Health Insurance QuestionFollow

Not when they compete fairly. If they strike based solely on the value of their labor, I'm all for them. Sadly, modern unions don't do this. They leverage previous contracts imposed either via government intervention or the unfair use of a labor monopoly to continue to press for ever more unbalanced benefits and wages.

Ideally, labor unions would not be needed and would not exist. I'm not opposed to them being formed if/when business becomes too harsh. But that pendulum has long since swung in the other direction. If there are a hundred people willing to replace you at your job for less than you are getting paid now, you can strike for more, but your employer ought to be able to just replace you if he's able to.



Now you're just contriving a situation. If that is true, then the entire market can only support one worker. If that's the only market, then if you get the job, you're still ******** everyone else over, right? Presumably, there have to be enough potential jobs for the workers or the system doesn't work regardless of what mechanism we use.



That doesn't really fix the problem though, does it? If there's actually not enough demand for the labor market, then there's not enough labor productivity to provide for all the people. Giving them all jobs paying more than they are worth is silly and counterproductive.

At the end of the day, the entire labor of the entire country generates X amount of goods and services (productive output). The value of labor is related to the value of that production. If more is produced than the labor is paid, supply and demand will decrease the cost of the goods produced, automatically balancing this out. Paying labor more only increases the price of the goods that labor produces, effectively nullifying the value of the increase.


You can't produce more than you produce by paying more or less for the labor which produces it. The solution to labor problems is to allow as free a market as possible, so that business may seek out new ventures and come up with more efficient production methodologies. That is the only way that actual production increases. And it's the only way we all increase our overall prosperity.


Everything else is window dressing. You think it's important, but it isn't.



It's telling that you automatically assume that if something is undesirable, that it must be banned. Very very telling.



Or lower the price of their goods. It's all the same really.


The problem is that you're assuming a worst case scenario. Clearly people can and do earn enough money in free market jobs to make a good living. So while some people may not, they *could*. If they make the right choices, get into the right jobs, and do well at them. You're assuming that because it's possible to not earn enough money to live off of, that we should chuck the whole system out.

For the most part, those earning too little to live off of are young, likely still in school, and are being supported in some way by their families. You're arguing the exception and insisting we change the entire system to account for it.

But the systemic changes need to look at the whole system. And at that level, we have to look at total labor production versus total labor costs. And, as I've already pointed out, you don't gain a damn thing by doing what you propose. Nothing. Even unions, which purport to help out the worker can't work on a large scale. If everyone is in a union, and making the same wages, then who's making up the difference between the value of what is produced and the wages paid to the workers producing them? All you're doing is raising prices on the goods. Inflation will consume what you're doing.


You want to assume that by creating unions and government wage control systems, you are fighting against a system that rewards only some, while penalizing others. But the problem is that you're replacing it with one that does the same thing. However, instead of rewarding the most productive laborers, while penalizing the least productive, your system rewards those who've joined unions or are working for/under some government wage program. Those groups aren't guaranteed *not* to be the most productive, but they aren't guaranteed *to* be the most productive either.

Unions only work if a relatively small percentage of the labor is in one. Government wage systems only work if a relative small percentage of people receive them. It's the great flaw in most liberal economic ideas. The mechanisms you use work when it's only a portion receiving the benefits. A small number on welfare. A small number on medicare. A small number on social security. They fall apart when expanded to include "everyone".

But people like you don't seem to realize this, and push for more more more. It's a tragic mistake.

Jesus, another thread discussing govt assistance with gbaji?

Why bother? He has clearly stated that the working poor are useful insofar as they enrich their employers and neither deserve nor need anything else to sustain or improve their lot in life. He will scream and yell that he never said this, and that I am twisting his words, but gbaji does this EVERY TIME he shown to be lying or wrong. And for the record he did. After he comes in here and calls me a liar, I'll be happy to link it.

I am going to just go with my belief that both you, gbaji, and varrus fell out of a lucky ******, never had a day -prior to moving out of your folks' place-if, in fact you have moved out- that you went without anything you needed or wanted, and have no concept of what it means to be working poor. Until I see absolute proof otherwise, this IS the truth and you two are just a couple of trustfund douchebags talking out your asses.


Gbaji, if you want people off welfare and assistance would it not make sense for ALL EMPLOYERS to pay a wage which would eliminate the need for their employees' need to rely on the government? Why do I never hear you argue for that?

Paying someone 7 or 8 dollars an hour to work in this country when the owners end of year profit are in the millions is not just greed.

