This was already addressed. You are conflating private industry with public government. There is a HUGE difference between tax money being spent on the public good and forcing an individual to purchase something from a private corporation that they will NEVER need.
Here’s a few questions for you, Steve.
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If, as you claim, the underlying issue is personal liberty, why does it matter at all whether or not you actually need the thing you are forced to buy? After all, for the sake of personal liberty shouldn’t you still be able to refuse the thing even if you need it?
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You’re saying that it’s OK for the government to tax you and later buy something for you, but not OK for the government to force you to buy that thing. Yet clearly the latter involves greater personal liberty, since in the latter case you are the one who gets to choose the particulars of the thing and who to buy it from. How can you justify this?
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Wouldn’t your argument apply equally to things like food stamps and school vouchers? Don’t those effectively force you to buy food and schooling from private corporations, just as the individual mandate forces you to buy health insurance?
[quote=“lackofcheese, post:22, topic:339”]
- If, as you claim, the underlying issue is personal liberty, why does it matter at all whether or not you actually need the thing you are forced to buy? After all, for the sake of personal liberty shouldn’t you still be able to refuse the thing even if you need it?
[/Quote]Yes. As a personal liberty issue you should be able to say no.
[Quote]
2) You’re saying that it’s OK for the government to tax you and later buy something for you, but not OK for the government to force you to buy that thing. Yet clearly the latter involves greater personal liberty, since in the latter case you are the one who gets to choose the particulars of the thing and who to buy it from. How can you justify this?
[/Quote]In the case of government programs in areas where the Constitution clearly grants power to the federal government to act they are fairly free to act as long as they stay within their legal framework. It is also expected that our elected representatives will take the will of the people into consideration when crafting such programs.
For example the Constitution clearly says the Legislature has the power to create an army and a navy. There is no mention of an air force. The early air force was part of the army and later was simply considered to be a “flying army” to square it with the Constitution. Funding for said army (though not the Navy) is limited to two years. There is nothing to prevent perpetual two year funding bills but some folks have claimed that a standing army is inconsistent with the Constitution. In today’s modern world a standing army is a requirement.
I believe that post civil war reconstruction was an epoch moment in American government where the tenth amendment was effectively over turned and the court packing fiasco of the New Deal led to Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution being turned on its head. When the commerce clause was interpreted to mean anything that might have an impact on commerce, even the absence of commerce well… Nothing is beyond the power of the US Legislature.
Back to your second point. If the government program helps everyone according to their needs while taxing everyone in the same fair manner then you should end up with more personal liberty to live your life with only a small expense due to taxation. So while it may seem at odds that I am against being forced to buy insurance while being perfectly OK with a single payer system it is not an irreconcilable stand to take. If the government program works as I would like it would also be the best value option available.
No. The SNAP program is extremely useful helping low income people put food on their table. There are restrictions on what you can purchase using SNAP but their are no requirements that a recipient HAS to purchase specific food items whether they want them or not.
School vouchers also help low income families move their children into better schools. This increases their future opportunities by (hopefully) giving them a better education today. Even in this case no one is being g forced to use them in a particular school, instead they are able to choose from a pool of schools.
As for ‘forcing you to buy from corporations’ … While the purchase options are only available from private corporations the choice of how to spend those funds is largely up to the personal choice of the recipient. IOW no one is being forced to buy bananas or send their kid to a specific school. Also these programs are financed by tax money not an individuals personal money. There is a difference between someone handing you $10 and telling you to buy some food and telling someone that they have to spend $10 of their own money on food.
Your position of applying these ridiculous semantics to women’s health care is openly sexist…
Your position of requiring men to pay women’s health care is openly sexist…
It works both ways when you put on the sexism lense. I would not expect women to pay for erectile dysfunction care as part of their policy either.
Are your arguments so poor that you have to resort to:
A. Tell me to fuck myself.
B. Repeat someone elses argument about tax==theft.
C. Call me a sexist.
Several forum members have made very persuasive arguments in this thread. Respectable arguments worthy of responding too. I have responded and tried my best to keep my responses in line with civil liberties, after all this discussion is about the ACLU and where it stands on issues.
Because the ACLU was a project by pro-labor lawyers to advocate for them around the turn of the century. Granted it is more of a neoliberal outfit now but it had a fairly radical past. It was never non-partisan or apolitical.
Also how am I the first person to point out that hormonal birth control pills are prescribed for more things than to just regulate pregnancy so your argument fails in your attempt to cordon it off from necessary medical procedures. You should have googled it first. I have run into people that had serious medical issues where aside from all of the medication they had to take were also prescribed hormonal birth control to help regulate their endocrine system.
This is not to dismiss the discussion of America’s fucked up medical system out of hand but you are going to need to get a better case than this in order to try and make your point.
Some men are born with ovaries dude. Trans people deserve health care too.
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Men are proscribed birth control pills? I know I earlier mentioned that they are proscribed for reasons other than birth control. It is also my understanding, from talking to friends, that if they are proscribed for a hormonal reason then the medical coding and subsequently the co-pay can be lower or even zero dollars.
