Re: Why healthcare in the U.S. is "expensive" (and why Andre's a lumberjack he's ok...)

On 4 Oct, 01:23, PolishKnight <mar...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <1191429690.136738.101...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Stephen Morgan <grauniad2libe...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 3 Oct, 01:17, PolishKnight <mar...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <ofh0g3lrns0cuvkmivte9v862k04e3s...@xxxxxxx>,

Jill <aske...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, 29 Sep 2007 19:05:05 -0700, Ben <ArGe...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sep 29, 9:36 pm, PolishKnight <mar...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello Andre, Ben, er... Jill. :-) I feel like I really ought to stay
far far far away from this, but I can't resist. Andre has this huge
chip on his shoulder about Canada being so much better about the U.S.
(you know, that country people can find on a map. (Well, people who
aren't educated in leftist U.S. schools anyway. More on that later.)

On Sep 29, 9:52 am, Ben <ArGe...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sep 28, 11:18 pm, Andre Lieven <andrelie...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 28, 10:52 pm, Jill <aske...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[blah blah blah]
Unfortunately, the news about "the Canadian Way" with regards
to
health care isn't anywhere near as good as the economic news.

Well, obviously I'm on your side in this one, Ben. Thank you
for
making the points in favor of the US so much better than I ever
did
or
could.

Thanks for the support, and you're welcome, Jill.

Bleah! Could you two at least assure me there was no tongue in that
exchange?

Jealous?

Naw. I've got Sharon as my honey already. :-)

Seriously, Mark, I'm taking you out of the killfile. God knows how
many of these "precious" witticisms of yours I've missed but the real
reason I'm taking you out is that, like Ben, you are really good at
shooting down these attacks on the US. If nothing else, for the time
being that makes your posts worth reading again.

I'm sure I'll annoy you sufficiently to get out of your good graces soon
enough.

[edit]

Why should health care be a function of the government in the US in
the first place?

The justification provided by hipsters and Andre is that, supposedly,
health care is cheaper when it's run by the government which doesn't
have a profit motive such as the insurance companies or hospitals.

That's not necessarily the reason.

In the states, at least, government is having problems running ANYTHING
correctly and especially cost-efficiently. The list goes on and on:
Public education, retirement, the airports, and even the roads are
expensive boondoggles. I liked the USPS myself but they've been raising
rates so often recently that we can barely buy a set of first class
stamps before they're obsolete.

Yeah, socialism is the worst possible system except for all the
others.

That was said by Churchill, I believe, about democracy. He fought
nazism or, if you didn't know, National Socialism, that had taken over
most "first world" countries in Europe...

He was stoned during the 1945 election campaign and soundly thrashed
in the polls. He didn't actually become an elected Prime Minister
until 1951. People thought more of socialist policies than of heroic
speeches. Turns out democracy didn't feel the same way about him as he
did about it.

Health care is "cheaper" in other western countries because:

1) Rationing and waiting lists. HMO's in the USA catch a lot of flak
for rationing but they're actually not bad compared to most socialist
health care in these countries. Many Americans CHOOSE to pay more for
PPO's for a better doctor selection.

Most "socialist" countries don't have waiting lists, only the UK which
has historically low levels of government health funding.

2) Medicaid: Most of these "socialized healthcare is cheap" claims are
based upon the U.S. blowing trillions on almost UNLIMITED NATIONAL
health care for senior citizens.

How many other first world countries DON'T provide almost unlimited
care for the elderly?

Nearly all of them don't provide almost unlimited care for ANYONE.

Untrue. Anyone who needs healthcare anywhere in western Europe gets
it. Full stop.

Ironically, national healthcare in the states is being held up by a
special interest group wanting to hog all the benefits for themselves.

I love class warfare. Marx had a point...

3) Cheap USA made drugs. It's strange to me that Canada is able to
negotiate a better volume discount for their 33 million citizens (more
or less) when many HMO's in this country probably have that kind of
subscriber base, but there you go. Good for Canada and Europe, but not
a testament to their healthcare system being "better".

