In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up!
NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action.
Mortality rates can also be affected by how likely a population is to get the disease. So sorry IgnE, that youtube video doesn't crush my stats
Sorry Jonny, but they are still crushed. Your stats are Tokyo and the video is Godzilla.
How are they crushed? Did you not watch the video or did you not understand it?
So your argument is that Americans get more cancer but have a better healthcare system to cure it?
My original argument was that some statistics favor the US over the UK.
As far as the video goes, both the survival rate and the mortality rate statistics were more favorable to the US than the UK so quibbling over which statistic is better is a moot point. Additionally, the point of the video was not that survival rates are meaningless, just that the can be distorted when making country comparisons. That's a fair point, though I'd argue that the same can be said for mortality rates.
Mortality rates can also be affected by how likely a population is to get the disease. So sorry IgnE, that youtube video doesn't crush my stats
Sorry Jonny, but they are still crushed. Your stats are Tokyo and the video is Godzilla.
How are they crushed? Did you not watch the video or did you not understand it?
So your argument is that Americans get more cancer but have a better healthcare system to cure it?
My original argument was that some statistics favor the US over the UK.
As far as the video goes, both the survival rate and the mortality rate statistics were more favorable to the US than the UK so quibbling over which statistic is better is a moot point. Additionally, the point of the video was not that survival rates are meaningless, just that the can be distorted when making country comparisons. That's a fair point, though I'd argue that the same can be said for mortality rates.
And how much money do we spend for similar mortality rates?
Mortality rates can also be affected by how likely a population is to get the disease. So sorry IgnE, that youtube video doesn't crush my stats
Sorry Jonny, but they are still crushed. Your stats are Tokyo and the video is Godzilla.
How are they crushed? Did you not watch the video or did you not understand it?
So your argument is that Americans get more cancer but have a better healthcare system to cure it?
My original argument was that some statistics favor the US over the UK.
As far as the video goes, both the survival rate and the mortality rate statistics were more favorable to the US than the UK so quibbling over which statistic is better is a moot point. Additionally, the point of the video was not that survival rates are meaningless, just that the can be distorted when making country comparisons. That's a fair point, though I'd argue that the same can be said for mortality rates.
And how much money do we spend for similar mortality rates?
On January 03 2014 08:14 Danglars wrote: It doesn't get much clearer than this in the health insurance industry: Government is not the solution to the problem, Government is the problem.
Except, you know, in literally every other first world country. American exceptionalism hard at work here.
It was first said and remains true in one government. I understand your system does not involve the tax-collecting apparatus playing a crucial role in the implementation.
You were making a broader ideological point that flies in the face of evidence worldwide. This is what confuses me about Americans, it's like you honestly don't understand that your country isn't breaking new ground and pushing back the frontiers of freedom and human society. Gays in the military and everyone speculates about what it could mean instead of just looking at another country which already did it and seeing what happened. Gay marriage, same. Here you're claiming that government is the problem with healthcare while disregarding the fact that every other place with government healthcare outperforms your healthcare system. You don't even address it, it's like other countries aren't even there, predictions about the great unknown must be rooted in ideology rather than reality.
Here's a theory for you. Government isn't the problem, Americans are.
"Breaking new ground" can apply as much to digging cemetery plots as to helpful progress. I mean, your national health service has broken new ground, as they released statistics showing an increase of 18 million (2005) to 22 million (2012) in ER room visits. 22% increase in 7 years, population increase of 4 percent. Progress!
I agree that the full socialized medicine countries do outperform in some cases. Canada drastically outperforms America with it's average wait of ~18 weeks between primary care physician visit and the followup specialist. Much much longer. And to pay for this great service? Well, it outperforms for the tax burden as % of gdp ... circa 28% back in 2007.
Rationed care? There's the 2012 story of sending sickly babies home to die. Eventually, you're just complying with laws. Make the ambulances wait at a distance so you can comply with regulators in the government system (don't worry, they're fined after 30 minutes of waiting, so comforting). More recently, in April of this past year your health secretary warned that the increase in emergency room visits were the "biggest operational challenge" to NHS. And here we're all being told that PPACA will reduce emergency room visits and encourage preventative care.
