Matt

I'm hearing economic conservatives talk about "rationing" healthcare, saying that healthcare is a scarce resource, and the best, most equitable way supply it is based on a person's ability to pay. That system may not be perfect, they'll argue, but they think it's still pretty awesome. Any other form of rationing using the influence of government is worse, because government is clumsy, ineffecient, and caught up in liberal interests like "equality."

I already have them beat: how about rationing medical based on who is going to die if they don't get treatment.

(Economic conservatives hate this idea because it is exactly the same as saying "as according to need," which is something Karl Marx said, therefore evil. I hope Marx didn't like basketball!!)

Anyway.

You can tell I am a bit of a contrarian when I mingle in economically conservative circles. I happen to be of the beleif that, on the slim chance that there is such a limited supply of healthcare that paying more people to become doctors would never work, it just doesn't make sense to have one person on a plan that gives him six referrals a month for acupuncture and a chiropractor because of his achy back, when the next person, who can't afford that plan, has leukemia that she will ultimately die of because of her medical circumstsances. Lets say she does have insurance, but her plan is only useful for catastrophic emergencies because of a hugely unaffordable annual deductable, so she, being a good budget-conscious person, doesn't get checkups, and didn't go to the doctor until she was showing bad symptoms. It turned out to be late in the course of the disease there's a 75% chance that she will die now even with expensive treatment.

I think a lot of people are in denial that this kind of thing even happens, and secondarily they'll argue that if it does it's impossible to change things for the better. First they're not paying attention, and second they're being painfully uncreative. But that's because their position doesn't really come from observations or pragmatism, it comes from a certain ideological perspective on how everything in society ought to be run.

That is: economic conservatives are very attached to the idea of free market capitalism. But in a culture inundated with capitalism's messags it is easy to lose perspective on what the free market actually is and what it isn't. We live in a post-industrial society, and the market isn't based on "labor" and "capital" in the old-fashioned sense; most of our stuff is made in Asia or Latin America, and our economy is based on services, a more abstract category of goods (like intellectual property) and on investing. Investing is key because it requires surplus income and good luck, and virtually everyone needs to do it to retire.

Many will have you think the way the economy works is to give the most money to those most willing to work hard. Now I won't argue that hard work is a valuable thing to be doing. Unfortunately, we happen to live in a world where people go to college and get a degree so that they'll have to work less hard in their lives (I sure as hell hoped for that when I went to school), and as much as we want to beleive that only the most deserving people make it, that's not how things shake out.

People don't put moral character and determination on their resume. You can write it in, but what employers want to know is what you've done and where you've been. A little fib here and there, though unscrupulous, turns out to be helpful, though not as helpful as knowing someone in high places - something that depends a lot on the community you were born into. In America, income is not based on work. The people you see at bus stops at 4 in the morning to clean the hotel beds or sweeping our streets - the most uncomfortable and inconvenient jobs - are poor, not rich. I bet the vast majority of people in this country making between $30,000 and $50,000 a year would love to accept a 60-hour workweek for a few years if they were guaranteed a six-figure income, if only they could land that job or its training. I bet the vast majority of people in this country would love to be an invester or be offered a million dollars by inheritance even if they weren't allowed to spend a penny of that - not even a penny - but simply they invested it, doubled their money in 25 years, and then had to pay the original million dollars back.

Unfortunately our world doesn't work that way. More often than not the people who make the most money had something other than willingness to work going for them: they had elusive skills beyond their ardent toil and suffering. They were savvy. Innately confident. They had a high IQ. They were able-bodied. They had an expensive education - starting in private elementary schools. They had private tutors. They knew the language of power and business. They got positive feedback to keep them going. They were "cool." They had friends or family members who knew people. They had a reputable family name. An the end, while few rich people have all those qualities, the mixture of those qualities they had paid off for them. They started out lucky and got lucky breaks.

Capitalism is, in the end, a game. It is your ability to play the game correctly, along with your natural-born talent, that gets you ahead.