It means a single national provider can get cheaper drugs. It is, in
other words, evidence that the non-American system is better in that
it allows better deals to be struck and drugs to be cheaper.

This would seem to imply that America shouldn't adopt socialist
solutions such as national healthcare because they'd still be "American"
solutions.

America should apply the most efficient system, in this case one that
originates elsewhere.

4) The Breck Girl: John Edwards made billions using class action suits
to shake down big-pocketed pharmaceutical firms and doctors where he
pocketed half (or more) of the monies.

I don't understand this reference.

The Breck Girl is a joke by Ann Coulter about John Edwards metrosexual
tendencies to spend huge amounts of money on his hair and makeup.

He sent his wife after Coulter to try to argue with him. He wasn't man
enough to do so himself.

That's not really relevant ot healthcare then.

5) The AMA medical union, er, "association" that discourages foreign
doctors from coming to the USA to practice, sets high arbitrary
educational standards (do you feel more healthy because a doctor studies
"pre-med" for 4 years rather than just going to medical school?), and
allows hospitals to exploit doctors for years as interns.

Again, this is the same everywhere in the developed world. The BMA and
GMC double up for the role in Britain.

I was suggested one area to cut costs besides nationalization.

As I say, there doesn't seem to be enough profit in cutting costs for
the companies involved to do it. So much for the profit motive.

6) Illegal immigrants. You don't think they paid for all those anchor
baby medical bills by picking lettuce and doing daycare for career
women, do you?

The British population is 10% immigrants. A twelth of those in the
last couple of years.

Er, you must have missed the part about illegality. Are you familiar
with the term? And our percent is a lot higher.

Economically it doesn't matter if they're legal. They're still doing
low paid jobs and sucking on the NHS.

If you like, you could have some more of them if you like. They LOVE
socialism! Their high birthrates can offset the darwinistic dieouts of
career women...

We've got plenty already, thanks.

7) Affirmative action. Russian doctors are told to not bother trying to
get an internship because the slots are made available for women and
minorities first.

The NHS has a problem: their highest ever GP numbers are ephemeral
because they're all part time women. Not a private/public issue.

I understand that the British health care system has a worse reputation
than Canada...

As I say, the NHS has historically low levels of funding. Almost all
other nationalised systems are better. The NHS, however, is the
cheapest. Or was until the Thatcher/Blair era introduced various
privatre contractors to do the catering and cleaning anyway.

As you can see, there's lots of fat for "private" healthcare to cut AND
difficult for a liberal socialist program to address.

Yet the fact remains cheap public healthcare and expensive private
healthcare. Obviously the profit motive is an insufficient motive for
efficiency.

The fact remains that... you haven't made your case. In that vacuum,
I'll show the opposite:

http://www.leftwatch.com/archives/years/2002/000019.html
"Researchers at the Institute for Global Health wanted to test the claim
made by the British National Health Service that its use of resources is
among the most efficient of any health care system in the world. So it
compared the cost-efficiency of the NHS with the cost-efficency of
Kaiser Permanente, the largest HMO in the United States. The results
were recently published in the British Medical Journal and did not
reflect very well on the British system.

The researchers chose Kaiser Permanente because it was similar to the
NHS in a number of ways, including the way it is organized, the amount
it spends to deliver health care, and services provided.

The main findings of the study were that those covered by Kaiser
Permanente had significantly better medical access than those covered by
the NHS.

Kaiser Permanente patients spent, on average, more than twice as long
consulting with physicians. Whereas it took 13 weeks for 80 percent of
patients referred to a specialists to actually see a specialist, 80
percent of similar people in Kaiser Permanente's system saw a specialist
within two weeks. Ninety percent of Kaiser Permanente's patients who
needed inpatient treatment or surgery had such surgery within 13 weeks.
Only 41 percent of NHS patients who need such treatment had received it
after 13 weeks.

Most HMO's have policies limiting the amount of hospitalization they
will cover, and such policies are generally very unpopular. But the
clear implication is that the more money spent on hospitalization, the
less that can be spent on providing access to other forms of care, such
as specialists and surgical procedures.

