A Usenet persona calling itself BCITORGB wrote:

Scott:
============
As to property taxes being an appropriate means of funding education,
I've never said that. That happens to be the way much of it is
funded,
but I'll agree with you, that doesn't make it right or the correct
way
to do it. Income tax works for me just as well (better!).

That's all I'm saying.
=================

And I've never said otherwise, except to disspell the notion that
tenants pay "no" tax toward schools. Property taxes are in more than a
few ways, very "odd" taxes. For example, here, where they're based on
assessed market value, they penalize those who take care of and
maintain their property. And, as you say Scott, they are a poor
reflection of actual usage of the services they're supposed to pay for
(sewage, water, garbage collection, or whatever). For many of these
things, I'm over on your side Scott. Put a meter on my water (which my
municipality is doing this summer), charge me per garbage can, etc. On
these things, I'm very much a "user pay" advocate (including, if you'll
recall and earler thread, agriculture, which you seem to want to
support).

Why not for health care and schools too?

[Aside: all bets are off if the city tries to sell the water
reservoirs and distribution rights to private, for-profit, firms --
water belongs to the PEOPLE.]

Well, down here, water belongs to whomever first diverts it and puts it to
beneficial use. Which is why, BTW, Colorado doesn't have any navigable
waterways for you to kayak on. (Just thought I'd bring the discussion back
to paddling for a moment.)
--
Regards,
Scott Weiser

"I love the Internet, I no longer have to depend on
friends, family and co-workers, I can annoy people WORLDWIDE!" TM

© 2005 Scott Weiser

Scott thinks:
===============
More importantly, med schools are in competition with each other for
students, so
it's extremely unlikely that they would shoot their own feet just to
pander
to the AMA.
===================

Hmmm... are you sure they're in competition with each other? If I were
a university president, the last faculty I'd want to increase enrolment
in would be medicine. Just a quick google got me tuition figures for
med school in Arizona (albeit two conflicting figures: just under
$10,000 and just under $13,000 per year). I'll assume the figures are
comparable around the USA. Surely you're not going to claim that $9,000
covers the entire cost of a med student's education. There's going to
be a huge government subsidy that accompanies this $9,000.

Med Schools have to be a royal pain in the ass to university
administrators as they are incredibly capital intensive with constant
demands for upgrading. It's so much simpler/cheaper to pump up
admission into business schools where your major expenditures are
chalk-and-talk seminars.

So, Scott, I doubt very much that there's competition between
universities to get med school students.

frtzw906

A Usenet persona calling itself BCITORGB wrote:

Scott objects:
=============
No, he just tells you you can't have heart surgery in Vancouver till a
bunch
of other people get surgery first. Nor can YOU simply board a bus and
go to
Toronto and walk in to a hospital and be admitted, because Toronto has
its
own government-mandated priority list, and you're not on it.
===============

OK, Scott, you need to decide, is it a "national" waiting list, or a
"city" list (obviously, in your mind, the provinces play no role in
this: or do they? What say you?)?

It's "national" in that the rules under which hospitals must operate are
promulgated by the federal government, which funds and regulates the system.
That it may be administered at the provincial or local level changes
nothing. Socialized medicine is, by definition, centrally-controlled, even
if no "central" list is kept.


And, in Toronto, this "government-mandated" priority list: which
government are we talking about?

Any government. All government.


From your analysis, could I, however, walk from one hospital in Toronto
to another to improve my position?

I doubt it. It's my guess that once you get assigned a priority, based on
the government-mandated priority criteria, you're stuck with it, and no
matter where you go, you end up behind others with higher priority. That a
different facility may not have the same number of people in line before you
is irrelevant. Moreover, I have my doubts that you would be allowed, once
assigned a priority at a hospital in your local community, to simply "venue
shop" in another city, thereby jumping the queue of those above you in your
original community. However, this is a guess, and I could be wrong. That
doesn't change the fundamental nature of the system, which is a
centrally-controlled, socialistic, rationed health care system.