Now I am willing to concede that capitalism is all we have to progress in the free world. Communism doesn't work, and people are ultimately happier and more secure if they have their own private property with the autonomy to do what they want with it. They want the control to determine their immediate surroundings, to choose their job, and if they believe the government or the community mismanages its resources, they are entitled to their own separate savings account or sphere of wealth and to do what they want with most of what they earn. I concede that capitalism is necessary, and even good.

But it's still a game, that requires natural-born talent, an able body and mind, and a few luky rolls of the dice. Some things are okay to ration as according to that game; the size of the house you live in, the fanciness of your car, the tennis court, the swimming pool, the number of rooms in it can all be rationed that way, I suppose because there's not much of a better way to do it.

But not life or death. Life or death should not be dolled out so tenuously. So in its place I propose a fairer game, the Free-Market Medical-Treatment Basketball Tournament for Economic Liberty, Market-Based Distribution and Freedom!!!.

Everybody can don their fancy basketball shorts and a tank-top, and it's onto the court to play!

First thing we do is put everyone in the country onto teams of 6 (five players one alternate) with people who have their same ability level, which will be judged in the pregame period. You get a couple (free!!!) training sessions - you can choose whether or not you go - then other players vote on how good they think you are, and choose what team to put you on. If you drop the ball a few times it might not be good for your placement.

This game is played like every other basketball tournament, and through the tournament's play, all teams will be ranked against the other teams. They will be ranked from the best players, to the worst. All people regardless of age, weight and physical disability must play. If you're in a wheelchair - gonna be tough for you buddy! - but this is no less fair than how we ration resources or jobs in the real world. For example if you were born with Down's Syndrome and your IQ is 60 you're going to get a banking job, so you just have to try to cut it as well as you can. If you have poor motor skills, also too bad. Those with poor social skills don't get a handicap at work; they have to find a lower-paying job that suits them. Those with no training in basketball are, similarly, shit outta luck. That was your choice to not get trained there, buddy! Either that or you weren't good enough to make it to advanced classes. Those without college degrees don't get a pay bonus to compensate for their lack of knowledge!

But hey - you may say - really old people are at a total natural disadvantage over young people! They were once young, too, one could argue, but even so, you argue; this basketball tournament is a one time deal, and it's not their fault for the year they were born!

Tsk tsk sir. It's not a person's fault for the income level/community he/she was born into either. Some old people might be in good enough shape to hold their own - just as lots of poor people hold their own and get ahead. But we don't give you automatic pay raises or promotions because of where you were born.

Okay okay, fine, we can throw in a “minority scholarship” for middle-aged folks. They get a few free classes to get them up to speed, and we'll try to place the ones who give the most effort on teams with younger players who are a little better than they are, so that they are pushed a little harder to get in shape. (The younger players will howl and whine about the "unfairness" of it till our ears bleed. You know, that's affirmative action, which is racist. So we won’t do it often; just on a few select occasions.)

You say men have an advantage over women? Ah, you already know how we're likely to handle that.

After the first round of games, we do some 1-on-1 games to see if there are a few individual shooting stars out there who were weighed down by their team, for some additional shakeup.

Okay everybody! Lets play some basketball!

The people who score in the highest 30% of the tournament are our winners. Clearly the most deserving and determined people in our competition - Unlimited healthcare! They get their life-threatening conditions treated, obviously, and if they get tendonitis or shin splints well let them see some physical therapists to work on that, too. They get to see a psychiatrist or psychologist if they need one, and get whatever medication they want. Need an acupuncturist? Go for it! Need some massage work done? We'll provide that too. Hey -- YOU EARNED IT!!!

The people in the middle 40% can get whatever's left. We'll try to give them care for the most serious conditions, but if somebody in the top category is having his slipped disc looked at, you aren't exactly our top priority for that swollen ankle. Sure it looks bad but it's not gonna kill you, is it? Unless it's broken, you're gonna have to wait in line.