In other words the HMO rations care, even after cherry-picking people
who can afford to pay their rates and who aren't too big a liability,
the NHS provides care for all based on medical, rather than financial,
grounds.

As Alain Enthoven notes in a Commentary that appears with the study, a
major reason for the differing efficiency is competition. People who are
insured by Kaiser Permanente have a lot more options to switch to an
alternative provider if they are dissatisfied, whereas customers of the
NHS have very limited options, since the NHS is supported by their taxes
regardless of whether they would prefer an alternative system. "

They have the right to go private if they do wish. The UK spends less
government money on healthcare per capita than the US government, so
that argument falls flat.

If anything, a government "solution" would be unacceptable from the
get-go for nearly EVERYONE:

1) Seniors won't be happy with basically everyone jumping on board of
their private gravy train. Woo woo! Choo choo!

True. The NHS was always for everyone, superceding the National
INsurance system which only covered the working population.

As I addressed above: No socialist country has unlimited health care for
the elderly...

Except for every country in western Europe, of course.

2) Doctors who are established after years of being exploited by their
benefactors (the AMA) are not going to want to become mere government
union employees. (For most people, that's a step up. For them, BIG
step down!)

The NHS originally put senior doctors in charge of hospitals, GPs were
contractors taking a capitation for each patient.

3) Pharmaceuticals and hospitals: There's billions of big lobbyist and
campaign contribution money there and it won't be going to Hillary for
her to slash their profits to nothing to try to (appear) to make
national health care efficient (for the first year or so.)

True, I can't see Hilary, Obama or the rest actually DOING it. Surely
that shows what a good idea it is.

Here's the thing:

If this is such a good idea, maybe leftists in America should move to
Europe? Oh, wait... no JOBS!

Plenty of jobs. Unemployment about 4%. Less in Britain. Of course,
loads of immigrants with jobs. Personally I think American leftists
should try to organise and convert their fellow-countrymen.

National healthcare is such a big dog (with fleas) that I'm amazed the
Democrats didn't bury it in the backyard. It's disliked and distrusted
by most Americans, HATED by politically powerful groups, and guaranteed
to be a flop out of the gate.

I don't think a referendum would agree.

You didn't read my analysis:

There's the:

1) Doctors
2) Seniors
3) Conservative white males
4) Most of their wifes (literally in Utah :-)

The illegals can't vote (well, most of them anyway), the welfare
recipients usually don't vote, and the Democrats biggest supporters,
criminal felons, also are not allowed to vote.

No party runs on a public-healthcare platform, so we don't know. We
only know that every country with such a party votes for it. No
country votes to get rid of it.

So why's Hillary and the faithful still pushing it?

I guess it's a matter of religious faith: She believes in socialism and
her own lies. It's wildly popular with the hipster set and she can't
back away from it now.

Some facts (from here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare#Economics
)

The UK has a longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, etc..

Healthcare is just one factor in this. Don't worry though, with your
immigration rate (and birthrate) you'll catch up to us soon enough, mate!

The
UK spends an average of less than half the American spend on
healthcare (as none is being leached off in profits).

See above. The UK gives a different service level and has different
obligations.

There is no way in which British healthcare is inferior, as witnessed
by the higher life expectancy and so on.

A Bentley costs more than a jeep too.

So does a rocket powered car with no wheels.

The US spends a
HIGHER percentage of it's national budget on healthcare. The UK
government spend pays 85% of UK health costs, the higher US spend only
44%.

Obvious solution: keep taxes the same, spend them more efficiently by
adopting the English model.

So take our illegals off of us as well as our minority population,

Plenty of our own, thanks. Why don't YOU take some poor and huddled
masses?

convince the seniors to accept rationing,

There's no rationing on the NHS, the only rationing is the American
rationing-by-wealth.

and take over our
pharmeceuticals industry and sell us cheap drugs and we'll be on track...

I think it would be better for you if we keep importing your drugs.
Are you Americans never happy with your balance of payments deficit?

.

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