However, this does not address the civil liberties question of why a man (or a woman) should have to pay for gender specific coverage in an insurance plan when they are not of that gender.
Now you want to bring in trans? I already covered that by stating three types of plans, male, female, and an inclusive male and female option.
You’ve regularly exhibited constant low-level weird sexism here, and now in this thread you’re bringing it full bore. I don’t really feel the need to explain the basics of health care, public good, etc… I do think you’re sexist, whether you realize it or not. I think your position is abhorrent and oddly specific (reinforcing the sexism).
You’ve become this sort of grab bag of weird conservative positions, and this thread is your opus.
Oh sorry about that. Your argument was a layer cake of Nonaggression principle bullshit and then the substance of your byzantine 3 pools scheme that I skipped it out of habit.
The individual mandate was always way to soak the public in order to prop up insurance company ghouls. They would have refused to sell on the exchanges otherwise. Even with the massive subsidies we are giving them they are still withdrawing from certain markets in droves and leaving people without any semblance of decent coverage.
No problem, there were some large walls of text there.
My view, at its core (in case you haven’t figured it out or you are falling back on strawmen): the government should not force you to purchase something from a private corporation that you will never have a use for. Gender is irrelevant. The actual thing being forced is irrelevant. If there is no chance you will use it, no forced purchase. If you see sexism in that, it’s all you.
At best, ignoring a ton of other weird things about your argument, is that it could be applied ad infinitum to increasingly specific issues and undermines the basic idea of having a large payer pool to even out risk.
Ignoring that, are you then fine with Universal single payer Healthcare that covers birth control.
I answered that question earlier as an affirmative.
I am not against birth control coverage in the current system. I simply prefer (from a civil liberties point of view) that anything gender specific not be forced into ALL plans as it causes individuals to pay for something that they will never NEED.
I get the feeling that any viewpoint other than “all policies must cover birth control at 100%” is going to be perceived on the forum as sexist. It appears that any deviation from this view is intolerable.
Just wanted to pop into this discussion to say that I don’t have anything to contribute at the moment, but that the flames background makes it annoying and difficult to read the text on my screen.
Please remove the flames if possible and just make it white.
Blame Rym. I did not do that.
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If I’m following this thread correctly, my question would be why does the distinction between the government forcing you to buy something from a private company you’ll never use vs. buying something from the government that you’ll never use be a bright line for you? I’m not following why this is an important volition if you agree that universal healthcare provided by the government would be okay.
It seems to me that the current system is a patchwork solution to the problem of
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Most people want some form of universal healthcare.
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Private insurance companies are not going away any time soon.
So while the best solution would be to nationalize the entire insurance industry, there isn’t enough energy necessary to make it happen. Thus the government forces you to buy some form of privatized insurance while we hopefully find some way to make nationalize insurance in the future.
I’m not that well read on this subject so I’m open to being wrong here.
There is an implicit bias you probably have sure, but aside from that I fail to see is why your point of stasis is so far into this. It is against everyone’s personal liberty that a small handful of rich insurance company assholes get to dictate the policy of the nation, which is what they did with the ACA. Why quibble about birth control when the pills you are “paying for” are pennies on the dollar compared to the massive profits everyone is giving away to the insurance companies?
It was riddled through with flaws from the start, which is how they make all of their damn money. Even with the massive subsidies they have been given they still refuse to service entire swathes of the country and at least 20 million people will be left without healthcare coverage and even more will pay for insurance that they cannot afford to use.
A market place for health insurance doesn’t make any damn sense. People don’t shop around, there is barely any transparency, and the penalties are so low that in those swathes of the country that insurance companies tried to service not enough healthy people signed up so the pools weren’t actuarially sound. Higher penalties would be even larger political poison than the mandate is. Forcing through 3 separate pools and even more bureaucracy to administer it will just put more pressure on our tottering healthcare system than there already is. The multiplan bullshit that this argument creates is even more dangerous in that it lends itself even further to a proliferation of broken insurance pools and coverage gaps.
It is hard to pin down an honest critique of this because your preferences bounce from the right wing of neoliberalism to the left wing of neoliberalism and then the outright Left at points and it is genuinely difficult to start from the some of the positions stated here because they are riddled with contradictions.
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Health care for vaginas and uteruses is not exclusive to women. Many trans men require this healthcare.
Also, the entire point of any government system paid for by taxes is to benefit all citizens equally. To not want to pay for something because it doesn’t specifically help you is a slippery slope argument that basically gets rid of the point of having a government at all. If we’re all going to agree to abide by a system, then it should actually help us all. If we’re going to pay to be bullied by cops, then you shouldn’t get to get out of paying for providing health care for all citizens of this country.
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That is exactly what I wanted them to say, that there was a trade off and this gives widespread, or more liberty. Instead they just sidestep and say there is no quandry at all.
