Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc
From: robinson@mdivax1.uucp (Jim Robinson)
Subject: Re: National Health Care
Reply-To: robinson@mdd.comm.mot.com (Jim Robinson)
Organization: Motorola - Mobile Data Division; Richmond, BC
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL5
Date: 26 Aug 92 16:39:48 GMT

Jim Brownfield (brownfield!jbrow) wrote:
>In article <1992Aug25.172444.27444@news.columbia.edu>  
>gld@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Gary L Dare) writes:
>> <jbrow@glv.com> writes:
>> >By this, I take it that *every* Canadian gave their consent to this
>> >system.  If not, then I suggest to you that calling it anything but
>> >theft is just to make the ones that wanted the system feel better.  Of
>> >course, if every Canadian gave their consent, then why did you need
>> >the government to enforce it?
>> 
>> We've had over 7 elections in the past 20 years, and no party has seen
>> fit to campaign against public health insurance ... in fact, everybody
>> considers doing so political suicide (a handful of extremist *former*
>> Tory MP's stand to bear mute witness to this fact) ... also, our voter
>> turnouts are in the high-80%/mid-90% voluntarily, so elections can be
>> taken as very reasonable plebescites rather than a sordid collection
>> of special interest and extremist groups who bother to go and vote.
>> One of the reasons for the success of Mulroney's Conservatives has
>> been to grab a moderate social market position when the post-Trudeau
>> Liberals (as in Churchill and Paddy Ashdown, if you are familiar with
>> any British references -- not Jerry Brown) nudged slightly left and
>> flirted with grabbing moderate leftists who traditionally supported
>> the New Democratic Party.  The federal Liberals have been fighting to
>> regain their old social-liberal/fiscal-conservative space from the
>> federal Tories since.
>
>Whether its 51% to 49% or 90% to 10%, its still theft.  When you have a system  
>where people can opt out on the payment side as well as the service side, you  
>will have a moral system.

I think that there are two separate debates going on here. One is the
libertarian taxation-is-theft vs the non-libertarian
taxation-is-payment-for-services-received. And the other is national
health care vs private health care.

If one accepts the necessity of taxation for at least some services, as do
the vast majority of people, the relevant question in a thread entitled
"National Health Care" should be whether a national health care system is a
more effective and efficient means of providing health care to the
citizenry than is a private health care system. I am not meaning to
belittle Jim's libertarian views, but, quite frankly, libertarianism is not
the issue here.

BTW, just for the record I consider myself to be one of those
"social-liberal/fiscal-conservative" types that Gary alludes to above, and
although I know Canada's system is not perfect I still believe that it is
both more efficient and effective as well as less costly at providing
health care than is the US system. Gary and Gerald have already in previous
articles made the points that provide the basis for this belief.


-- 
Jim Robinson
robinson@mdd.comm.mot.com
{ubc-cs!van-bc,uunet}!mdivax1!robinson

Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc