reply to post by TheRedneck

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Redneck
Yes at the correct age going onto medicare may be voluntary, but the catch there is there is no other choice. I found that out when my parents tried to stay out of it, there was no other health care choice. Yes you pay premiums like you do with insurance, but the government pics up the rest. That is where I use my argument that if you could with draw from any sort of government health care program you might get your wish. Also I did not mention it before but any sort of legal action also.
I know the medical companies are getting rich but this is not really the thread for that.
I agree with you that the hospital with people picking and pokeing at you is not the place to leve this world.

reply to post by RedGolem
I can't disagree with the lack of reasonable health care alternatives for the elderly. It seems we are agreeing quite a bit, but that's not surprising. I have found you typically have good reasons behind your arguments.

My point is simply that this is an unavoidable catch-22 situation that will crop up whenever we allow government to subsidize anything. In this case, the government decided to subsidize elderly heath care (for better or for worse, I do not wish Medicare would disappear; far too many people are now dependent on it). As a result, since no private insurance companies would cover this need (for lack of profit, I assume), it became a very successful and far-reaching program. When the costs of health care increased, this increased the load on the system, and ironically, it was the system that was partly responsible for the rise in cost. It is simple economics that when a service becomes affordable, people will avail themselves of that service whereas they might not do so if the service were expensive.

So the only way to slow the rising costs is to make people healthier. But there is more to life than sitting around trying to stay 'healthy'. There is still a lack of understanding of the basic life processes and an even greater lack of understanding of how the human body works in all its nuances and complexity. Thus, we have cigarettes hailed as the deadly evil it is obviously not (else we would have all died out a couple generations ago) and things like Aspertame are allowed to freely exist, despite serious health concerns. It would be one thing if both examples mentioned were allowed to exist in the name of freedom or if both were restricted for health concerns, but now, due to special and private interests backed by government intervention, we have hypocrisy with tobacco providing a great deal of the taxes needed to maintain government projects, but at the same time forced into decline by governmental regulations.

We are witnessing the end of an era, my friend. This isolated tobacco debacle is not truly isolated; it is one of a myriad of symptoms of this end. For 232 years, there has been a country where the people made plenty of mistakes and errors in judgment, but still where freedom was the rule and not the exception. I for one will miss that freedom, for we are losing it and I believe there is no way to stop that now. Too many freedoms without responsibility, too much freedom without morality, too much freedom of the few treading on the freedom of others.

That's why I support Phillip-Morris. I just cannot afford to pay them anymore for the chemical-bathed products. That's why I roll my own now.

And as a side note: those who mentioned the chemical additives to cigarettes are definitely right. You will not know unless you start smoking actual tobacco. The difference is amazing.

TheRedneck

They say nicotine is a harder addiction to break than heroin. But has it always been this way or just within the last half century as cig producers put more and more chemicals into the product? Are they trying to make it more addictive? To keep the smokers they have and hook new ones quickly? I think so. This is circumstantial evidence that supports that theory.

The side benefit is that it makes people sick so that keeps the medical racket going. All 'their' rackets feed into one another, like a merry-go-round of money, except not a closed loop. Starts with Joe Blow Taxpayer and ends at the top of the mega corporations.

[edit on 23-11-2008 by TheComte]

wow thanks a bunch RedNeck

I think you said it very well there. We are loosing freedoms, and there has been problems with responsibility ect... in the past. I do see our freedoms going away, and I find it nauseating that the reason is money. Thanks a bunch for all your imput Redneck

Rolling your own I do suppose is a good way to get around all the poisons