I don't want to waste any more time on a detailed response when you quote one sentence from my first post to go off running, so I'll try to bottom line it. The fundamentals are increased taxation and rationed care. The denials are that you can wish away costs for expensive treatments, that medical innovation won't decline, and that government can do a better job at appropriating scarce resources to the patient than anybody else. Pardon me if we've been trending towards more government meddling far before PPACA and can't present a true free market health insurance and health care system to contrast. The progressives don't always move by leaps and bounds, sometimes its just steady undermining of the current system. The distortions are from laws prohibiting insurance sales across state lines, benefits to employers denied to individual market purchasers, and keeping your insurance across employers.
Do you even understand the difference between tax burden and % of GDP(whatever else relevant) spent on healthcare ? Do you also understand that there is no easy correlation between waiting times and quality of healthcare. Waiting times in public systems are based on need. We are much poorer than Canada, but if I would be in risk of death I would be seen by specialist immediately. Global waiting times are pretty useless metric. Ideal system would be public system with no waiting lines. But if you have to sacrifice something the empirical evidence of other countries shows that smartly increasing waiting times by triage is much better solution for the society than denying care based on financial exclusion.
And your cherry-picked anecdotes are such a strong argument. Or do you think anyone actually argued that public systems are perfect, because that is the only scenario where your arguments would have any relevance. If you want create a statistic of bad things happening in US vs UK (any other first/former second world country) relative to population, be my guest, I am pretty confident UK will come up on top. In the meantime it would be good to avoid arguments based on anecdotes.
how about the overall US life expectancy -- how does that stack up vs. these same countries?
heh
On January 03 2014 11:32 JonnyBNoHo wrote: OK, but it seems like "quite a lot" of people die of cancer in the UK even though medical technology is sophisticated enough to save them. And keep in mind that if you do get stuck with bills that the US has forgiving bankruptcy laws.
US life expectancy seems quite low even though we spend astronomically more on public health initiatives and health care in general
this obviously isn't a direct response to what you're saying but i'm wondering how you respond to a similar sort of perplexing thought -- exactly the sort you broached with regard to cancer rates by country
Life expectancy is affected by healthcare as well as other factors. It's a useful metric to look at, but it shouldn't be the only metric you look at.
Interesting. What exactly do 'your' statistics about cancer patient survival rates tell us again? That spending enormous amounts of money on specialty care means we have marginally better specialty care?
Mortality rates can also be affected by how likely a population is to get the disease. So sorry IgnE, that youtube video doesn't crush my stats
Thanks for the two charts, Jonny. Clearly, we have a good amount of progress needed before we can be up to these socialized medicine standards in mortality and survival rates. But if there's one thing Obama has taught us, it's, "Yes, We Can!"
Ahm... Isn't a cancer survivalrate a totally useless metric when not taking age into account?
Old People get cancer more often and are more prone to die from just about any illness, let alone a dire one such as cancer. This kinda autmoatically pushes the mortality rate of cancer patients in countries with higher life expectancy up.
You are right to be suspicious of people who advance marginally higher cancer survivability rates as a chief benefit in a system that costs twice as much.
Missing from this entire argument is the fact that the US Healthcare system is this mangled garbage of a system of socialism and fascism. Then, the critics of such system label this abomination, a 'market system', to which I can only imagine their definition to be 'money passes from one party to another', or some other vagaries. Then there are the reactionaries, who defend this abomination with the same tortured argument of it being a 'market'. Between these two factions I can only shake my head in disbelief. I am sure the AMA, FDA, Medicare, SCHIP, Medicaid, Tri-care, VA, and the trillions of dollars of Government-money funneling into the system means relatively little...it's all those insurance companies fault! The fact is, the insurance industry is partly to blame for their lobbying to crush competition via writs and regulation and mass subsidy, and the other side of the equation being Government mandates and outlawing of contractual arrangements between parties (especially re: insurance pooling, list of conditions that all policies must have, etc. etc.).
There are also a ton of other causes such as the Government outlawing importation of drugs especially generic. Which is to say, those making the argument we have some 'free market' in healthcare to shout down market proponents of change, is laughable, just as much are the 'market' reactionaries who actually think we have some semblance of 'market' healthcare, to which I can only laugh just as much. The foreplay these two groups constantly interchange only obfuscates the real heart of the issue.