Those in the bottom 30% get nothing. Unless it's, you know, life threatening, like you're bleeding to death, then you can go to a hospital; but you have to prove it to us. You don't get regular physicals or screenings.

Sound fair?
Confident you'd do well in the competition?
It's at least as fair as things are with a totally market-based approach to healthcare. See in our society, we think the best players in the game of life have the liberty to do what they want with their success.

Fair enough for most things, maybe - BUT NOT FOR HEALTHCARE. Call your local representative and ask them to support a Public Health Insurance Option if you want something better for America.

I've been brewing my own Kombucha Tea lately so I made a video on how you do that:

Prediction: the reason that Sarah Palin is resigning from the governorship from Alaska is that something from her emails (which are part of the public record) as the governor of Alaska would incriminate her in a scandal, as she is fighting against their release. She's either hoping that in resigning and retiring from the spotlight she can avoid having their release by escaping public pressure to open them, or is hoping that she will be far enough from the spotlight that the turmoil after their release will not be as intense so she will have the chance of running for office again.

The higher you go in public office, the more you must clean up your act because you'll come under greater scrutiny. Politicians tend to rise slowly and therefore can "grow up" over time (think of George W. Bush's 1976 DUI arrest, 24 years before he became president when he was 30), but Palin was thrust into the spotlight so quickly and unexpectedly that she didn't have the chance to prepare, or at least didn't have the chance to let her past activities become old news the way most politicians college days, bad habits, DUIs and personal issues fade from importance.


**Update July 5, 2:00pm MT**

Sarah Palin's attorney released a statement threatening to sue for defamation any publications that allege Sarah Palin could have been involved in unsavory activities leading up to her resignation.

For her attorney to do so would be laughable, because Sarah Palin is a public figure and office holder, making her fair game for almost any kind of coverage or commentary by the First Amendment's guarantee to freedom of political speech. For any politician to win a lawsuit against the press for defamation would be almost impossible, and would certainly be an unprecedented decision that would change the way we cover politics in this country.

Aside from that, it really ruins Sarah Palin's image as a fighter as a tough-as-nails maverick governor who swims upstream. Sarah Palin has fronted an onslaught of allegations over her political career - ranging from the solidly plausible to left-field baseless criticism. She and those in her camp have complained repeatedly about attacks on her personal spending habits, her daughter's pregnancy, her intelligence and her competence and allegations of ties to Right-wing fringe or separatist groups. But this is something that all politicians deal with when they are widely known, and those on the far-right and far-left (Sarah Palin represents one of those camps) are most at fault. Barack Obama has faced repeated allegations that he isn't really a U.S. citizen or that he is a Muslim in league with terrorists, President Clinton faced rape and murder allegations while in office by the very same political camp that Sarah Palin is most popular in, and George W. Bush was accused of Plotting September 11, which probably takes the cake for how theoretically "damaging" a false allegation (if everyone believed it) would be.

Of course the media is going to speculate on Palin's resignation, because no politician in any prominent office in recent history has resigned without having faced a scandal or at least a serious personal issue equivalent to a cancer diagnosis. And Palin's utter lack of explanation (she said she didn't want to become a "lame duck" after informing everyone won't run for office again - something that could have been avoided simply by waiting longer to announce she wasn't running) for her move, coupled with her already divisive and controversial public image, make it one of the strangest political curiosities in recent history.

The threat from Palin is absurd, and is likely to spark another round of more intense speculation from the press rather than intimidate anyone into backing off. One thing her camp has continuously failed to do since she first emerged in prominence last year is to have any clue about what those outside the far-Right are thinking or doing. Most of the moves by her and the McCain campaign to seem bold or independent have come across as desperate or nonsensical to the American public. Her resigning from the governor's office may have been the the most bizarre yet - and a lawsuit against any media organization for defamation would really take the cake.

