“Other services wouldn’t be free of charge. There would be nothing stopping you from using your insurance to get those ”
OK, where do you see this claim in the essay? Emmanuel never gets anywhere this close to outlining the specifics of any health care system. This is your defense of Obamacare, and the reiteration of your claim that private insurance would be untouched.
Same here:
“Do you understand? In Emaneul’s construction, the only thing that would change is that everyone would have access to a baseline of services. And even so, you could always use private insurance for every single one of those services instead. ”
Emmanuel doesn’t distinguish between private and public insurance, he distinguishes between guaranteed and discretionary. And the distinction between guaranteed and discretionary can be within a public system: i.e., everyone is guaranteed coverage for, say, pregnancy, but certain kinds of cancers are left to the discretion of the government bureaucrat.
And, of course, this:
“And by the way, none of this is actually in the bill, nor is there any chance in hell that it will ever happen in the United States. Imbeciles. That goes without saying, but you people are so mind-meltingly stupid that I really wonder how you managed to get all your fingers to move at the same time to write these posts.”
I do thank you for forcing me to go back to the text again–I hadn’t noticed, until I looked for it, the complete absence of any reference to private insurance. If anything, he is criticizing a system where “discretionary” services are determined by “wealth,” rather than by some kind of “public rationality.” That itself says more than all your flailing what this is really about.
The bigger question, still is what kinds of government intervention and control get justified by the use of the pleasant sounding “communitarian.”