It is evil. It is corrosive to the community and the country. it forces people to rely on the govt to provide needs they can't possibly provide for themselves. All while the bosses at the top of the heap rake in more money than they can spend AND THEN ***** about taxes going to welfare AND THEN go to church and convice themselves they are decent, religious people. @#%^ing hypocrites.

Varrus is just stupid, and therefore ignorable mostly. But you, gbaji, at least seem to be reasonably inteligent and yet spout the same crap varrus does. Your massive disregard for your fellow human beings leads me to activly dislike you.

IIRC you have never said directly you are a Christian. You seem to hate abortion, however, so this leads me to believe you are a Christian. Running with that assumtion a moment, how could you PERSONALY do any less than to improve the lot of EVERY poor person you possibly could. You know, like the "private - not govt" help you keep saying would work better.

Do you tithe? Do you give food to your local food pantry? Do you volunteer at your local homeless shelter or participate in job training programs? Do you do ANYTHING to help the poor at all?

Yeah, I thought not. It is extremely likely that very few of your neighbors are helping, either.

Edited, Jun 25th 2009 12:58am by Bijou

Fair enough, but the question of how much HE'S helping is still valid, as he thinks private citizens should step in and help to reduce or eliminate govenment assistance.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.






Edited, Jun 25th 2009 5:35pm by Elinda

Speeling iz srs bzn3z.

Jophed,

I don't have cable.

10 years ago the UK Private Healthcare Insurance industry was alive and well.

NHS (the UK's state healthcare) waiting times were horrendous - 6 months to see a consultant and anything up to 3 years for him/her to operate. Since 1997 funding has doubled (but still far less tax per head than USA taxpayers) waiting lists have plummeted. I've read a leaked email from a Private healthcare company that used the words 'now that NHS waiting lists no longer exist in reality'.

The industry's been hammered twice.

1.
Investment and service redesign means that average waiting times for an appointment with a consultant are 3 to 4 weeks (1 week for an urgent appointment) and about 2 to 3 months for an operation. Even privately funded hospitals are now no more accessible than NHS hospitals.

This made a huge proportion of privately insured people (and employers who offered private healthcare insurance as a 'perk') walk away. Why pay premiums to receive a service that's available free anyway.

2.
As that happened, private insurers and hospitals looked for ways to recoup the income they'd lost and came cap-in-hand to the NHS, offering to do a range of procedures on behalf of the NHS. (Their ORs were costing a fortune to stand empty).

The NHS set a deal. NHS Patients can choose to go to your hospital IF you can:
a) match the NHS price
b) meet NHS safety standards, and
c) upgrade your IT to communicate with ours.

They bit our hand off, which goes to show how much they had been over-inflating their prices for self-funding or privately insured patients.

I've kind of blurred the boundary between private insurers and hospitals because in the UK they were by and large the same companies.

As it is, private healthcare insurers are in meltdown, private hospitals are now increasingly dependent on state-funded patients, standards have increased and net costs have fallen.

As a side note, it was always perceived that private hospitals were 'better' than NHS hospitals. The NHS has always had to publish quality data - infection rates, readmission rates, clinical errors etc. The Private hospitals didn't have to.

Now they're receiving state funded patients, they are having to produce data that proves they are (on average) in the bottom quartile for quality compared to NHS hospitals.

Funny eh?

Lol. Nice word twist.



Apparently you failed to read the post where I stated that I lived in my car for a period of time. I'm quite sure I've been more "poor" in my life than most of the posters on this forum.




Because it would not work. Only those with a remedial understanding of macro-economics think that just by raising all pay to some "living wage", we can eliminate poverty, much less unemployment. Doing so will in fact most likely increase both poverty and unemployment. I explained why just a couple posts ago.



An employers end of year profit in relation to a single employee's pay is utterly irrelevant. What's relevant is the ratio of workers to profit generated by their work. See. The more profit per employee, the more valuable that employee is to the employer. If a company makes a million dollars net profit in a year, and has 5 employees, it's going to reward those 5 employees with much higher salaries than a company making the same net profit with 500 employees.

To put it in perspective. If the latter company gave each employee just 1 dollar more per hour, they would turn their net profit into a net loss, while the former company could give each employee a 10 dollar an hour raise and not significantly impact their bottom line.



No. What's evil is a government that offers those things right off the bat making entry level employees think that they can't possibly earn enough from a job to compete with the standards the government has set. Pretty much no one earns enough to support a full sized family the first day they enter the job market. That's why they're called "entry level positions". The problem is that most of your analysis is based on a comparison between what one can get at the bottom of the pay scale to what one can (or should!) get from the government.

