Duncan Edwards wrote:Why is it any more of a human right than food? Should that be provided to everyone?
Actually, here in the UK food is provided to everyone.
If you are unemployed, then you get jobseekers allowance, which isn't much money but is enough to pay for food and essential living costs, but you can only get it if you can demonstrate that you are actively trying to get a job. (I imagine that the US has something similar.) And if you DO have a job, well, food isn't very expensive. It would be absurd to expect someone with a job to not be able to afford food. You don't hand out for free what people can normally afford. There'd be no point in working at all if everything you need in life was given to you for free.
But if someone on minimum wage has an accident, he isn't going to have £30,000 lying around to pay for expensive medical treatment. In the UK, everybody pays tax and "national insurance" which is a tax specifically for healthcare. Every paycheck you receive in your entire life has a contribution towards this national insurance, entitling you free healthcare should bad stuff happen to you. The treatment you get isn't dependent on how much money you have paid on the past or some policy that you have. If the treatment is likely to save your life, you'll get it. (The only iffy situations are drugs and treatments that extend life by just a few months.) Every penny of the national insurance tax goes into the system, providing healthcare. Sure, doctors and hospital managers and stuff might get paid lots of money, but they've got the tough job of saving people's lives, so fair enough.
As I understand it, in the US there is some sort of charity medicare thing which is notortious for being rubbish. The only way you get decent healthcare is if you get an insurance policy from a private medical company. So that works just like the British national insurance tax, excpet for the fact that your insurance can run out and then you are completely fucked. Or it can turn out that you had some kind of prexisitng medical condition, and again you are fucked. Or you made a mistake filling in your forms when you applied for the insurance, and they say you gave incorrect information or claim that you intentionally lied to them, and again you are fucked. Or, something happens to the company and it goes bust, and oh look you are fucked. Millions of people that think they are safe because they've been paying medical insurance for years, and then when disaster strikes they find that their policy is worthless and their whole family is put under enormous financial pressure to pay for someone's treatment, they've got to stump up the money all in one go. I recall there were some scandals involving companies that would find spurious grounds to refuse to pay for treatment for old people, and they hedged their bets that the person would die of their condition before they could succeed in an appeal to get their money. Or maybe that was just the plot of a movie I watched.
I'm sure it was based on something in reality.
And, the money that you pay on the insurance policy doesn't all get spent on providing healthcare or paying the salaries of doctors etc - they are profit making companies, so a large chunk of it just makes the rich fatcats that own the company even richer. They aren't directly saving people's lives, they are just businessmen that bought lots of shares.
I think the people of China, Iran, Burma, and lately, Egypt would consider freedom of personal communication to be just as important right now. Google is considered to be a human right in China.
Fair point. I guess that in nations that dont' have free speech or many human rights, the ability to express oneselves on the internet is a godsend. But I doubt they need hundreds of gigs of download allowance for personal communication.
In a first world country, it's a way to shoot virtual people, download TV series, look at porn, and tell your friends OMG I JUST BOUGHT A CABBAGE! ROFLMAO!
Nor do I. The point I was trying to make is if the government can regulate and provide your health care then what makes your internet access so special that they shouldn't have their hands on that?
To me a service that gives you a heart transplant is an entirely different kettle of fish to one that lets you share amusing pictures of cats or see what your bank balance is at 2am.
Complaints eventually take care of themselves in a competitive environment. Too many and a company is forced to get better than the competition or go out of business.
Well, in the UK the train system used to be state run, and affordable, and then it was privatised. You can't choose which company to travel with, a certain region of the country is run be a certain company. The contracts are renewed every five years or so. Problem there is that there is no incentive for a company to invest a fortune in long-term plans to improve tracks or trains, because by the time the improvements are in place that company may no longer hold the contract and someone else might be running that region. Oh, and for some reason ticket prices keep spiralling ever upwards, far in exccess of inflation. Cars are not as ubiquitous in the UK as they are in the US, many people are dependent on public transport, so we have no choice but to suck it up and pay whatever price they demand. (And it used to be that the more expensive "peak" hours were during rush hour in the morning and rush hour in the evening, but now some train copanies have expanded their peak times so that the second rush hour starts at 3 in the afternoon...)
Have any of these train companies been forced out of business? Nope. (Oh, and almost no-one buys first class train tickets here in the UK. The normal tickets are so expensive you'd think that you'd be getting first class rather than being squeezed into a sardine tin.)
Private companies provide service at whatever level the spending public wishes. You generate maximum profit by doing that. That is why we have first class seats on trains and airplanes, Cadillac and Kia, and an incredibly diverse and ever more capable telecom environment. Taking that decision out of the market place will not help the Canadian internet users at all.
I agree with you there, when it comes to telecoms and cars and stuff then yeah, private companies all the way. They are luxuries, they are consumer goods, and it makes sense that companies make profits from them.
But when it comes to healthcare - a matter of life and death - it seems wrong that people should pay thousands and thousands and have a good chunk of that just be profit and not be spent treating people. Or find that their policies do not cover them due to some bizarre loophole. And when it comes to trains, you can't have real competition unless every train station has got 5 different tracks and five different train services running and you can choose which one you want to travel on. Or, at the very least, a system that isn't as screwed up as the UK one.
