurance industry's huge lobbying power. A former insurance lobbysit is no a part of Schwartzaneggar's staff)

Or drive them out of business, leaving only a mammoth public monopoly to take its place.

1) I very much doubt that.

2) From the beggining I've advocated a reform of insurance regulations IN CONJUNCTION WITH tort reform, thereby lowering medical costs all-around.

Regardless of cost though, the underhanded practices done by insurance companies should be illegal.

Or make them find loopholes in all of your regulations,

I've no doubt. But that's not a good reason for letting an industry get away with the stuff this one does. That's a cop out argument and nothing more.

How do you know which would really happen?

I don't. Does that mean we never change anything because we don't know for sure what will happen? That's silly.

You do your best to find the outcome, then decide if it's the best choice. IMO, the best decision is to regulate insurance companies while reforming the lesal process. Your opinion may differ, but my opinion is not rendered wrong because "I don't know what will happen". That's another cop out argument.