Health care and the Death Penalty

Krugman has a winning article today on medicare for all.  He reminds us that the AMA and Southern Politicians opposed Truman's attempt in the 1945 for their own interests [say, a worry about integration].  His key paragraph:

The great advantage of universal, government-provided health insurance is lower costs. Canada's government-run insurance system has much less bureaucracy and much lower administrative costs than our largely private system. Medicare has much lower administrative costs than private insurance. The reason is that single-payer systems don't devote large resources to screening out high-risk clients or charging them higher fees. The savings from a single-payer system would probably exceed $200 billion a year, far more than the cost of covering all of those now uninsured.

Conservatives will misrepresent this - arguing that this is government management.  No - its government as insurance.   Here is a site of doctors who support medicare for all and of a coalition - the Campaign for a National Health Plan.   

This hits churches and small businesses particularly hard.  Neither my sexton or secretary have health care [they work- part time].  The sexton recently got put on a payment plan at a hospital to pay off a $7500 bill for having pneumonia.  He makes $12 an hour.  The vestry intends on making his position full time, but that's a $20,000 increase overall.  A national health care means less desperate people using emergency rooms.  Even now, corporations are dying under the cost of health care.    Small business can't simply be required by law to pay health care.  A national health plan will give them more freedom to hire the people they choose. 

The Supreme Court chastizes Texas and the appellate court for having Thomas Joe Miller-EL man on death row due to a stacked jury.  I especially enjoyed their comments of the fifth circuit. 

In finding otherwise, the majority said today, that the Fifth Circuit's finding amounted to a "dismissive and strained interpretation" of evidence presented by the defense. Two years ago, the justices rebuked the Fifth Circuit with virtually identical language.

The supreme court said "The state court's contrary conclusion was unreasonable as well as erroneous."

Not that he was innocent.  But he did deserve a trial by his peers.

Don't have much to say about MJ, but I probably would have gone with whatever the jury had said.   Here are some interesting tidbits via Slate.

Comments

[Erin]

The reason that government-funded health care makes me nervous is that I think it gives the government the moral right to legislate private behavior in an insidious way. For instance, it would likely become very tempting for the government to outlaw smoking, due to the overwhelming evidence that it leads to a life-threatening and very expensive disease. I have very few vices, myself (apart from indolence and a sweet tooth), but I do not want to see vice outlawed for the sake of saving taxpayer dollars. And yet if the taxpayers are the ones footing the bill, I fear the only vices that will be permitted will be the extremely popular ones, and that will be understandable, and I will hate it.

It's possible that this is paranoia; and really, this is my only objection to government health care. Certainly, at least in the case of communicable disease, one can make a strong case that it is as proper for the government to provide health care as it is for them to fund a fire department. Nevertheless, I worry.

(It won't happen anytime soon anyway; Clinton was fairly popular (for a time) and moderate and he still failed miserably, and there is a giant vacuum in the Democratic party where plausible national candidates ought to be.)

[john wilkins]

I don't think governments should outlaw behavior generally. Pricing behavior out seems justifiable. Some argue that smokers actually pay for themselves by dying earlier - so that taxes are actually excessive.

[obadiahslope]

Erin, smoking has not been outlawed here in Australia where we do have a national health safety net. Nor has it been outlawed in Britain.
And when your state taxes are taken into account the tax burdens are comparable.