13 Crows

2 months ago

Notes: 13 / 2 months ago from blackhoodie

blackhoodie:

(via nowpublic.net)

Notes: 276 / 2 months ago from madstatler (originally from bohemea)

abilly:

bohemea:Helena Bonham Carter

Good grief. She is oh-so-pretty…

3 months ago

Scientists Discover the Largest Orbweaving Spider in the World [Evolution]

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4 months ago

Stephen Hawking steps down as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University

4 months ago from bookmarklet

The Smallest Minority

Normally I don’t comment over at Markadelphia’s blog. He does enough of that here, but yesterday I couldn’t resist. Read his very short post, Yep.

I was the first to comment:

Great! Let him and his organization provide that coverage, and let’s see how long he and his organization stay in business.

Health care is not a RIGHT.

There were, of course, responses to that, but here’s the one I’m going to respond to with an Überpost:

blk said…

From the preamble to the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

A basic education is a right in this country. It wasn’t always. Most people would agree that protection by the fire and the police departments is a right. It wasn’t always that way.

Why isn’t health care a right? What else would promote the general Welfare of our population than ensuring that everyone has a long and healthy life? What could be more Just than making sure that every child, worker and elderly person can see a doctor when they’re sick?

National health care would promote domestic Tranquility by giving everyone peace of mind, knowing that if their kid comes down with some awful disease they can get treatment. If you have cancer, the emergency room just ain’t gonna cut it.

To enjoy the Blessings of Liberty you have to be alive. Many people die in this country because they don’t have health care.

We are a rich country. As we’ve become wealthier and as technology and science have advanced the notion of what is a right has changed. Now that we can afford them, education, police and fire protection are rights. The way health care costs are exploding, we are going to go bankrupt. We have to change the way the system works to reign in costs. By covering everyone we can make it cheaper for each person. When everyone is covered and everyone is paying, we’ll finally have the leverage we need to prevent the explosive rise in costs.

That will mean squeezing out unnecessary middlemen who get between you and your doctor. The most expensive and least useful middlemen are insurance industry execs. By eliminating them we can squeeze literally billions of dollars from health care overhead (health care company execs pull in salaries, bonuses and options in the range of tens of millions, to hundreds of millions to a billion dollars).

Where to begin? Why, at the beginning!