[Sarcasmo]

Originally Posted by IsiliRunite

Obviously there are some special circumstances you are in that are attempted to be covered by the pre-existing Veteran's health-care-fo-life plan, that could use reworking but..

I'm sorry you think its "tired" that I have some principles I stand by and can express using a variety of methods. I would address people's specific examples if they weren't addressed by some of my beliefs a few miles upstream of their example.

Keep painting the picture that I am the bad guy by putting removing a little faith in government and putting it back in people to solve, what you and I both acknowledge, are problems. I've said all I can say...

It's not so much that we're for bigger government, but the changes you would like to see made are on a societal level, and that takes decades of engineering to do, and while that happens, people are going to die who don't need to.

I've read the pages prior to my post, and you still haven't addressed the questions that I've put to you, totally separate from anything involving veterans. Again, what, other than universal healthcare on a federal level, will provide for people who are too emotionally or mentally damaged to hold a job? War is not the only thing that causes PTSD, and PTSD is not the only affliction out there. If these people cannot hold jobs and cannot make money, how do we ensure that they have the means with which to get medical treatment? To throw another variable into the mix, what if they're habitual drug users? I've worked with the developmentally disabled, and a great number of them smoke. They're developmentally disabled, which means that at some point in their early childhood (before the age of 18) something happened to them that trapped their minds in an age of anywhere from 19 months to 7 years of development. Are you saying that you would deny them health care to related to their smoking because they were, for lack of a better term, retarded?

The big issue that most of us argue against you on is the fact that market forces and leveraging one's power as a consumer only work when you have MONEY. If you can't make any MONEY, you can't even get your foot in the door, and you lose from the get go. Are we supposed to tell those people, "Hang on, we're trying to evolve as a society, and we'll get to you once we've activated the altruism gene?"

The second big point that we argue against you on is the fact that a hospital stay, even a small one, can be a financial cataclysm for nearly anyone not fabulously rich. A man who was 4 days out of open heart surgery for a quadruple bypass fell when he was walking to the bathroom, popped his stitches and developed an infection, resulting in his lingering in an intensive care suite for 3 months, and then the cardiac wing for another ten, and he still died. All told, his hospital expenses were north of 2 million dollars. Do you know anyone who could absorb that kind of expense? And are you willing to say, flat out, that if his 4x bypass was caused by obesity and lack of exercise, and he survived that ordeal, that he should have to foot the bill for the whole shebang?

Here's the way the world works. There's a thing called a Hippocratic Oath, which states that a physician cannot deny care to a patient that needs it. Now, this doesn't apply to things like tummy-tucks and face-lifts, but it damned sure applies to things like chemotherapy and heart bypasses. What that means, in a nutshell, is that if you can't pay the hospital, they still have to treat you, and the cost still has to go somewhere. I don't even know if a hospital can take you to court to recoup their losses. So that means, even according to your plan, you'll still end up paying for people's stupid mistakes because, thank God, you didn't write the Oath. If, according to your view of How Things Should Work, people were held ultimately accountable for everything they did throughout their lives, noone would get treatment for anything, because insurance companies wouldn't insure people who smoked, drank, did any kind of drug, engaged in promiscuous, unprotected sex, or played high impact sports. That means that in order to conform to your way of thinking, anything and everything we did would be open to scrutiny from potential health care providers and insurance companies. Which, oh Constitutional Scholar, is... I don't know, A DIRECT VIOLATION OF OUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS! I made that bit a tad conspicuous so that you'd catch it. And in order to monitor people that closely, you'd need, oh, I dunno, A FUCKING HUGE GODDAMNED GOVERNMENT! Again, emphasis is for your benefit.

May the power of comprehension wash over you. I've said all I can say...