That's the evil. That's the trap. It makes people think they can't succeed. And thinking so makes it so. They don't bother to enter the job market and never see the higher pay which comes from working over a long period of time. But they don't realize this until it's too late. If you start working in your late teens and early 20s, by your early to mid 30s, you'll have a good paying job, earlier if you have the right education. But if you don't do this because your first job wont pay enough, it still wont when you're in your 30s and have been slacking off waiting for a magic fairy to come along and sprinkle you with success.

Then you turn to the government complaining that you can't support your wife and three kids on an entry level salary. Um... Duh. Should have "entered" 10 years ago dummy!



Sigh. If we remove rewards for success, we remove motivation for success.

What you continually miss is that in a free market, useful productivity is rewarded overwhelmingly. That's what allows a company to profit. If they provide some good or service which people are willing to pay for (useful), at a price they can make a profit on, then they'll make money. Those who do this are rewarded with salaries in proportion to their contribution to that process.


It's strange to me that this seems "wrong" to you. How else should we determine who makes what? Have a government "pay czar" set all the pay scales for every job in the country? Will that actually do a better job at motivating people to be productive? I can't see how that can possibly be true. What will happen is that people will be rewarded for their politics and not their productivity. Those in government largely care only about what helps them get and retain power and position in the government. Do you really think that if we give the government the power to set pay, that this wont reflect purely political and not financial objectives? You are very naive if you do...


You can rail against the system for it's imperfections. But it's better than any alternative.



That's because you ascribe motivations based on your own assumptions of outcomes. You assume that the free market is "bad" for workers and so anyone who espouses it must want bad things to happen to workers. Have you considered that your assumption might be wrong? I believe that the free market is the best for workers. I believe that it is better than any government controlled system we could implement. Thus, when I argue for the free market, it's not because of a disregard or hatred of the working class, but a desire to see the best for all workers.





Lol. I'm a pro-choice agnostic. You couldn't be more wrong.

I am, however, willing and able to see other sides to positions than my own. My positions on most issues are more nuanced than people are used to dealing with though, so it's easy to just label me I suppose.



It's irrelevant what I do personally. Yes. I do some of those things. I do donate to charities I like. I have in the past donated my time to food bank programs in the area. And certainly I will directly help out any friend of family member who falls upon hard times.

That's part of the point as well. Most people *should* have a support network made up of friends and family. One of the more insidious aspects of our public assistance programs is that they tend to break apart families. They reward women for not marrying the guy who knocked them up. They encourage them to live on their own away from their parents and siblings. The government holds out this promise of "independence" to young adults (especially young women), which ultimately causes them and their children to become dependent on the government instead. After a few generations of this, the effects of this process are devastating, especially among the African American population.


I oppose these things because I think they are incredibly harmful. They do much more harm than good over time.

Yet millions of people have done it. Worked low paying jobs and made personal sacrifices to save up money and moved on to better things.


I did it.

I worked 2 jobs (both of them low paying)to pay for my books for college. I lived with 2 roomates in a crappy appartment for more than 2 years and gave up my cell phone when I could not pay the bill and used the school computer for assignments.

I rode a bike or walked to work and school when my car broke down and I could not afford to have it fixed.

I could go on but somehow I don't think any of it matters to you because you say it can't be done.

And that is the greatest tragedy, reading post after post from you and people like you who sit around on a game message board all day rating each other up in some kind of failed attempt to convince yourselves how smart you all are.

What do you know? Seriously, what the **** do you know? According to you, you still live with mommy and your gonna lecture people about how flawed our Capitalist system is? How unfair life is And how nobody can make it in America without the government handouts.

I don't hate any of you, I actually want to offer you all my pity, because this is the garbage you have all been force fed most of your lives. You don't know any better. You have no clue of the opportunities that exist in this country to people who are actually willing to work for it.

A lot of it does depend on where you are living. Minimum wage of $5.50 at 40 hours a week works out to $800/month after taxes. That won't pay rent in NYC, but it'll cover rent in many places here in GA, where a 1 BR apartment can be had for $350/month, and still leave some money for food and utilities. It won't be a glamorous subsistence, but it'll cover your needs.

My fiance and I calculate that we can survive, the two of us, on $1500/month, which is roughly what I make at my marketing job.

Well, Athens isn't exactly rural. But ATL is a major metro area; of course rent is going to be higher there than in the smaller cities around here.