From DailyKos: If the Republicans' idea of compromise [on healthcare] is 'drop[ping] their opposition to universal coverage' why can't our idea of compromise be 'dropping our determination to give a free Pony to every child on his fourth year checkup?' We'll meet in the middle at a single payer system. How 'bout that?"



( Call your Senator )

A reminder of why the ideological Right was so virulently opposed to Al Franken as senator from Minnesota:



Most politicians intentionally avoid such spats as head-on debates with fringe figures like Ann Coulter; they don't win many friends beyond those who were already on your side, but they do win enemies. Meanwhile, it was Franken who wrote a book titled Lies, and the Lying Liars who Tell Them, about Fox News and political commentators from the right, including Ann Coulter. Franken did his homework and was very well-sourced and careful to avoid making points that are disingenuous or easy to refute, something that another icon of the Left, Michael Moore, often failed to do. But Al Franken wasn't likely to pry away any followers of the ideological Right for his work, and the very title of his book indicated he wasn't interested in making friends across the aisle.

On the other hand, Al Franken's is a demonstration of how much the Democratic brand was outperforming the Republican brand in 2008; try imagining Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity unseating an incumbent Democrat from any state.

To most people the philosophy of Hell is a non-issue. If you are agnostic or atheist or from a religion that doesn't believe in Hell, you think, why should one believe in some mythical place invented by some other group of people, with no evidenciary basis, and a lot of reasoning based on premises that can't be proved? If you are a believer you say of course there is a Hell, but I'm in the right church and I'm not going, so what do I care?

But if you grew up Roman Catholic, like I did, hell, taught as a physical place, is a founding part of your religion, and something you learn to fear. Whether you are Catholic or Protestant, Christian doctrine teaches that all people are sinners, and having even the slightest, tiniest unforgiven sin on your record means you are damned for eternity. Jesus is the atonement for your sin; accept Jesus as your Lord (meaning accept him as God), and because Jesus died on the cross, your record is wiped clean! He was punished in your place! By his love and mercy you are free!

The fate of your non-Christian family or friends notwithstanding, there are some hardships to accepting this with glee. Catholic doctrine teaches that most people lapse into "mortal sin" from time to time, so you must repent and go to confession to re-gain grace. Mortal sins are seen as a rejection of God so they aren't automatically forgiven like other kinds. If you die "in sin" before you get to confession, you go to hell. Mortal sins include big, obvious things like rape, murder, genocide, torture, adultery and intentionally offending God.

They also include everything sexual you can think of, even if it doesn't seem that harmful; in Catholicism, ALL sexual activity outside marriage (even if there is no penetration), masturbation, or even "deep kissing" (according to my church's youth group leader), are mortal sins. Even entertaining sexual fantasies can be a mortal sin. Acting on any sexual impulse the Church doesn't like is damnable, so if you are one of those rare individuals attracted only to the same sex, you are taught that you will either die a virgin, or find yourself, at many points in your life, in mortal sin you must repent.

Nowadays they don't teach the littlest kids about Hell. You grow up vaguely aware of the fact that the world's worst people go there, but it doesn't affect you or anybody you know. I remember telling my parents I thought the Book of Revelations was hooey because there's no way God would be so cruel. At Catechism they only talk about heaven until you're 13 or 14 years old - they don't want to piss off your parents by scaring you - and then they spring it on you when you're a hormoned teenager and you really want to do the things you'll be condemned for. That's when you learn that not only is there a real Lake of Fire somewhere in the universe for bad people like Hitler and Timothy McVeigh, but MOST people, far more than half, end up there: society is full of hellbound miscreants who are the either wrong on religion, don't believe in God at all, reject God at the end out of bitterness, stop going to church out of laziness or apathy, or most commonly, die in sin. (Like they have sex with their teenaged girlfriend before marriage, you'll be informed.) But you are one of the lucky few, your church instructors explain: you are Catholic, so don't have anything to worry about, just so long as you don't have the wrong kind of sex or have sex too early.

