Thursday, April 1, 2010

Should we have a single payer grocery/food system since it will work so well with health care

Should we have a single payer grocery/food system since it will work so well with health care?
why not single payer housing, auto leases, etc. Let the gov portion out everything to "provide for the general welfare" and no one gets anything better than anyone else, and everyone has equal acccess to health care, food, housing, transportation, etc
Politics - 2 Answers
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1 :
All will be coming soon at the rate Obama is going.........sad, sad, sad
2 :
Because food is still a free-market activity here. Automobiles are not a free-market good, and neither is housing, transportation, or medical care. Government regulation controls what the supply looks like from the consumer's point of view. In almost all communities, if you bought a piece of land, and built a plywood shack on it to live in, you would be in jail in a heartbeat. Also, if you built your own car out of spare parts of lawnmowers and bicycles, you would also be in jail. You could count roads and highways as transportation, which are a public good and supported and repaired with taxes from those who would either use or benefit from them. Public transportation is a public good and also a benefit as those who don't drive, or can't afford to drive, have access to a wider world out there. I detect that you believe that their is something wrong with access to medical care. Insurance is the gate-keeper of access to medical care. Some states allow the uninsured access to life-saving treatments, and some do but make them pay, or have a very low qualification income ceiling. Just think, if we had food insurance, no one would be able to buy meat. It would cost hundreds of dollars a pound, as most dietitians and nutritionists believe that meat is very bad for you. Also, you would not be able to buy alcohol, tobacco, and lard. I'm sure that your imagination can come up with foods we all have access to, at paltry prices, that are considered very,very bad, like ice cream. If there was no health insurance, doctors and other highly-paid medical professionals would be driving around in Hyundais, not BMWs or Hummers. They would have to live in neighborhoods like mine, and shop at Wal-mart or K-Mart. Health care is no more a free-market activity than all the other activities you name. Personally, I want my doctor to care more about my health than about his next car payment or his junket off to some exotic realm. Most doctors go into medicine to get rich, not to help people or ease suffering. There are still a few who do care, but since those who don't care are now the majority, the relationship between doctor and patient has ceased to be a free-market activity

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