Well Mr. Brewer, glib appraisals of your betters aside, you know nothing about me. I've been in business for myself for quite a few years and always made money. I never complained incessantly about taxation because I figured out at a pretty early age that we all have to fit into society, that it's a classic Prisoner's Dilemma and that society has things like sick children that, if we are to call ourselves anything but a morally bankrupt bunch of self-centered monkeys, we have a duty to try to mitigate that sort of suffering.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, because your life can change for the nightmarish worst at the turn of a dime.

-Kerry O.

Ad hominem......Oh my! I was not attacking you, I was commenting on the post you made equating health care delivery to slavery.

From everything I have seen thus far and read on the proposed health care reform bills, I can't seem to find any reference to where doctors would be required to provide their services for free. Perhaps you can enlighten me.

How rational is it to pool risk when you know for a fact every single person is going to cash in multiple times? Thats anything but rational. At least in a pyramid scheme the early investors get paid. This smacks of a system designed to fail. Because it was. Its failure will be a perfect chance for another power grab by government...in conditions brought about by government....imagine that....

I have not relied on false logic. I have certainly pointed it out when others use it, yes, but I avoid it myself (unless I do so to make a point). FYI, I'm not a "neo-anarchist" (I've never heard of it), I'm an anarcho-capitalist. This philosophy has been around in one form or another for most of civilization's history.

The reason I am not being inconsistent "By showing you have relied and continue to rely on the same thing you're poor mouthing" is that the existing system is so pervasive as to make it impossible for me to do what I want to do (so far). This argument goes all the way back to Socrates when he proved that he did not owe anything to the Athenian State just because he lived there. (I highly suggest you read "The Trial of Socrates" to understand this)

The point of speaking out against the State has never been to immediately win converts, but to help people understand and self-actualize to the point where they no longer rely on the State. Unlike Statist philosophers, I adhere to the non-initiation of force (all State action is force). I believe it was Gandhi who said "you must be the change you want to see in the world".

Where I come from, receiving help from family and friends is NOT being responsible. Doing it on my own is being responsible to me.

"We need to maintain a free society so that we can make choices to live how we want. Rich people give to charity, poor ones dont."

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That's a myth. U.S. Labor of Statistics: The poorest fifth of households contributed 4.3% of their incomes and the riches fifth gave 2.1% of their incomes in 2007.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/68456.html

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"If half the country wants to insure 30 million citizens and 16 million illegals, start a foundation and broker a policy for them, some insurance carrier gets a giant market share or they all grow, the cost is cheap, and nobody was forced at gunpoint to pay for it."

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Nobody is insuring the illegals.

You're right. But I'm referring to situations in which I could not help myself for one reason or another (it has to be real bad, cuz I'm an independent minded type, like hospitalization for chronic illness). I always do everything for myself that I can. When I wanted double bass lessons or a new guitar, I painted the house... When I wanted to study at MIAET, I earned a scholarship, etc, etc.

health care is a right that all american's should have. I agree with mrs. melody.

OK, hes going to legalize them first so technically you are right. You know damn well obama is not going to turn illegals away even if he didnt plan to legalize them.

Its no myth. In typical liberal fashion you assign the wrong facts to things. heres what you need to know:
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U.S. More Charitable Than Any Other Country
by Jon Holato on June 26th, 2007

According to an AP story via USA Today, Americans gave nearly $300 billion to charity in 2006, setting a record that even topped giving in 2005, which saw a surge in aid to victims of hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma and the Asian tsunami.

Total American donations last year amount to an estimated $295.02 billion, which is a 1% increase over the 2005 amount ($283.05 billion) when adjusted for inflation. Of the 2006 amount, individuals accounted for 75.6%, or $223.03 billion.

Not impressed? Consider it from an alternative perspective, the percentage of GDP given to charity. In this case, the U.S. more than doubles the second place country, Britain. The U.S. ranked first at 1.7%, Britain was second with 0.73%, while France, with a dismal 0.14% rate, trailed countries such as South Africa, Singapore, Turkey and Germany.

