Single Payer Too Exspensive, No Way?

Yes, you did. So instead of pulling FF's trick of just posting a link, why don't you tell us what you think that article means?

Yes, it is. No matter how many times you shriek "taxation is theft."

But the part you didn't read (twice) is where it explains that Vermont was actually not trying to implement single payer. The article is a complete sham. Post a California article if you think that will prove something, but be sure to read it first.

Ask me specific questions, I'll give you specific answers. I'm not rewriting the article for you unless you pay me to.

You've never answered, even once, under what circumstance being forced to give money to people isn't theft. That gets a lot of mockery, a lot of babble about a non-existent "social contract" that is completely one-sided in the takers' favor, but none of that ever changes the fact that you're forced to give up money under the threat of force. Giving up money under the threat of force is theft, and it doesn't matter whether it's a punk with a gun or 5,000 punks with guns, an official seal, and a mandate their partners in crime wrote to excuse 'em. Either way, it's theft. If you can't say "No" to giving up your money or your stuff without worrying that somebody will try to hurt you for saying no, you got fuckin' robbed.

Tell. Me. What. You. Think. The. Article. Means.

Read the article. The article says what I think the article means. I'm not rewriting what's already in the article. If you won't pay attention to what it says in the words of the original author, you're not going to pay attention when I paraphrase it, so I won't be bothered to waste the keystrokes.

Then don't be coy. All you've said is "He's right." Surely you can prove that.

P.J. O'Rourke — 'If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.'

The article proves it. The work has already been done. If you're ignoring it already, you're going to ignore it when I restate it, so there's no point in wasting my time restating it, is there?

Statement made in '93. And based on a fantasy. Unless you're suckling the corporate teat (and you probably are), your healthcare isn't free.

Proves what? It's okay to admit you didn't read it, sooner rather than later.

Same old BS - the World Health Organization rates the Swedish health care system the 23rd best in the world - 15 spots higher than the US version - and of course the think tanks paid for by conservatives find out how awful it is because that's what they are paid to do.

So we should listen to this Hogberg guy, right? After all, he has a Ph.D.

In political science.

Sorry, I think I'll go by the groups that actually know something about health care.

Actually, they found out because they surveyed the studies conducted primarily by Swedish academics. I suppose you haven't read the article I cited, either, and -- like Garamet -- you have no intention of doing so.

VT. wasn't trying to create single payer? Not according to the Governor.
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/.../17/shumlin-right-time-single-payer/20547557/

I've invited you to test whether or not I've read it by asking questions relevant to it. But to do that, you would have to have read it, which you clearly haven't done. You want my conclusions, absent the research citations. Without the research citations, of course, you are ready -- and apparently anxious -- to dismiss my paraphrased version of it out of hand.

Read the article. Or don't. But stop asking me to give you the Cliff's Notes so that you can, inevitably, respond to those instead of responding to the fully citation-supported article itself.

Such 'studies' are all fuckin agenda-driven, any lofty claims of non-biased notwithstanding, and for a smart guy you're foolin yourself if you think the ones you happen to agree with are the exception.

And I've repeatedly challenged you with a single question - "What do you think it means?" - which you're unable to answer. If you were able to answer it, you'd have done so, and we could drill down to specifics.

Now, either give us the TVGuide version of what you think the article means, or keep repeating yourself, or have one of your classic meltdowns. The latter two will get you no further response from me.

Here's what I think it means:

TROLLHATTAN, Sweden — Refugees from Syria and Iraq are pouring into Sweden at a record pace, placing strains on welfare, schools and housing. With national elections imminent, the center-right government is watching some of its supporters desert it for a populist, anti-immigrant alternative.

Were this any other European country, the governing coalition’s leaders might vie to win back voters by toughening their stand on refugees and immigration. But this is Sweden, where the right-leaning prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, has decided to gamble re-election on embracing the country’s tradition of openness, in stark contrast to the anti-immigrant sentiment infusing politics across much of Europe.

“I appeal to the Swedish people to open their hearts” to refugees, he said last month in one of the defining moments of the campaign.

