Unfortunately, you haven’t really won anything- you’re just in the 5th of a 6 stage delusion, which I laid out for another “winner” over three hundred posts ago…
You keep using that word, but I don’t think it means…
What criteria would you like to use to meaningfully compare systems? Aside from from the loud stupid rhetoric from, say, a convicted drug offender with apparent erectile disfunction and a sick thirst for undersage Domincan prostitutes, most standards would seem to have you be the one who is sniffing glue and living in fantasy land.
I always find it fascinating that folks who repeat the pathetically stupid rhetoric on ‘God bless HMOs, whose profitability is the backbone of American freedom…’ seem to have so little understanding of the basic facts of the subject at hand.
First, Canada is not a nationalized heath care system. It is more like 10 or so government backed health insurance plans (each province manages its own). Doctors are primarily private practitioners and the average Canadian sees a lot less red tape and health care rationioning than most middle and upper middle class families in the US.
Is the system perfect? Not at all, Canada went through it’s own phase of Voodo Economics, where morons actually thought that massive tax cuts would pay for themselves (as opposed to massively increasing national debt, like, well, here), and that signficantly weakened the system. They also have long range planning problems, largely because of the relatively small population and insurance pool. For example, it takes a decade to train a medical radiation technician and lack of planning has led to a shortage there now.
Among industrialized nations, their system’s performance is pretty modest. The WHO ranks them 30th in the world on a collection of criteria. Pretty low among industrialized nations. But, we rank 36th. Trailing them on every criteria (longevity, access to care, appropriateness of care, etc.) except one - spending. On that front, we’re king. Consider this, out of every dollar in our GDP, a nickel, 5%, goes, not to ‘health care’, but simply to ‘health care administration’ - a nickel out of every dollar you sweat for goes, you got it, to simply pushing paper - most of it related to trying to give you the absolute bare minimum of care possible.
As sad (or silly) as that is, it is actually the light at the end of the tunnel. It would be nice if people stopped, say, making wildly impossible claims about medical savings accounts because they suddenly applied Jr. High critical thinking and simple arithmetic. But I’m not holding my breath. But I do predict that it will go away. Because the rate of inflation for health care in the US is utterly unsustainable and the current situation already is creating a significant competitive disadvantage to US firms. We see this starting in presdiential politics now. It isn’t big business vs. caring about people, Lots of businesses are starting to feel the pinch of paying the most while getting the least themselves.
We are starting to see a political landscape where something akin to Canada’s system is the political ‘middle ground’ and full on nationalized healthcare is the ‘extreme’. I predict that the anti gibberish will disappear. Like troops in Iraq. The adminstration spent 18 months arguing that, no, the critics were wrong and more troops were
not needed in Iraq, until suddenly more troops were needed… The human echo chambers shifted gears without batting an eye. Health care will be the same thing. If you are the sort of person who can argue that spending the most and getting the least is not just ‘good’, but the definition of ‘freedom,’ than changing your tune 180 degrees with no rational explanation is not going to cost you any sleep or embarassment…
If you look at the time on the posts, you will see that goofyjim and I were going back and forth very quickly. I didn’t have time to run spell check, much less proofread for technicalities. Oscar is correct, I was trying to explain to goofyjim the difference between a legal right and a natural right.
