Do Republicans argue badly or is it just me?

More bad argumentation on the health care issue. A commenter writes:

The high healthcare costs in the U.S. are the product of the current regulations. U.S. tax law, combined with the idea that employer-sponsored health-care is “a good thing”, have combined to create a situation where health-insurance is not insurance at all. Instead, it covers every little expenditure — like a managed account. From this root, springs the fact that a huge bureacracy is required to monitor these managed spending accounts.

Here’s a good article on the history of health-care costs.

The bottom line is that universal health-care will benefit some and hurt others. Similarly, if one increased taxes a little, and used the money to raise unemployment payouts, you would benefit some and hurt others. The essential issue is the immorality of having the government force people to be altruistic. Redistributing my income? No thank you!

Where to start:
“The essential issue is the immorality of having the government force people to be altruistic.”

You must be a libertarian, Republican or a very stupid Democrat. The government is already forcing you to be altruistic. You pay a hidden tax to cover the costs of the uninsured. These uninsureds are either low paid workers whose companies do not provide healthcare or small biz owners who can’t afford to buy healthcare for their workers or self-employed who would rather keep the cash or dumb twenty somethings who think they’re never going to get sick. You might be a contractor who falls into one of these categories. So, when you get sick, as you will during your lifetime or just before you die, you will have to pay for treatment or we, the taxpayers, will have to cough up the bucks in the form of compensation to the hospitals that are stuck with the bill that you owe and can’t pay because you waited until your condition got to be serious enough to require hospitalization.

You’re *already* being forced to be nice to people because we as a society generally think it’s a bad thing for sick people to go without treatment or have their bloated corpses lying around. Of course, Republicans have been trying to get Americans to not feel so strongly about this so they will feel less guilty about letting poor people drown and die in New Orleans, for example. But it hasn’t been very successful because even the non-New Orleans native knows that there but for the grace of God go they.

I’m just curious, why is it that altruism towards the less fortunate is frowned upon but bailing out millionaire investors on bad real estate deals is perfectly OK? THAT kind of altruism Republicans can’t get enough of and they rob the hardworking taxpayers of NJ to pay their business buddies in Iraq with no bid contracts too and this does not trouble their consciences. And for some reason, we hard working slobs have it in our heads that we are being unreasonable to insist on affordable healthcare for everyone. WE feel guilty about asking everyone to pitch in so that people will not die or go bankrupt unnecessarily. The bastards in charge have been pretty good at messing with our heads when they get us to passively accept our fate as somehow not deserving of “charity” while we lavish government bailouts on *their* friends as if they’ve met with some catastrophic fate instead of a loss in their portfolios.

There seems to be no limit to the altruism heaped on those people with our tax dollars. But pay for a insulin pump for a diabetic child or a mammogram for a self-employed woman or an MRI for a guy with stomach pains, that’s where we draw the line. That’s just stealing from people like you. But stealing from me to cover Merril-Lynch’s bad investment gambles, that’s OK?

Go haunt a Norquist blog and drown someone else’s government in a bathtub.