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The point I was making, I admit I didnt articulate it well, is that when you have a giant social state it relieves people of the moral obligation to help the poor, Furthermore, because it lowers economic growth and foments social unrest, it puts people in a position they are unable to help. Ill take 2.1% of bill gates income over 4.3 percent of the local garbage mans income. Ive never been to a hospital funded by leroy the mechanic but I have been in one funded by the Dupont family trust. Hate the rich all you want, but riches bring guilt that feeds charity.

Not all problems should be solved by government. If so many people, many of them rich liberals, are so worried about the problem why not start a trust or open free clinics? Why extort your countrymen at gunpoint in this manner?

Where did I claim to know something of you?

What does your choice to enjoy ever increasing taxation for things that are unconstitutional have to do with my obligation to also accept it?

Prisoners dilemma eh, so you feel imprisoned, might as well help put bars around the rest of us?

I named your IRS agent, how bout name me one child that died because it was denied care based on money.

This is the problem with your ilk, you cannot fathom how a person could be against a government takeover of health care and yet not want little babies with crooked legs to suffer or some crap. Please, get over yourself.

What is this crap about nightmarish stuff? Is that a threat? Some allusion to one day i wont have health care? Im far more worried about dying bed ridden because the government denies me a hip due to rationing, you said you were here in the sixties, perhaps it is you who should be careful what you wish for.

Ill tell you about bells tolling:

Look what you’re missing in the U.K.:

* Breast cancer kills 25 percent of its American victims. In Great Britain, the Vatican of single-payer medicine, breast cancer extinguishes 46 percent of its targets.

* Prostate cancer is fatal to 19 percent of its American patients. The National Center for Policy Analysis reports that it kills 57 percent of Britons it strikes.

* Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data show that the U.K.’s 2005 heart-attack fatality rate was 19.5 percent higher than America’s. This may correspond to angioplasties, which were only 21.3 percent as common there as here.

* The U.K.’s National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) just announced plans to cut its 60,000 annual steroid injections for severe back-pain sufferers to just 3,000. This should save the government 33 million pounds (about $55 million). “The consequences of the NICE decision will be devastating for thousands of patients,” Dr. Jonathan Richardson of Bradford Hospitals Trust told London’s Daily Telegraph. “It will mean more people on opiates, which are addictive, and kill 2,000 a year. It will mean more people having spinal surgery, which is incredibly risky, and has a 50 per cent failure rate.”

* “Seriously ill patients are being kept in ambulances outside hospitals for hours so NHS trusts do not miss Government targets,” Daniel Martin wrote last year in London’s Daily Mail. “Thousands of people a year are having to wait outside accident and emergency departments because trusts will not let them in until they can treat them within four hours, in line with a Labour [party] pledge. The hold-ups mean ambulances are not available to answer fresh 911 calls. Doctors warned last night that the practice of ‘patient-stacking’ was putting patients’ health at risk.”

Things don’t look much better up north, under Canadian socialized medicine.

* Canada has one-third fewer doctors per capita than the OECD average. “The doctor shortage is a direct result of government rationing, since provinces intervened to restrict class sizes in major Canadian medical schools in the 1990s,” Dr. David Gratzer, a Canadian physician and Manhattan Institute scholar, told the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee on June 24. Some towns address the doctor dearth with lotteries in which citizens compete for rare medical appointments.

* “In 2008, the average Canadian waited 17.3 weeks from the time his general practitioner referred him to a specialist until he actually received treatment,” Pacific Research Institute president Sally Pipes, a Canadian native, wrote in the July 2 Investor’s Business Daily. “That’s 86 percent longer than the wait in 1993, when the [Fraser] Institute first started quantifying the problem.”

* Such sloth includes a median 9.7-week wait for an MRI exam, 31.7 weeks to see a neurosurgeon, and 36.7 weeks – nearly nine months – to visit an orthopedic surgeon.

* Thus, Canadian supreme court justice Marie Deschamps wrote in her 2005 majority opinion in Chaoulli v. Quebec, “This case shows that delays in the public health care system are widespread, and that, in some cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care.”

Obamacare proponents might argue that their health reforms are neither British nor Canadian, but just modest adjustments to America’s system. This is false. The public option – for which Democrats lust – would fuel an elephantine $1.5 trillion overhaul of this life-and-death industry. Having Uncle Sam in the room while negotiating drug prices and hospital reimbursement rates will be like sitting beside Warren Buffett at an art auction. Guess who goes home with the goodies?

