I've read your posts on the forum for a while and in nearly all of them that pertain to an anti-liberal argument, you bring up the "straw man". The straw man argument itself, is a straw man argument; it assumes the other side doesn't know what they're talking about. It's an easy response to fall back on when you see a fact you can't deny and don't agree with. It's easy to attack the other person and say they got it all wrong and then dismiss their entire argument as a fallacy. It saves you from having to actually show proof and back up anything with facts.[/quote
You started attacking religious people and generalizing that all conservatives are religious and then started talking about the bible. It was completely irrelevant to the question at hand. I wasn't bringing up the straw man to discredit you, I brought it up because you were ranting about and irrelevant subject. I'm not a fan of religion but it has little to do with arguments for universal care.
Many of my arguments are "anti-liberal" because...I'm no longer a liberal. I'm a libertarian. Interestingly enough, I actually wrote a paper arguing for Universal Care my Junior year of high school. I actually used to be pretty much a socialist. If you look at my profile, it still says I want to subsistence farm for a living.
Now... I think I gave a pretty good spread of the facts in the initial post. I'd also say most of the non-US world would back those facts up, especially if you talk to those who have lived here and elsewhere in one of those systems. There are papers, tax returns, WHO studies, documentaries and dozens of documents available simply by going to Google. Nothing I'm saying about the Healthcare system can be debated - the salaries are comparable, the taxes are about the same the coverage is better, etc.
Well, for people who have money, they tend to choose private physicians. I'm not disputing the validity of the information you're presenting, I'm saying private doctors are better. I'm also saying that there are economic consequences to having government mess around in the healthcare system and you're neglecting those consequences.
As for coverage, there was actually a trans member on this forum that was complaining about how hard it was to get reassignment surgery in the UK. If you put government in control of healthcare and get rid of private doctors, you'll have to go through the government in order to make these types of services available. It's a long, expensive process. In a free market, you don't have that problem because it provides wants, not needs. If you're covering wants, you've gone beyond covering needs. It's about choice.
If you're really at a loss for an argument and want to bring up economic woes and pin that on a healthcare system, then you'd have a point... if the US simply went head-first into it. Our defense spending counts towards 19% of our budget. The UK's healthcare spending counts towards 18% of their budget. Take a wild guess at what their defense spending is... 6%. If we boosted our healthcare system up and fixed the mess we already have, we'd be in trouble, if we kept spending billions of dollars on defense. If we took that budget and put it in a universal healthcare system, then I'd be willing to bet no average citizen in this country would even notice a difference in their tax returns. It's called reallocation; the money's already being paid, we just spend it on the wrong things.
I'm not at a loss for an argument. Pinning economic woes solely on the healthcare system is simply incorrect. There are people who have gone into bankruptcy because of high costs of care but that doesn't happen to everybody. I totally agree we spend too much on defense but because we spend too much period. I don't even want a military to be perfectly honest. If you mean that government spend on the wrong things, I'd agree. But I say that individuals are the only ones that can spend their money with their benefit in mind. Government spends money on things because the free market is not providing it. The reason it's not provided through the free market is because it's not profitable (people don't buy it...i.e. they don't value it). So why do we think government fixes things? It takes money from people and then spends it on things they wouldn't, making them worse off.
It's great you're a bleeding heart liberal and want to help people, it's admirable. I used to be that way too but now I think there are so many problems that can stem from the solution you're proposing that can be explained with simple economics. "Re-allocating" government funds to me seems like the patrick star solution ("you just take it and put it over there"). Having free market incentives ensures there will be more innovation and greater variety. Saying that you're solution is the only solution and everybody else is stupid is fine...so long as it's not out loud. One of the things you're not considering by tying universal care to tax revenue is that tax revenue fluctuates with the economy so there will be either massive cuts to the system or hikes to taxes during recessions. And of course we saw these cuts a couple years back in Britain.
To be honest, I've struggled with the healthcare thing for a while as to what I actually think. It's easy to hear a testimony about how one person got screwed and then throw your support behind a social movement. My point is that it's not so simple and in the end, I want for people to make choices for themselves, not for a government to do it for them.