Our healthcare 'care' is very good, it is the cost which is the problem, a problem which can only be solved by understanding the causes, and they aren't boiled down to 'greed' or 'this is the market price!'. Of course, there are those who do understand the cause of the prices we currently see and defend those causes (AMA, licensures, FDA, Medicaid/Medicare/Regulatory State/etc.), but then whine about the prices, or use it to push for even more socializing of the hideous system we have to endure. The latter group knows who they are.
On January 03 2014 08:14 Danglars wrote: It doesn't get much clearer than this in the health insurance industry: Government is not the solution to the problem, Government is the problem.
Except, you know, in literally every other first world country. American exceptionalism hard at work here.
It was first said and remains true in one government. I understand your system does not involve the tax-collecting apparatus playing a crucial role in the implementation.
You were making a broader ideological point that flies in the face of evidence worldwide. This is what confuses me about Americans, it's like you honestly don't understand that your country isn't breaking new ground and pushing back the frontiers of freedom and human society. Gays in the military and everyone speculates about what it could mean instead of just looking at another country which already did it and seeing what happened. Gay marriage, same. Here you're claiming that government is the problem with healthcare while disregarding the fact that every other place with government healthcare outperforms your healthcare system. You don't even address it, it's like other countries aren't even there, predictions about the great unknown must be rooted in ideology rather than reality.
Here's a theory for you. Government isn't the problem, Americans are.
"Breaking new ground" can apply as much to digging cemetery plots as to helpful progress. I mean, your national health service has broken new ground, as they released statistics showing an increase of 18 million (2005) to 22 million (2012) in ER room visits. 22% increase in 7 years, population increase of 4 percent. Progress!
I agree that the full socialized medicine countries do outperform in some cases. Canada drastically outperforms America with it's average wait of ~18 weeks between primary care physician visit and the followup specialist. Much much longer. And to pay for this great service? Well, it outperforms for the tax burden as % of gdp ... circa 28% back in 2007.
Rationed care? There's the 2012 story of sending sickly babies home to die. Eventually, you're just complying with laws. Make the ambulances wait at a distance so you can comply with regulators in the government system (don't worry, they're fined after 30 minutes of waiting, so comforting). More recently, in April of this past year your health secretary warned that the increase in emergency room visits were the "biggest operational challenge" to NHS. And here we're all being told that PPACA will reduce emergency room visits and encourage preventative care.
I don't want to waste any more time on a detailed response when you quote one sentence from my first post to go off running, so I'll try to bottom line it. The fundamentals are increased taxation and rationed care. The denials are that you can wish away costs for expensive treatments, that medical innovation won't decline, and that government can do a better job at appropriating scarce resources to the patient than anybody else. Pardon me if we've been trending towards more government meddling far before PPACA and can't present a true free market health insurance and health care system to contrast. The progressives don't always move by leaps and bounds, sometimes its just steady undermining of the current system. The distortions are from laws prohibiting insurance sales across state lines, benefits to employers denied to individual market purchasers, and keeping your insurance across employers.
Do you even understand the difference between tax burden and % of GDP(whatever else relevant) spent on healthcare ? Do you also understand that there is no easy correlation between waiting times and quality of healthcare. Waiting times in public systems are based on need. We are much poorer than Canada, but if I would be in risk of death I would be seen by specialist immediately. Global waiting times are pretty useless metric. Ideal system would be public system with no waiting lines. But if you have to sacrifice something the empirical evidence of other countries shows that smartly increasing waiting times by triage is much better solution for the society than denying care based on financial exclusion.
And your cherry-picked anecdotes are such a strong argument. Or do you think anyone actually argued that public systems are perfect, because that is the only scenario where your arguments would have any relevance. If you want create a statistic of bad things happening in US vs UK (any other first/former second world country) relative to population, be my guest, I am pretty confident UK will come up on top. In the meantime it would be good to avoid arguments based on anecdotes.
My point was that if he wanted to judge based on anecdotes, he should at least have big sample of those. Your statistic is not based on anecdotes and is actually valid argument in US vs whatever healthcare system debate
As for that, I think most people agree that you get very good level of care (if you actually get it and system does not discriminate based on financial situation) in US. Problems in US system are with access to care, heavy negative feedback on preventive care and extreme inefficiency of the whole system. The last part being specifically damning in regards to the specific point of "government is bad in healthcare" as it shows there is no such thing as healthcare system getting more efficient proportionally to the amount of government intervention. Public systems are not only ethically superior, they are also economically superior, at least to the US system. It might be that pure market systems would be economically superior to the public ones, but they are not feasible anyway so they remain purely speculative.
