Why not negotiate with drug companies?
Monday 31 March 2008 - Filed under Politics
Can some conservative please help me out? Our government, in their infinite wisdom, passed a law that Medicare cannot negotiate with drug companies. Someone please tell me how this is consistent with conservative ideals of free markets?
As an aside, in defense of socialized health insurance, I’ll quote this little gem:
Administrative costs for Medicare are 2-3%. Approximately 30% of private insurance premiums go to overhead, profits, and executive salaries. Doctors and hospitals have to employ huge staffs just to process insurance claims from a multiplicity of insurance companies. About 20% of the income of private doctors goes to pay for this staff. Overall, the administrative costs of private insurance exceed $400 billion a year. That.s enough to cover all of the uninsured without raising taxes.
As usual the people that conservatives are trying to protect are rich corporations.
2008-03-31 » lolife
31 March 2008 @ 6:31 pm
What are
Lobbyists
and
Political contributions?
3 April 2008 @ 11:47 am
Conservative answer: You’re right. This is a complete perversion of free markets. The confusion arises over the overloading of the term “conservative” and its implicit connection with “Republican,” “right-wing,” and the like. The people in power are not conservatives or Republicans. They are neo-con criminals who should be treated as such.
True conservatives do not go out of their way to protect rich corporations. They do not go out of their way to protect anyone more than anyone else. Your rights are limited only be the equal rights of others. The legislature writes fair laws to protect the rights of the individual. The executive enforces those laws (and only those laws) in as fair and equitable a manner as possible. The courts resolve disputes and enforce contracts. That’s it.
No tinkering, no prodding, no meddling. Complex societies and economies are emergent phenomena. Emergent phenomena are the bi-product of countless simple interactions among independent players. You can’t control it any more than you could intelligently design complex life, or improve the structure of your own brain, or manage The Internet in any meaningful way. Sure, you can modify the computers’ hardware or software. You can rewire it, transmit it across light posts or by satellite. You can alter the websites and upgrade the servers. You can tweak the protocols. You can even change the minds of the users. You can do all of these things and more, but you’re not going to ever be able to say, “I’d like to make this particular change to The Internet and so I’m going to make this particular change to its constituent, generative parts.”
All I can do is assert that you have no right to tell me what hardware I can or can not assemble into a computer, what software I can or can not write or install on that hardware, or what data to store or transmit with that software–because it’s mine (assuming I haven’t voluntarily signed into a restrictive contract with my service provider). And by the same logic, I have no right to force you to install open source software, or use standard formats, or install security updates that would benefit the rest of us who have to share The Internet.
Again, you are right in that the behavior you describe is not conservative behavior and real conservatives don’t buy into the fallacy of lifting-some-boats-raises-the-tide or whatever hogwash they’re spewing, but by the same token, we don’t think that there is anyone in this vastly complex system with the knowledge or power to effectively improve upon the system. It falls into the same category of fallacy as the argument that some complex systems are so complex that they must have been designed.