Continue reading the main story
RELATED COVERAGE

• 
  
  U.N. Reports Sharp Increase in Refugees as Civil Wars Cripple NationsJUNE 20, 2014

Refugees are good for the country, he said. “These are people who come into Swedish society to build it together with us. Together we are building a better Sweden.”

Photo

Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has urged Swedes to welcome refugees. The center-right government has lost some supporters to an anti-immigrant alternative ahead of Sunday’s 9/14 elections. CreditJonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
But even in Sweden, the politics of immigration are growing more heated and complex.

The country appears poised to shift leftward in the parliamentary election on Sunday, polls suggest, with a coalition of moderate socialists and Greens consistently ahead of the governing coalition of center-right parties led by Mr. Reinfeldt.

But the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats, who have roots in the extreme right, are running strongly enough in pre-election polls that they could win 10 percent of the vote and almost double their seats in Parliament. An unconvincing victory by the left-leaning coalition could leave the anti-immigrant, anti-Islam nationalists of the Sweden Democrats holding the balance of power in Parliament.

After the prime minister’s embrace of the value of immigration, the Sweden Democrats seized on his admission that the short-term costs of welcoming refugees were so “huge” that they ruled out major new investment in welfare.

“The prime minister has confirmed: The choice is between prosperity and mass immigration,” the party’s leader said on Twitter after the speech.

Mr. Reinfeldt’s move put the issue squarely at the center of the election and made it a test of the boundaries of Swedish tolerance.

“We don’t know of any other country in Europe saying we should not be scared of immigration,” said Sophia Metelius, an adviser to the government on immigration policy. “Most have moved the political map in the direction of the far right.”

In Norway, the populist Progress Party entered a coalition with the center-right conservatives this year; Anders Behring Breivik, the far-right terrorist who killed 77 people there in 2011, was once a member of the Progress Party. The new government moved swiftly to ban what one Progress Party member and government official characterized to The Financial Times as “the flow of beggars from outside Norway.”

In Denmark, Sweden’s Scandinavian neighbor to the south, support from the far right People’s Party kept a minority coalition in power for the first decade of this century, extracting major concessions on immigration policy as a result. At elections to the European Parliament in May, the far-right party took more than a quarter of the vote.

Sweden has not seen such a high number of people claiming asylum since 1992, when the country received nearly 60,000 Kosovar Albanians fleeing war in Yugoslavia. This year, about 80,000 people will claim asylum here, up from the 54,000 who came in 2013. As a result, 15 percent of Sweden’s population today was born abroad.

Surveys show around half the population thinks that refugee numbers should be reduced, said Anders Sannerstedt, a specialist on immigration at the University of Lund. A poll last month suggested that only a quarter wanted to see more refugees come to Sweden, although two-thirds say they support the government’s migration policy.

But there is also evidence that the unity of the main political parties on this issue has helped to hold anti-immigrant feeling in check. Parties of left and right have erected a ring of sorts around the Sweden Democrats, treating them as political pariahs and refusing cooperation in Parliament.

When a center-right politician wrote an opinion piece last month on the need to discuss a limit on refugee numbers, her party leadership said they felt “sick” and “ashamed” of her “pitiful” article. Politicians and the media dumped a truckload of scorn on a governing party lawmaker who proposed a ban on street begging last month. She had “made the mistake of listening to her constituents,” one of her few supporters, the mayor of Vaxjo, Bo Frank, wrote on his blog.

There is no evidence that opinion has shifted toward the Sweden Democrats since Mr. Reinfeldt’s speech, and social media discussion this week has been buzzing with revelations about racist comments on chat forums by far-right candidates, one of whom was photographed wearing a swastika armband. But as Election Day nears, divisions between the main parties have emerged.

The center-left Social Democrats, front-runners for the premiership, contend that Mr. Reinfeldt, even as he embraced the principle of welcoming immigrants, made a calculated gift to the far right by highlighting the cost of integrating refugees. They say his government is preparing to cling to power with the Sweden Democrats’ support.

Mr. Reinfeldt’s colleagues counter that he was simply scoring a point against the left’s promises of generous public spending. Gustav Fridolin, the Green Party leader and potential coalition partner with the Social Democrats, said he was “proud to live in a country where a center-right party during an election campaign asks for solidarity when the world is burning.”

Boel Godner, the mayor of Sodertalje, a town near Stockholm that has taken in thousands of people fleeing Iraq and where half the population has a foreign background, complained that her municipality received no additional funding from the national government, while wealthy towns received very few refugees. “We need to do more than open our hearts, it is not a solution in itself,” she said.

The Integration Ministry said financial support for towns receiving refugees was recalculated this year to make it fairer.

In Trollhattan, a town of 50,000 people near Sweden’s second city, Goteborg, almost one in four people has an immigrant background. At 13.9 percent, unemployment here is nearly twice the national average, not helped by the bankruptcy in 2011 of Saab, a premium auto manufacturer, that threw thousands of people out of work.

Listening to a Sweden Democrat rally in a park, Kurt-Olof, 72, said he would vote for the party because of an “explosion of people” that was out of control. He worked for 47 years at Saab, losing a finger on the assembly line.

“Refugees come here and get a smorgasbord of benefits,” he said. “They cost too much, and there are too many cultures.”

Immigrants are concentrated in the Kronogarden area, a short ride from the center, making Trollhattan one of the most segregated cities in Sweden.

“I am scared when I go out of this district,” said Ismail, 26, who came to Trollhattan from Eritrea as a toddler, and who like many people interviewed asked that only his first name be used. “When the Sweden Democrats are strong I get more racism on the street.”

Annika Wennerblom, the mayor of Trollhattan, said in an interview that local industry would rely on immigrant labor in the long run because the indigenous population was aging. But in the short term, her municipality needs more financial help from the government to provide schools and housing, and to integrate the new Swedes.

“We say to Fredrik Reinfeldt, ‘Our hearts are open — but you need to open your wallet,’ ” she said.

In short: I think it means what it says. But since those on your side of the idealogical spectrum never actually mean what they say, I'm not surprised that you can't wrap your head around such a concept.

Some organizations have a proven track record of being impartial - and some not so much.

The think tank that employed Jack Abramoff, a scammer and felon? Who let him in on their board of directors?

That would be the not so much part.

But I'm sure this particular guy has an unimpeachable record, right?

Well, beside the fact he's published one work:
Medicare's Victims: How The U.S. Government's Largest Health Care System Harms Patients And Impairs Physicians.

Soul of impartiality here.

This is point and laugh time again.

I think the World Health Organization is a slightly more credible source than the conservative scandal ridden NCPPR 'think' tank.

Tonight on ABC: Tony Danza plays Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin as he wrestles with abandoning a major health care initiative while trying to find his missing cat.

Took you long enough. I'm sure you especially made note of this part:

Article was posted in September. Any idea of the outcome?

Except what if you're wrong, and he is. Nah. You're not wrong, are ya. You're mortal, and finite, and biased. No chance that you could be wrong, is there.

Oh, and Sweden pays less per capita than we do - of course, EVERYONE pays lower per capita then we do, while most 1st world countries cover their entire population:

http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2013...e-longest-waits-most-red-tape/30501384398664/

Right there for ya.

Then eliminate the government interference and make insurers duke it out in the marketplace. Prices will go down, quality will go up. Why? Because if they want business, that's what they'll have to do to get it.

If I recall correctly, the New York Times was predicting a 10 percent win for the anti-immigration party, but they got 13 percent.

Sounds to me that the swedes have some of the same concerns we do with respect to immigrants legal or not. They are concerned with them getting benefits and taking jobs.

Legal immigration is a good thing, especially in countries with an aging population such as Japan's and even ourselves, with baby boomers hitting retirement age and folks having smaller families. That doesn't mean open the floodgates to everyone, but I respect those that do it the right way.

[quote="garamet, post: 2677270, member]
Took you long enough.
[/quote]
Care to explain why couldn't have just read the article the first time Castle posted it the first time rather than play this stupid game?

You know what this thread reminds me of?
When I was a kid, and my dad would come home, and say "I bought myself (insert new candy/soda I wanted), and ate it all up, and it was terrible, you would have hated it".

"You would have hated single payer, it was all farty stinky, and full of bugs".

And those that don't still get the benefits.