Further, within one hospital, once I'm there, can I walk from one
surgeon's office to another to try to improve my position or exercise
some choice over who actually does my surgery?

I don¹t know. Nor do I care. The key question is who determines when you get
to go to the hospital in the first place. In Canada, it's the government.
Down here, it's the patient, or at worst the individual, free-market
hospital.

We need answers Scott. These are very real, practical, dilemmas.

--
Regards,
Scott Weiser

"I love the Internet, I no longer have to depend on
friends, family and co-workers, I can annoy people WORLDWIDE!" TM

© 2005 Scott Weiser

A Usenet persona calling itself BCITORGB wrote:

Scott thinks:
===============
More importantly, med schools are in competition with each other for
students, so
it's extremely unlikely that they would shoot their own feet just to
pander
to the AMA.
===================

Hmmm... are you sure they're in competition with each other?

Yup. Positive.

If I were
a university president, the last faculty I'd want to increase enrolment
in would be medicine. Just a quick google got me tuition figures for
med school in Arizona (albeit two conflicting figures: just under
$10,000 and just under $13,000 per year). I'll assume the figures are
comparable around the USA. Surely you're not going to claim that $9,000
covers the entire cost of a med student's education. There's going to
be a huge government subsidy that accompanies this $9,000.

Med Schools have to be a royal pain in the ass to university
administrators as they are incredibly capital intensive with constant
demands for upgrading. It's so much simpler/cheaper to pump up
admission into business schools where your major expenditures are
chalk-and-talk seminars.

So, Scott, I doubt very much that there's competition between
universities to get med school students.

They're just like any other business. How ever much of a pain med students
are, the university has a lot invested in the med school program, as you
yourself admit, and the only way to pay for all that infrastructure is to
have students in the programs. Any med school administrator who went to the
Regents with the argument "Med students are a pain in the butt, let's not
only not recruit them, let's deny them admission so we don't have to spend
any money educating them" would be fired.

--
Regards,
Scott Weiser

"I love the Internet, I no longer have to depend on
friends, family and co-workers, I can annoy people WORLDWIDE!" TM

© 2005 Scott Weiser

On 29-Mar-2005, Scott Weiser wrote:

Probably, but down here they don't operate under government guidelines or
restrictions for the admission of patients.

Exactly where are these guidelines or restrictions spelled out?

Mike

On 29-Mar-2005, Scott Weiser wrote:

What's government controlled is the compensation provided by
the national health service for in-hospital care and surgery, irrespective
of whether the doctor is a government employee or a private contractor.

First of all, there are no doctors that are government employees. It
has already been pointed out that doctors in Canada are all self
employed. Furthermore, doctors work on a fee-for-service basis. If
they do the work, they submit the paperwork and get paid. The
health insurance ministries cannot avoid paying for work that has
been done.

You are, as usual, full of ****.

Mike

On 29-Mar-2005, Scott Weiser wrote:

Oh, he/she is merely a cog in the rationed health care machine that's the
whole basis of socialized medicine.

Then who is it that sets the limits that this person supposedly
enforces?

You're making this up as you go along.

Mike

"Scott Weiser" wrote in message
...
A Usenet persona calling itself KMAN wrote:



Uh. The landlord will charge the rent he needs to generate the profit
margin
he wants, and one of his expenses will be taxes. As long as the
property tax
paid by the landlord is appropriate, then so is the share the tenants
are
paying through their rent.

Profit margin is not the point. The point is whether each citizen is
paying
an equal share of the funding required for schools. Fact is that renters
are
not paying an equal share, they are paying far less per capita than
landowners, which happens to include people who own homes and land upon
which NO profit is made. Thus, the single home owner pays more than the
renter as well.

Your beef would seem to be with how properties are assessed.

In part.

This has
nothing to do with the poor guy paying his rent. If the property is taxed
appropriately, the landlord is going to charge the renter and collect the
revenues need to pay the property taxes.