Libertarians are. They’re for gun ownership, drug legalization, an expansion of civil liberties. There’s also a kind of implicit civil liberties, I was listening to NPR Planet Money, and they were talking about this
The right tends to be against occupational licensing (unless they’re being crony capitalists and getting money from them). So you have them pushing for the civil liberty of being able to paint nails, or braid hair without being charged hundreds of dollars in fines. Also, the ability to move from one state to another, and be able to keep painting nails in Pennsylvania, even though you were licensed in California, without having to go to school for 2 years and pay tens of thousands
[quote=“hmtksteve, post:23, topic:339”][quote=“lackofcheese, post:22, topic:339”]1) If, as you claim, the underlying issue is personal liberty, why does it matter at all whether or not you actually need the thing you are forced to buy? After all, for the sake of personal liberty shouldn’t you still be able to refuse the thing even if you need it?
[/quote]Yes. As a personal liberty issue you should be able to say no.[/quote]If that is so, why does it being something you won’t use feature so prominently in your argument? If not personal liberty, what underlying principle makes this distinction so important?
[quote][quote]2) You’re saying that it’s OK for the government to tax you and later buy something for you, but not OK for the government to force you to buy that thing. Yet clearly the latter involves greater personal liberty, since in the latter case you are the one who gets to choose the particulars of the thing and who to buy it from. How can you justify this?
[/Quote]In the case of government programs in areas where the Constitution clearly grants power to the federal government to act they are fairly free to act as long as they stay within their legal framework. It is also expected that our elected representatives will take the will of the people into consideration when crafting such programs.
For example the Constitution clearly says the Legislature has the power to create an army and a navy. There is no mention of an air force. The early air force was part of the army and later was simply considered to be a “flying army” to square it with the Constitution. Funding for said army (though not the Navy) is limited to two years. There is nothing to prevent perpetual two year funding bills but some folks have claimed that a standing army is inconsistent with the Constitution. In today’s modern world a standing army is a requirement.
I believe that post civil war reconstruction was an epoch moment in American government where the tenth amendment was effectively over turned and the court packing fiasco of the New Deal led to Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution being turned on its head. When the commerce clause was interpreted to mean anything that might have an impact on commerce, even the absence of commerce well… Nothing is beyond the power of the US Legislature.[/quote]You say that, but the individual mandate was upheld under the Taxing and Spending Clause, not the Commerce Clause.
[quote]Back to your second point. If the government program helps everyone according to their needs while taxing everyone in the same fair manner then you should end up with more personal liberty to live your life with only a small expense due to taxation. So while it may seem at odds that I am against being forced to buy insurance while being perfectly OK with a single payer system it is not an irreconcilable stand to take. If the government program works as I would like it would also be the best value option available.[/quote]Now you sound like a single-payer fanatic.
How exactly would a government program result in “only a small expense” relative to what private insurance costs you now? It would save some money here and there, but the only way it would be a small expense is if the cost is mostly paid for by the taxes of those who earn more money than you do.
[quote][quote]3) Wouldn’t your argument apply equally to things like food stamps and school vouchers? Don’t those effectively force you to buy food and schooling from private corporations, just as the individual mandate forces you to buy health insurance?
[/quote]No. The SNAP program is extremely useful helping low income people put food on their table. There are restrictions on what you can purchase using SNAP but their are no requirements that a recipient HAS to purchase specific food items whether they want them or not.
School vouchers also help low income families move their children into better schools. This increases their future opportunities by (hopefully) giving them a better education today. Even in this case no one is being g forced to use them in a particular school, instead they are able to choose from a pool of schools.
As for ‘forcing you to buy from corporations’ … While the purchase options are only available from private corporations the choice of how to spend those funds is largely up to the personal choice of the recipient. IOW no one is being forced to buy bananas or send their kid to a specific school.[/quote]Nor does the individual mandate force you to purchase a specific plan from a specific insurance company.
Just as the government regulates food safety, and the government regulates what exactly qualifies as a “school”, the government also regulates what exactly constitutes qualifying health coverage under the ACA. Those things are clearly analogous.
[quote]Also these programs are financed by tax money not an individuals personal money. There is a difference between someone handing you $10 and telling you to buy some food and telling someone that they have to spend $10 of their own money on food.[/quote]That distinction is quite weak. If the government introduces a benefit to the public then you as an an individual still end up paying for some of that benefit in one way or another (usually higher taxes).
The individual mandate of the ACA is, equivalently, a system that levies a tax on everyone and provides a tax credit to those who purchase qualifying health insurance.
That’s not how it works here in Canada, we pay for condoms and stuff, it just seems weird to me to get birth control provided for free by your health care provider.
I have never attended an ACLU meeting, and likely never will, as I only end up in the US for conventions, so most of this is just stuff I hear along the grapevine.
The ACLU from what I’ve seen just seems to change positions alongside the DNC, and barring local chapters (Like Nevada) doesn’t really contradict their party line. This is probably because it’s covered less by the media.
When I look up the ACLU, I come across articles like this
My perception seems to be that a law they pushed for, they’re turning against because it no longer follows the party line.