On January 03 2014 19:01 Wegandi wrote: Missing from this entire argument is the fact that the US Healthcare system is this mangled garbage of a system of socialism and fascism. Then, the critics of such system label this abomination, a 'market system', to which I can only imagine their definition to be 'money passes from one party to another', or some other vagaries. Then there are the reactionaries, who defend this abomination with the same tortured argument of it being a 'market'. Between these two factions I can only shake my head in disbelief. I am sure the AMA, FDA, Medicare, SCHIP, Medicaid, Tri-care, VA, and the trillions of dollars of Government-money funneling into the system means relatively little...it's all those insurance companies fault! The fact is, the insurance industry is partly to blame for their lobbying to crush competition via writs and regulation and mass subsidy, and the other side of the equation being Government mandates and outlawing of contractual arrangements between parties (especially re: insurance pooling, list of conditions that all policies must have, etc. etc.).
There are also a ton of other causes such as the Government outlawing importation of drugs especially generic. Which is to say, those making the argument we have some 'free market' in healthcare to shout down market proponents of change, is laughable, just as much are the 'market' reactionaries who actually think we have some semblance of 'market' healthcare, to which I can only laugh just as much. The foreplay these two groups constantly interchange only obfuscates the real heart of the issue.
Our healthcare 'care' is very good, it is the cost which is the problem, a problem which can only be solved by understanding the causes, and they aren't boiled down to 'greed' or 'this is the market price!'. Of course, there are those who do understand the cause of the prices we currently see and defend those causes (AMA, licensures, FDA, Medicaid/Medicare/Regulatory State/etc.), but then whine about the prices, or use it to push for even more socializing of the hideous system we have to endure. The latter group knows who they are.
On January 03 2014 19:41 IgnE wrote: You live in a fantasy land if you think healthcare could ever operate under some kind of radical laissez faire market.
It is a radical idea to let people know how much their procedure will cost; we need to banish the thought from our minds. It is a radical idea to let people choose their health insurance for their time of life and situations in life. It is better to remain ignorant and let these wizards of smart tell us how much it should cost actually just banish greed and make it free! We've seen clearly the masses are too dumb to choose it for themselves, they must be forced into the right choices. Freedom is overrated.
On January 03 2014 19:01 Wegandi wrote: Missing from this entire argument is the fact that the US Healthcare system is this mangled garbage of a system of socialism and fascism. Then, the critics of such system label this abomination, a 'market system', to which I can only imagine their definition to be 'money passes from one party to another', or some other vagaries. Then there are the reactionaries, who defend this abomination with the same tortured argument of it being a 'market'. Between these two factions I can only shake my head in disbelief. I am sure the AMA, FDA, Medicare, SCHIP, Medicaid, Tri-care, VA, and the trillions of dollars of Government-money funneling into the system means relatively little...it's all those insurance companies fault! The fact is, the insurance industry is partly to blame for their lobbying to crush competition via writs and regulation and mass subsidy, and the other side of the equation being Government mandates and outlawing of contractual arrangements between parties (especially re: insurance pooling, list of conditions that all policies must have, etc. etc.).
There are also a ton of other causes such as the Government outlawing importation of drugs especially generic. Which is to say, those making the argument we have some 'free market' in healthcare to shout down market proponents of change, is laughable, just as much are the 'market' reactionaries who actually think we have some semblance of 'market' healthcare, to which I can only laugh just as much. The foreplay these two groups constantly interchange only obfuscates the real heart of the issue.
Our healthcare 'care' is very good, it is the cost which is the problem, a problem which can only be solved by understanding the causes, and they aren't boiled down to 'greed' or 'this is the market price!'. Of course, there are those who do understand the cause of the prices we currently see and defend those causes (AMA, licensures, FDA, Medicaid/Medicare/Regulatory State/etc.), but then whine about the prices, or use it to push for even more socializing of the hideous system we have to endure. The latter group knows who they are.