Once again, the issue is the fairness and equitability of school funding
assessments. I'm merely pointing out that in most places in the US,
schools
are disproportionately funded by landowners, and that there are many "free
riders" who get substantial discounts on their "fair share."

Yes, but you are incorrect. The landowners pass on the cost to the renters.
The only issue of fairness would be if landlords are somehow paying unfairly
low property taxes.


I'm not surprised at your inconsistent approach to funding medical care
and
schools, given the fact that it's landowners who get soaked for schools,
and
socialists don't like landowners because they are mostly "have nots" who
are
jealous of the "haves" of society and are willing to do anything to
bring
others down to their own level. That's what socialism is all about.

I'm a landowner. I'm not a socialist. I'm also not a selfish jerk.

So why the inconsistency in your positions in re health care and school
funding?

There is no inconsistency. I believe that universal health care and
universal education should be core foundations of any society, or at least a
goal they are striving to achieve.

"Consumer goods" is the usual term used. It applies to "luxury" goods
in
that "luxury" goods are generally defined as items that are for
recreation,
pleasure or quality-of-life enhancement. It excludes necessities such
as
food, most clothing, heating and electrical costs and other suchlike
necessities.

I have a feeling it won't be a very popular idea,

Probably not, since the majority of people are not landowners and they,
like
you, are happy to stick it to landowners out of jealousy.

I'm a landowner. I am not interested in "sticking it to landowners."

You don't argue very effectively for not doing so.

I don't think landowners are taxed unfairly.

If everybody in
the country had ethics, we wouldn't need much by way of law.

Let me know when you get some. Advocating vociferously for your own
selfish
needs is not what I would call ethics.

That's because you confuse socialist dogma with ethics. It's hardly
unethical to advocate fairness and personal responsibility.

Then I'm as ethical as can be.

and I think Wal-Mart is
going to fight you pretty hard to make sure as many goods as possible
aren't
in your luxury class.

Nah. They don't care about the taxes, they don't pay them, the consumer
does.

LOL. You might want to find out a little more about how taxes affect
spending, which affects the bottom line of business.

Only when the business is marginal. Wal-Mart doesn't give a damn what the
local taxes are because they have a tremendous market dominance and know
that the higher the taxes, and the less discretionary funds that a family
has available, the MORE LIKELY they are to shop at Wal-Mart. It's a key
component of their business model.

Get together with all the consumer goods companies and ask them how they
would feel about the addition of a consumer goods tax. Heehee. You'll be
ridden out of town on a rail!

This is why while elites don't like Wal-Mart, it's exceeding rare for a
Wal-Mart store to fail. You see, Wal-Mart's customers are the middle and
lower income brackets who *need* to save money on consumer goods and don't
have the luxury of being able to spend more on better quality goods.

"If you build it, they will come." is the catchphrase of
Wal-Mart...because
they do.

Ehuh. Wow, that's a brilliant catchphrase.

On 29-Mar-2005, Scott Weiser wrote:

But there is a national system of classifying medical conditions by priority
is there not?

Medical care is a provincial jurisdiction, not a federal one. Your ignorance
continues to show every time you post.

If doctors are free to admit whomever they please whenever
they please and do surgery on them, how is the system "socialized?" If
things are as you imply, it's a free market economy. Obviously, it's not,
because many people are complaining about their inability to get served
because the government won't allow them to see a doctor or go to a hospital.

Exactly who in the government won't allow them?

The reason that folks aren't being served is that the system is overloaded
in a specific area for a specific treatment. It is not because the government
refuses to treat people. Providing unlimited resources in every area is not
efficient. The taxpayers have indicated that they want to see better service
in many areas, but the politicians have been dragging their heels on getting
improvements in place. Most of the real problems in Canada's health care
system have been the result of right-wing politicians' meddling. Folks
like Mike Harris and Gordon Campbell have done a lot of damage to a system
that used to work much better.

Mike

On 30-Mar-2005, Scott Weiser wrote:

Toronto has its
own government-mandated priority list, and you're not on it.

Who mandated it? Where is this list kept?

Mike