Scott Weiser wrote:
A Usenet persona calling itself BCITORGB wrote:


Scott:
===========
The argument made in the various letters from the Health Ministers of
Canada
worrying that a two-tier system would cause problems because the
clinics
would "cherry pick" the easy cases while leaving the hard, expensive
cases
to the state is idiocy.



Allow me to paint with a broad brush to
make my point -- there are minor and trivial exceptions to what I'm
about to say. And the insurance you buy MUST be provided by a
Provincial Crown Coporation. You may not buy your BASIC coverage from
anyone else. Why? Because, if the corporation is to gain the benefits
that come from having this monopoly and is to be able to provide the
blanket, global coverage the corporation was set up to provide, then it
cannot afford to have private insurers cherry-pick the low-risk
clients, leaving the crown corp to pick up the difficult, expensive
clients. [BTW, the premiums compare quite favorably to other
jurisdictions across Canada that use the private model]


Correct. This is true of insurance plans that are allowed to exclude people
and are allowed to control risks by excluding (by price or otherwise) those
who pose higher risks to the actuarial pool.

However, this problem does not apply when *everyone* is in the pool, by law,
and when the premium payments are extracted equally from everyone by
taxation, not by individual premium payments for those who are "in the plan"
or based on their perceived position in the actuarial risk tables.

In this case, people who choose voluntarily NOT to take advantage of the
coverage by buying and paying for their own insurance *which is additional
to the mandatory government coverage, for which they have to pay anyway* do
nothing but BENEFIT the members of the pool by NOT extracting money from the
pool when they can, and choose to pay the bills themselves.

===============
Correct. And there is *no* prohibition to buying extra coverage, so long
as you buy the basic coverage. As you say, so long as you are in the
pool. By law you must be.
=================





Further, an anecdotal example of cherry-picking (that really ****es me
off): in the elementary school my daughters attended, there were two
sisters, one of whom was severely handicapped. The parents,
dissatisfied with the education their daughters were getting at this
school, took the daughter who was not handicapped, and sent her to a
very expensive private school. By doing so, they further diminished the
academic calibre of the school by taking a very bright girl out, and
leaving a handicapped one. This sort of cherry-picking diminishes our
ability to provide quality to everyone.


Hold on a second! You cannot compare the economic effects of insurance
cherry picking with some sort of "intellectual premium payment" that you
suggest a parent or child owes a school.

==================
Let me rephrase: what parents/citizens owe society.
==============


What you suggest is that
exceptional children must be "leveled out," or required to suffer an
educational environment that does not best exploit their learning abilities
merely in order to provide some kind of egalitarian "level playing field"
for other children.

=============
Interesting point. I have a "gifted" child and have made the
"educational environment that best exploits her learning abilities"
argument myself.

The argument I make is not an argument of egalitarian playing fields.
Rather, it is the argument that *if* all gifted, or even above-average
children, are taken out of the system, the quality of education becomes
a downward spiral. Cherry-picking leaves the public system impoverished,
leading, eventually, to more and more people leaving. Ultimately, the
only pupils left will be the children of the poor and any others who can
find no way out.
==============


What you suggest is akin to educational slavery. You suggest that a bright
child, who can benefit from a higher quality, more expensive education that
her parents can both afford and wish to give to her, ought to be forced into
an inferior (for her) school in order to benefit *other* children.

==============
In a simplistic sense, it is not to benefit *other* children but,
rather, to benefit the entire system.

I don't say "don't provide the gifted (or the disabled) the education
they require". I'm all in favor of providing "higher quality, more
expensive education". But, any system needs a certain critical mass of,
let's say, gifted students before special programs are established.
Every *rich*, gifted child who leaves the system reduces that critical
mass and thus reduces the quality of the whole.
===================



That's
just wrong. No parent, and no child, should be required to sacrifice
educational opportunities at the altar of socialist egalitarianism. Children
ought not to be made into sociopolitical pawns to salve what I intuit as
your bruised academic ego.

================
My bruised academic ego??

Explain please.
=================



As for the "handicapped" one, she has a RIGHT to that education, by your
own argument, and to suggest that her presence drags down the educational
environment for other children, which ought to be balanced out by forcing
her sister into academic slavery, is astonishingly uncaring and dismissive
of the fundamental value of each child, no matter how handicapped. I can't
believe you really mean this.

====================
You're mixing up way too many concepts. No matter how much programs for
gifted children (my daughter, for example) may cost, that cost pales in
comparison to the costs associated with educating disabled children. I
was appalled by the hypocrisy of the parents, "leaving" (I do use that
term advisedly) the "expensive" disabled child for the taxpayers to take
care of (I don't object) while taking the bright sister to the private
school (cherry-picking). Why not the other way around? Hypocrisy!

By their actions, it was the parents, not I who "suggested that the
disabled child's presence dragged down the educational environment for
other children (including the bright sister)" Thus, you'd have to
characterize them as "astonishingly uncaring and dismissive of the
fundamental value of each child...."

I might have applauded their actions if the roles of the sisters had
been reversed.
====================



I understand that you may not ascribe to that philosophy, but I do. If
one ascribes to that philosophy, then cherry-picking can not be
permitted.


What I see as implicit in your argument is that you believe that no one
should be allowed to excel or enjoy individual success above any other. This
is the essence of socialistic oppression, and it's why socialism always
fails.

===========
NO.

I do not believe that in the matter of education or health care, money
ought to be a determining factor.
============

frtzw906