A public option is just the opening bid for eventual nationalization of American medicine. As House Banking Committee chairman Barney Frank (D., Mass.) told SinglepayerAction.Org on July 27: “The best way we’re going to get single payer, the only way, is to have a public option to demonstrate its strength and its power.”

Barack Obama seconds that emotion.

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately,” Obama told a March 24, 2007 Service Employees International Union health-care forum. “There’s going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision [single payer] a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out.” As he told the AFL-CIO in 2003: “I happen to be a proponent of single-payer, universal health-care coverage. . . . That’s what I’d like to see.”

And why a public option just for medicine? Wouldn’t government clothing stores be best suited to furnish the garments Americans need to survive each winter? And why not a public option for restaurants? Shouldn’t Americans have universal access to fine dining?

All kidding aside, government medicine has proved an excruciating disaster in the U.K. and Canada. Our allies’ experiences with this dreadful idea should horrify rather than inspire everyday Americans, not to mention seemingly blind Democratic politicians.
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So you and mrs melody should start a non-profit and provide it for them. Get to work! Ill probably throw in (but dont tell the local republicans).

The family is societies safety net. Its not about responsibility at all, its a family obligation to take care of their own. If one of them becomes an irresponsible crackhead, however, you might have to cut them off.

That right there is the fatal flaw of social programs. There is no way to avoid massive fraud, waste, and abuse. This leads to eventual collapse. Then you are back to reliance on family.

Build the society around a family and there is no need for totalitarianism. Thats why so many policies of the liberal/fascist/socialist crowd have negative effects on the family, its by design to create more people dependent on govt. Once dependent on govt you are their slave. Take the black community, the left was going to help them and fix them. Prior to the great society 85% of black kids were raised in 2 parent households. By the time the liberal/fascist/socialists were done with them over 70% of them are raised without a father. Now they have a nice uneducated group of government dependents who vote over 90% left in every election. Another mission accomplished by the american leftist.

By the way, how do you sleep at night knowing you always made a profit and all those people are starving right now? Unless you gave it all to charity and live in a cardboard box Im smelling some hypocrisy here...

The Constitution of the United States was written with the specific purpose of limiting what the federal government could do. The founders knew that, if given too much power, the federal government would turn out to be very much like the government from which they had just finished separating over a period of many years, and at the cost of an incredible number of lives.

"When the people fear the government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." - Thomas Jefferson

Typical liberal fashion? You're into name calling.

I wasn't talking about how much more Americans gave then other countries gave. I was talking about your comment, "Rich people give to charity, poor ones dont." That's a myth.

You missed the point of the conversation. The conversation was about responsibility.

Yes, I understand those kind of situations. You're lucky in that way. Many people don't have family or friends to help them out.

My comment was in regards to how socialism affects charity, my statstics relate to that.

And besides, its not a myth:

􀂾 Average tax filers with $1 million to $1.5 million in adjusted gross income made annual charitable donations of $47,232. This amounted to 0.55% of their $8.5 million in estimated investment assets.
􀂾 Average income tax filers with $1.5 million to $2 million in AGI made annual charitable donations of $58,042. This amounted to 0.46% of their $12.5 million in estimated investment assets.
􀂾 Average income tax filers with $2 million to $5 million in AGI made annual charitable donations of $105,375. This amounted to 0.51% of their $20.68 million in estimated investment assets.
􀂾 Average income tax filers with $5 million to $10 million in AGI made annual charitable donations of $274,798. This amounted to 0.60% of their $46 million in estimated investment assets.
􀂾 Average income tax filers with $10 million or more in AGI made annual charitable donations of $1.83 million. This amounted to 1.21% of their $152 million in estimated investment assets.

-------so people that made 1 million gave almost as much to charity annually as the average wage in this country (about 50,000) It goes up from there. Yes as a percentage of adjustable growth income they give less but it is not a myth. If we continue down the marxist path these numbers go down across the board.

Responsibility for what?

Health care. I dont know what kind of family you come from but I make sure mine is taken care of and I dont intend to sick the government on my neighbors to accomplish that goal.

Responsible for himself.

Yes, you're right. You don't know what kind of caring family that I came from.