( continue )

From a film-critical standpoint, Drag me to Hell is entertaining. It achieves what it sets out to achieve - to be a shocking, fun, jumpy and self-satirical film. It requires a hefty dose of suspension-of-disbelief, but remains within its boundaries. Every bit of information offered early on is important later, and a rich and funny scene with the protagonist and her soon-to-be in-laws ads a familiar element to an otherwise horror film. Some parts of Drag me to Hell are so gross or playful that they'd be jarring in a serious film, but this movie is delightful for those who like gratuitous terror, green vomit and slimy mucus pouring from rotting corpses. You get the sense that the director is poking fun of other horror flicks with the utter cheesiness of some of the dialog.

The film has little literary or social value; to take anything in it seriously would mean admitting that many of the ethnic portrayals in the film are so hyperbolized in their stereotyping that it becomes problematic. Get ready for the familiar trope of wise brown-skinned people representing the mystic or supernatural, because there is a lot of it here. (See Michael Clarke Duncan as the feeble-minded yet holy giant Black prisoner in The Green Mile, Brandon Walters as the earthy, Aborigines boy in Australia or Tourism Australia's commercial, or Gloria Foster as the all-knowing Black oracle in The Matrix trilogy to see more of what I'm talking about.) This film has an East Indian psychic as its main spiritual guide, and an even more powerful Latina psychic medium who does a dramatic spiritual battle with the antagonist demon. Meanwhile, we cannot leave out the utterly cliché curse from an old Gypsy witch with one eye, which sets the film's plot in motion. One scene where the protagonist visits the Gypsy home is painfully stereotypical; everything you ever associated with Gypsies: a candle-lit room, boisterous laughter, copious amount of food and reveling, walls utterly covered in adornments, Eastern European iconography, framed pictures of deceased relatives set on empty table places, and huge numbers of people packed in a small space are randomly present inside the otherwise-inconspicuous home. There is even someone playing a fucking Gypsy Violin in there while they eat dinner, for chrissakes.

Every character seems to be enveloped in a cliché social archetype; the young university professor boyfriend who is a rationalist and initially dismissive of his girlfriend's interest in the supernatural, the grotesquely-wealthy, self-absorbed and restrained parents who live in an immaculate home and want their son to marry into high society, the boss figure, played by a Jewish actor, who is fixated on nothing but the bottom line, the career-hungry but groveling Asian who will do anything for a promotion is the protagonists main competitor at work, and the once-chubby former farm girl who wants nothing but to prove herself. And lets not forget our two main psychics, who are familiar with this kind of gypsy curse, and turn to esoteric books to inform us everything we need to know about every kind of supernatural being or phenomenon.

The film is fun if you're willing to laugh at it, with spine-tingling demon scenes and lots of startles. But I'm not a film critic - I wouldn't post an entry here to discuss a film from the standpoint of is it entertaining or not.


What moved me in Drag me to Hell is the depraved immorality of the universe itself. The ultimate premise of the film is grotesque: it accepts a Christian-Islamic version of an eternal hell of flames and lava, but hell is not where a person goes because of evil deeds or even lack of faith; in this film, you go to hell because you are the owner of a cursed object you don't even know is cursed, and three days after obtaining said object you are pulled down alive into the fire. What bothers me most is how lightly the idea of going to hell is taken in a film that is ultimately meant to be amusing and funny.

That's why Drag me to Hell is so troublesome, whether you see that troublesomeness as a good thing or a bad thing. I can tell you without spoiling the plot that at least one innocent person does get "dragged to hell" in this film, in the very beginning - a young Mexican boy, not even ten years old, who, too young to even comprehend what he was doing, "stole" a necklace from some Gypsies and was not allowed to give it back. It is 30 years before the rest of the film's plot takes place, and introduces the psychic Shaun San Dena, who calls after the demon that they will meet again after it successfully claims the terrified young boy.