On January 03 2014 19:41 IgnE wrote: You live in a fantasy land if you think healthcare could ever operate under some kind of radical laissez faire market.
It is a radical idea to let people know how much their procedure will cost; we need to banish the thought from our minds. It is a radical idea to let people choose their health insurance for their time of life and situations in life. It is better to remain ignorant and let these wizards of smart tell us how much it should cost actually just banish greed and make it free! We've seen clearly the masses are too dumb to choose it for themselves, they must be forced into the right choices. Freedom is overrated.
Yes i know your being sarcastic but yes, people are sometimes to dumb to choose for themselves. Young people thinking they dont need to cover cancer cause its 'no big deal' and then they get it, cant pay for it and are fucked while being society has to pay for them. Now ofc there are limits and degrees to this but as has been argued about months ago a lot of people have no idea what they do or do not need insurance for.
On January 03 2014 19:01 Wegandi wrote: Missing from this entire argument is the fact that the US Healthcare system is this mangled garbage of a system of socialism and fascism. Then, the critics of such system label this abomination, a 'market system', to which I can only imagine their definition to be 'money passes from one party to another', or some other vagaries. Then there are the reactionaries, who defend this abomination with the same tortured argument of it being a 'market'. Between these two factions I can only shake my head in disbelief. I am sure the AMA, FDA, Medicare, SCHIP, Medicaid, Tri-care, VA, and the trillions of dollars of Government-money funneling into the system means relatively little...it's all those insurance companies fault! The fact is, the insurance industry is partly to blame for their lobbying to crush competition via writs and regulation and mass subsidy, and the other side of the equation being Government mandates and outlawing of contractual arrangements between parties (especially re: insurance pooling, list of conditions that all policies must have, etc. etc.).
There are also a ton of other causes such as the Government outlawing importation of drugs especially generic. Which is to say, those making the argument we have some 'free market' in healthcare to shout down market proponents of change, is laughable, just as much are the 'market' reactionaries who actually think we have some semblance of 'market' healthcare, to which I can only laugh just as much. The foreplay these two groups constantly interchange only obfuscates the real heart of the issue.
Our healthcare 'care' is very good, it is the cost which is the problem, a problem which can only be solved by understanding the causes, and they aren't boiled down to 'greed' or 'this is the market price!'. Of course, there are those who do understand the cause of the prices we currently see and defend those causes (AMA, licensures, FDA, Medicaid/Medicare/Regulatory State/etc.), but then whine about the prices, or use it to push for even more socializing of the hideous system we have to endure. The latter group knows who they are.
On January 03 2014 19:41 IgnE wrote: You live in a fantasy land if you think healthcare could ever operate under some kind of radical laissez faire market.
It is a radical idea to let people know how much their procedure will cost; we need to banish the thought from our minds. It is a radical idea to let people choose their health insurance for their time of life and situations in life. It is better to remain ignorant and let these wizards of smart tell us how much it should cost actually just banish greed and make it free! We've seen clearly the masses are too dumb to choose it for themselves, they must be forced into the right choices. Freedom is overrated.
Yes i know your being sarcastic but yes, people are sometimes to dumb to choose for themselves. Young people thinking they dont need to cover cancer cause its 'no big deal' and then they get it, cant pay for it and are fucked while being society has to pay for them. Now ofc there are limits and degrees to this but as has been argued about months ago a lot of people have no idea what they do or do not need insurance for.
I give you credit for coming out and stating it openly, the fundamental premise for centrally-controlled anything. Sometimes, or a lot of, people are too dumb to choose for themselves so a benevolent nanny-state needs to come in and choose for you. Krauthammer laid his finger on that not too long ago either
You want a catastrophic plan which is very rational, but Jay Carney is saying, you know, 'you're too stupid to understand what you want.' Once you eliminate the market response, which is a lot of people decide I know what I want better than the bureaucrat and they're eliminating this. That's the essence of what's happening and that's why it's not going to work.
It's the age old problem ... you put it in the hands of the bureaucrat and not the individual and you simultaneously set up a perverse system. The bureaucrat responds to what is politically advantageous for him and his masters because he is not an infallible angel. You have fallible men governing fallible men until you find these angels who will organize society on our behalf.
EPT![[image loading]](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/72070179/Cancer3.PNG)
![[image loading]](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/72070179/Cancer.JPG)
