Definitions of Liberal and Conservative

It's not the quote button, genius, it's the reply button. It lets the person you reply to know that you've replied to them via email, just like Theo said. You'll note that Theo didn't use any quote button either, demonstrated by the lack of actual quote tags in his reply to you.Is there a reason you don't want the person you're replying to to be notified of the reply? I mean, the "reply" button is right below the post you're reading and presumably responding to, you can;t get any easier than that, so you must have a specific reason for not using it, and I cannot fathom why.

Remember that this site is a rather special case - its specific purpose is for debating religious, scientific, and occasionally political issues. Disagreements will obviously abound, and sometimes particularly wrong beliefs (or of course beliefs that are just vehemently opposed) will garner insults, incredulity, and the like.In short, this is not a place where "tolerant language" is to be expected. As a debate site, we begin with the premise that not all beliefs are equally accurate or logically justified, and specifically set out to convince each other of the errors in our thinking.But in normal life, that doesn;t mean we are so intolerant. On a debate forum, I'll call Creationists morons and go off on a long diatribe on Biblical errors and the absurdity of believing in magic men in the sky or worshiping crucified zombie deities, or the occasional political rant when we discuss those topics. In my real life, I don't do that unless someone specifically seeks to engage me in a debate first (Jehovah's Witnesses, for example).

The private sector has failed, utterly.It's a matter of incentives, Tram:A private health care corporation has very little incentive to provide excellent health care, and a very large incentive to deny care regardless of need. Every time the company must pay out for a claim, that money is a direct subtraction from their profit. A private company has no free-market incentive to provide care for a cancer patient, for an HIV patient, for an MS patient, etc - these individuals can never ever pay in premiums what it will cost to treat them. Under a free-market health care system the incentive is to let these people die.Public health care disregards income or the amount of money required to treat an illness. Under public health care, cancer patients and HIV patients and MS patients are treated, according to their need. Rather than being answerable to stockholders, the system is answerable to the people it serves in the form of the voting public. The incentive, rather than to make profit, is to efficiently and effectively disperse the allotted funds to provide the maximum level of care to all citizens.The ethical differences between these two systems are blatantly obvious.Economically, we have examples of private health care costs in the US and public health care costs everywhere else to compare with. In every example, individuals in the US pay more while receiving less in terms of people covered and problems covered. There could be no more clear evidence that the private system is utterly inferior in every way, ethically, economically, and even in terms of achieving the basic goal of providing health care.There is no excuse or reason whatsoever to support private health care given the evidence available. NONE. At all.Afraid of the costs? Public care costs less for everyone in every case everywhere. In teh US it costs something like $800,000 for a heart transplant - in the UK, it's more like $50,000.Afraid of lowering the quality of service? You can;t get much lower quality than the people who have no coverage at all because of a "pre-existing condition." Even excluding them, the US has worse metrics in terms of longevity, infant mortality, and other relevant statistics than nations with public health care. The stories of long wait times are myths, urgent needs receive urgent care, you won;t wait months for an immediately necessary procedure, and waiting exists in the US too!THERE IS NO ARGUMENT IN FAVOR OF PRIVATE HEALTH CARE THAT IS CONSISTENT WITH THE SIMPLE FACTS OF REALITY.