This film is like a cross between a traditional horror films and films that portray epic spiritual battles between heaven and hell, like The Prophesy and Constantine - each with its own theological universe - except that Drag me to Hell battles the forces of hell with no theological universe beyond a viewer's speculation and no explanation of good. Throughout the film there is no mention of whether or not God exists, or why there is no good force that can overpower this particular demon. There is no mention of why the lamia (the evil demon that fetches the miserable souls) is allowed to travel to and from hell but the human inhabitants are stuck there for eternity. There is no explanation as to why demons, who are themselves revealed to be somewhat mortal, lack infinite power but hell itself contains infinite power to trap forever the people the demons catch. There is no explanation as to how it is different being pulled there alive through a portal in the ground than to go there after death as consistent with traditional theology.

I'm rather shocked that the film got away with being rated PG-13. If full-frontal-nudity or bloody violence is considered too traumatizing for young children to handle, then surely the thought of someone their age being sucked down to burn for eternity is more likely to give them nightmares. The most disturbing movie clip of my entire childhood was the Hell scene from All Dogs Go to Heaven and this one was far, far worse.

There are a few ironies in the plot that the writers simply overlooked. It is strange that a woman who grew up on a farm raising pigs would later identify as a PETA-friendly vegetarian who is shocked by the idea of slaughtering animals, as the film later explicitly states. It's also strange that the Gypsy woman, who was presumably an ordinary human, becomes more or less a disembodied stand-in for the powerful demon at different points of the film - or why she is so adamant during a time later in the film (I will try not to give too much away) to prevent the protagonist from putting a meaningless coin on a tombstone.

They are really excessive on the sound effects in some places; the dog growling sound while the old woman tries to bite the protagonist just puts it over the top.

There is no explanation as to why the protagonist didn't tell her boyfriend more of what was going on - there is first an easy enough assumption that she kept it secret because he wouldn't understand, but when he later reveals that she did tell him part of the story off-camera, and he seems to beleive her, it leaves a question on how some of the tragic events of the film could have been avoided had he known more.

If you watch the trailer carefully you could probably use it to guess how the movie ends.

If the public were to directly vote on a government-run option for health insurance, the initiative would win in a landslide, according to a recent New York Times poll that only reaffirmed what we already knew from other polls about public support for this plan. Not only does the public option have a mandate among the general populace, but even fifty percent of Republicans support it.

Yet it still may not pass. Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com explains:

The bottom line is that the health care debate is not really being played out in the court of public opinion. If it were, Congress would pass a robust plan with a public option that was funded by raising taxes on cigarettes, booze, and people making over $250,000, and we'd live happily ever after (or not). Rather, this is a behind-the-scenes fight at the committee level, where certain senators who have ample financial incentives to please the insurance industry have a disproportionate amount of control over the process.

I'm generally not one to carp about special interest money -- seeing politics through that lens is often an overly reductive formulation that serves as a catch-all excuse any time Congress does something you don't like. But on something like the public option, which has broad public support and which would probably reduce -- not increase -- the long-run bill to the taxpayers, it is just about the only way to explain what's going on in Washington.

How shameful would it be for this plan to fail?

Here's another entry from fivethirtyeight where Nate Silver says essentially what I said in my last post about healthcare:

George Will Admits Public Option will Cut Costs.

Nate explains that George Will's argument is essentially that: of course government would do better than private insurance companies, because they have no need to make a profit, and that's unfair competition.

Which essentially means, we are ideologically opposed, even though your camp is technically more right on the facts. And what I'm saying is, ideological opposition is ideological opposition, so why turn around and use false factual arguments to back that up?

I'm running into a common breakdown when discussing healthcare policy with economic conservatives. They are people who believe that taxation to pay for government programs is unfair or immoral, and because of that belief, argue that any form of government-provided healthcare is bound to fail and dig up a bunch of statistical or factual points about why they think it would. Or to be more accurate, they think adjusting our already-public/private system by creating a government-sponsored public healthcare option is a "step in the wrong direction" and therefore bring up points about why they think it would waste money and lead to worsening health conditions. There are rapid shifts from moral to factual arguments.

