Re: OT: I Am Moving To Mexico; Letter to President Obama

On Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:36:14 -0400, "RichL" <rpleavitt@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

anything@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:16:54 -0500, Misifus <rafseibert@xxxxxxx>
wrote:

anything@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:03:13 -0700, Larry Pattis
<NeverHere@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Winston <winston4315@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<<snip garbage>>



You lie.

Well, sort of...apart from the flying of flags thing you can get all
of that from any EU country by simply coughing up about £10 for
green card medical insurance certificate so if you travel in the EU
you can claim your expenses back from the NHS when you get home.

Our basic income tax in the UK is about 23% - I wonder what
Winston's entry-level tax rate is?

The rest of the stuff is merely racist paranoia. If it weren't for
all the Polish doctors driving buses and trains over here we'd have
no public transport at all - but then, outside of New York, you
don't seem to have one of those in America either, despite the
number of tax-avoiding Mexicans you must clearly be overrun with by
now.

I'd be quite happy to run a book on the odds that the last person to
take Winston's bloods for his annual M.O.T. was not a Native
American.

Pete


pete, i'm sure what you say is true, but we don't have VAT, YET.

Nope, but you do have local taxes, which in many states are levied at
similar rates.

You've got that "Council Tax" thing, right?

I'm taking the piss out of Winston, obviously, but our average tax
burden in the UK (it's higher in the rest of the EU) is something
under 45% including V.A.T and about 40% excluding purchase taxes.

I believe it's a similar figure in the USA (certainly was last time I
looked).

To be serious, (just for once) what bugs me is the massive campaign
being fought against healthcare reform in the USA when we have proved
over the last 60-odd years (and not just in the UK) that healthcare is
better when it's state funded. I wouldn't be so bugged about it except
for some medical insurance companies putting up a bunch of stooges not
very long ago to say that the NHS was rubbish - not to mention that
the stooges in question were told they were taking part in a
documentary when in fact their interviews were used in an advertising
campaign against healthcare reform. That was cheap. I'm not much of a
nationalist but corporations taking advantage of gullible people for
their own profit really does not blow up my skirt.

Not least because you guys are having the shit ripped out of you for
healthcare. Steve Hawkins (not famous for his democratic leanings) has
just had to part with part of his soul simply to pay the excess on
treatment he would have had here as part of his taxes (and if he was
unemployed he wouldn't have had to pay a penny).Selling guitars to pay
for kidney cancer treatment? Ridiculous. Keep the guitar, son, we'll
fix your kidney anyway - enjoy!

State funded is certainly cheaper. We spend 8% of our GDP on
healthcare - America spends 16% (ish) and still 1/6 of Americans have
no cover. I know where I'd rather have a coronary...I called out an
ambulance only last week simply because I was freaked at feeling
unwell so quickly. Paramedic in my bedroom in 4 minutes. Ambulance in
10. Fair enough, I live in a big-ish city - so there's a paramedic on
every other street corner. In the country it might have taken a little
longer.

We've never had to set up what were effectively field hospitals (as
they did in Virginia a couple of weeks ago) just to get people checked
over. Jeez, that's like, erm, Eritrea, or Sudan.

The healthcare argument in the USA should be over. It's a whole nation
divided over a no-brainer, and it's being divided by shareholders, not
by the people who need the care.

I'm having an MRI scan tomorrow. I've paid no taxes since 2006. I will
not be charged for it. How much would the same cost in the States? My
house? My car? My Northworthy's?

You lot are being ripped off. Royally.

Agreed, but I'm not sure to what extent any bills proposed in Congress
"fix" the problem. I don't think we in the US have really figured out
why the UK and other countries pay so much less yet are ahead of the US
in standard measures of health-care quality.

The so-called "public option" is basically dead. So whatever we come up
with, we'll still have for-profit insurance companies, mainly for-profit
hospitals (when I was young, hospitals in the US were primarily
non-profit), interns and hospital residents working unfathomable hours
and then feeling the world owes them something when they finally get to
setting up their own practices, excessive malpractice insurance costs
(due to *both* runaway jury awards *and*, once more, insurance-company
greed), etc., etc.

The system needs an enema and I'm afraid it's not going to get one, not
in the US, not in my lifetime.


There's plenty of private hospitals in the UK and across Europe, they
just don't have A&E, so if you know what's wrong with you and can
afford to pay for it then you can get treatment quicker and at
considerable cost (although private medical insurance over here is
frequently a job perk - if you're in the right kind of job).

Where the private medical thing falls down is when you have a car
crash, or fall off a ladder, or slice the top off your finger boning
out a piece of lamb.

The people in Washington know exactly what needs to be done, and so do
most of the people in the 'States - what's holding everything up is
the need to take share dividends away from hospitals with A&E
facilities. A&E is labour intensive but fairly cheap - most people
just need patching up and they don't stay in hospital for long.

All Congree has to do is take a look at the way the health system is
run in any of the world's major democracies and copy it. The most
effective, to my mind, is the French model, but then they have an
average tax take of nearly 50%...:-)

Pete
.

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