…

SD posts something as ludicrous as this:

Any system that provide the same healthcare to someone who spends their time surfing in Hawaii as someone who gets up every morning and goes to work and pays taxes is doomed to failure.

and still expects to be taken seriously. Given that we did have welfare reform and there’s nothing that I’m aware of that would let his hypothetical surfer buy food and clothing what fantasy land is SD imagining? Oh, that’s right. He had to make up something, didn’t he?

Simply put, no system will be perfect, and waiting for a perfect system and doing nothing is a silly way to approach things. What we have now is terrible. Period. Unless you’re rich.

However, as I pointed out, Spain, Norway, France, and Japan are not the United States. Japan does not have a population that nclude 20 million illegal aliens and does not have a population that is 12% black and 13% Hispanic. All the countries you listed are smaller than Texas in land mass. They are defiitely not the U.S.

If you look at life expectancy, a Japanese American will live longer, on average, than a citizen of Japan. It is one of the oddities on health statistics.

I love how people propose systems such as the government will make sure you always have free health care (and call it insurance even through their no insurance, risk management portion of the program) and refuse to believe that people will not totally game the system.

Any system that provide the same healthcare to someone who spends their time surfing in Hawaii as someone who gets up every morning and goes to work and pays taxes is doomed to failure.

The plans put forth by the Dem candidates are just band-aids.
We need radical change, and universal health care is the only answer available. There will be problems, for sure. What area of lide doesn’t have problems? But at least this would begin to look like a modern country, not some 19th century backwater, whete a certain sector of sodiety is expected to die in a timely fashion in order not to spoil the scenery.

Employers could cover the cost of insurance for their employees as a benefit or even stick purely to the private insurance sector but because of the sliding fees no one would lose their health care because of losing their job because their cost would drop to zero until they find another job. Because there is no one size fits all solution I think there are things that could hopefully be done for rural areas that aren’t being done now like a bus/truck tandem that could actually provide mobile clinics for any rural areas that have severe problems with getting health care.

Something else that I think should be done is to remove the artificial barriers between different kinds of health care. Dental care (non-cosmetic) and mental health care are just as important to overall health as your internal medicine specialist or orthopedic surgeon.

Just some speculation on somewhere we might go.

Total government health care will be a disaster.

Total corporate health care is a disaster for those who cannot afford outrageous health care premiums or who fail to have a good job which covers them.

I started looking into premiums for insurance and they are outrageous. Many of them are more expensive then a house mortgage.

That sounds sorta absurd to me. I have government insurance as a retired military officer, however I find that my daughter is paying like 355 a month for health insurance and that is after the bank she works at pays the other 355 a month.

Despite my conservative leanings I realize that a solution to this must be found because it is getting near impossible for most Americans to afford health care.

Somewhere we need to find solutions instead of argue the same talking points.

Universal health care is good.

Is not!!

Is Too!!

Is Not!!

Is Too!!

This hardly solves anything.

However, in the real world, the government will either develop a one size fits all.

The U.S. is not Spain. What works in Maryalnd probably will not work in Wyoming. Spain is not the U.S. As a function of GDP, Spain is about the same size as Texas. Texas could probably develop some sort of healthcare system that would work in Houston or Dallas but probably fail everywhere else.

Everything I posted about the lack of payment by insurance companies, collection agencies, etc. are what I have personally encountered in dealing with hospitals, doctor’s offices and insurance companies. Between my deceased parents, my mother-in-law’s cancer and my wife’s health problems I have seen more of their crap than I ever dreamed. None of it came from any activist web sites.

As far as something to confirm my claim here’s one article about a hospital that is cutting off an unreliable insurance company and suing them.

And should executives in the industry receive astronomical compensation as everyone in the universe is complaining about costs? Sorry, I forgot who I was addressing.

Well, look at it this way, we beat Slovenia…barely.

You can look more in depth at the ranking if you like. You can see that the US is…
– number 72 on overall health
– number 54-55 on fairness and distribution of healthcare.
– Number 1 (Finally!)….on per capita spending on healthcare.

Yeah, that nasty universal healthcare, who wants it? It’s not a statistic but I think it bears mentioning. In Spain the complaint list about our public healthcare system is long (there is private healthcare for those who wish it) but there is something that no one doubts, they’d rather have this than the US system. The very idea that you could literally not be able to go to the doctor or be economically ruined by being sick sounds simply bizarre. If at least you saved money, but it looks like not even, what we pay in taxes you pay in premiums, except I pay less.

Government run healthcare can be horrible, just look at Walter Reed or King-Drew medical center (both government run).

What companies are making great profits and are not-for-profits doing any better.

Remmeber, facts please and not cites of activist blogs or homepages.

It does not include things like credentialing, quality assurance, institutional review boards, and many other things that companies like HCA would include as administration costs.

Of course the VA hospitals do not have OB, pediatrics, neonatology, Emergency rooms, sports medicine, or many other departments that exist in community hospitals. That also makes their administration much easier. See http://www.washingtondc.va.gov/departments/index.asp

You can also look up
http://www.auntminnie.com/index.asp?sec=ser&sub=def&pag=dis&ItemID=63000
to see how CMS reimbursement affects adopters of new technology.

I hope that is enough facts for you and note that none of them came from an activist website. In the future, I hope you can do the same.

Add to your list co’s terminating medical insurance when a two weeks’ notice is given and employees not realizing that a doctor’s visit or treatment is suddenly uncovered, until mos. later.

The arguments against healthcare are so ridiculous and made so often that there are ample reasons to fix any problems before the system goes online. To argue against it means you are a) rich b) an ideologue c) a & b.