This is akin to discussing theology based on someone's personal interests:

Person A: I know there is a god.
Person B: How do you know?
Person A: Because there should be something to right the wrongs in the world.

There may be a god, or there may not - I'm not trying to get in to that argument - but the above argument is a non-sequiter. Just because you want something to be so doesn't mean it is.

Similarly, just because you think that taxing income to provide healthcare for low-income people represents what you call an immoral redistribution of wealth - a power that the government has no legitimate claim to - doesn't mean that using a government program to provide better healthcare to our 50 million uninsured people could only do so by worsening healthcare for everyone else.

I doubt that many economic conservatives are even fully aware that their passionate opposition to a government health insurance provider - that they still oppose to even if it were, for the sake of conversation, completely self-supporting and not require tax dollars - is based on their desire to see society structured in a certain way but not actual facts or interests. But it would be hard to argue that the uninsured's interest in getting access to better healthcare outweighs a private insurance company's interest in their profits, or their own asthetic preference for private over public entities - and that their passion in opposing it is really proportional to how destructive they honestly think it would be.

To be fair, there are people on the other side of the aisle who make similar leaps. Some want a public option because they would rather buy in to that option and have their money go into a common public plan than a private entity, which they consider immoral. Others dislike the private sector in general, or just want to stick it to those mean rich guys. But I consider this more of a European-style leftist attitude than one of American liberalism, which, excepting a few hardliners, is open to the market if that's the best way to solve the issue we want solved.

Also to be fair, I am sure there are some opponents of government-subsidized healthcare who reached that conclusion out of reasoned analysis rather than a need to fit their observations into a predetermined ideology, and there are also liberals who support government healthcare for ideological reasons - one of the main reasons why I and most other liberals want to increase access to healthcare is that we consider 50 million uninsured Americans to be morally unacceptable. So it is a moral argument. But we have sought out, and would consider, any number of a wide variety of plausible solutions to expanding access. Single-payer would be the preferable option for many liberals, but we'd be willing to compromise for a public option in a private market if it were more feasible or more likely to make it through the political process. We'd be willing to consider a variety of options if it could be argued better than how it is working now. I think you could argue that we are operating under a pragmatic concern rather than a moral one - we'd be up for anything if you can convince us that it makes healthcare better for everyone and expands the number of people who have access to it.

The scarcity argument does not work for me - healthcare is a service, and is therefore as scarce as monetary resources spent on healthcare put in the right places. The scarcity argument would only in economies that have no expendable income or economies that aren't wasting the vast majority of dollars already spend on healthcare - maybe Africa or Southeast Asia, where people have a hard enough time paying for food. We do not need to "ration" healthcare - a buzzword of the Right - when we live in an extremely wealthy society that has as many resources for healthcare as we provide. Putting money into healthcare on behalf of those who currently do not have access could certainly lead to an increase in the number of doctor's offices, doctors and nurses and other medical staff, medical research and resources. Scarcity is only limited by the number of people employed in the profession and the efficiency with which we use those resources. Furthermore, giving low-income people access to preventative care would reduce the need for delayed care which is more expensive and uses more resources - which is the single most important issue I and most liberal advocates of healthcare reform will talk about. It is perfectly reasonable to believe that shifting the system around and encouraging people to see a doctor sooner would ultimately reduce the scarcity of healthcare in America - and it's what most economists and experts say anyway.

I've heard the scarcity argument from six or seven people now, who insisted that any government intervention in healthcare would mean it is being "rationed," and it seems to be more of something fed by university economics departments than a real-world analysis, or in some cases even a scare tactic. They have the need to fit the same basic principles to everything because doing so tends to put factual arguments in a framework of their moral philosophy. I didn't graduate with a degree in economics so I can't name any philosophy that argues that in some cases, in an industry that is a service rather than a good, scarcity is limited by how much much energy we choose to spend and not a physical property, but if I did know, I'd name that.