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On July 16 2009 04:44 D10 wrote:
I think many people are missing the whole point of universal health care, the US is being left behind in terms of coverage (as in people covered) and thats quite ashaming for such a rich country, here in Brazil even the poorest people have acess to the top treatment, and for making drugs cheap we simply ignore patents and make generic medicine. Other coutries have other situations but most of them make the priority to give coverage to as many people as possible, cost reduction comes after broad coverage, otherwise you wont even know where to start reducing from.
But in the US people start attacking the government and questioning its credibility, but it seems to be credible enough to have a huge army and wage wars all around.
If you guys keep delaying health care reform, eventually you will will be paying for the whole world's scientific research/health care because it will be so insanely profitable that they will only do it there, we will keep breaking patents and treating our poor while you fight for the scraps of a system that is focused in doing the companies good instead of the people depending on them.
edit: here everyone that can, has a private insurance option, and they are extremelly regulated and effective, its really hard to screw someone who has insurance being the insurer, and it works wonders, specially because everyone knows that public hospitals = lines
Do you have any conception of how the pharmaceutical industry (or really any intellectual property based industry) works?
Freeloading off of American (and British and Swiss etc.) R&D investment is fine until the US adopts the same irresponsible policies of your government, and investment in new drugs and health care technology vanishes like a squirt of piss in a hurricane.
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On July 16 2009 12:20 Kwark wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2009 12:12 s_side wrote:On July 16 2009 04:05 Sadist wrote:On July 15 2009 01:00 Aegraen wrote:
Not only that, most Americans are HAPPY with their current healthcare.
this is the biggest piece of trolling bullshit ive observed in a while. how the fuck.....can you claim that most americans are happy with their healthcare? Sure the wealthy ones are. Try looking at the fucking middle class for once. Healthcare plans are getting completely raped in new budgets in school districts all the time. Not only that.....tons of jobs that once offered amazing healthcare plans now offer absolutely horrible ones because its not possible to keep up with the ever increasing cost (such as the auto industry). From personal experience.. the only people who seem to have great healthcare anymore or people who have pretty high paying jobs in the first place..or people who work for the government. I wouldn't say that this is a troll, necessarily. The statistics that I've seen suggest that about a percentage point over half of Americans self describe as "very happy" with their health care. That's about 10% more than their Canadian counterparts. What it really boils down to though, is that their will always be "rationing" in health care. It just depends on how you want to ration. In my opinion, it makes more sense to use a regulated free market system in which more productive members of society receive better care. It sounds callous and Darwinian, but compared to the arbitrary and, let's face it, ineffective yoke of a single payer system, it seems the lesser of two evils. Except when the more productive member of society wastes money on inefficient treatment for himself when that same money could be used for the efficient treatment of a half dozen others who cannot afford it. It's unlikely he's all that productive and at the end of the day when a skilled worker dies needlessly society as a whole loses out, not just those directly effected. Some illnesses cost more to treat than others. To get the most bang for your buck it makes sense to cure all the cheap people first and then work your way up.
If an omnipotent arbiter existed, I'd be on board 100%. What we have, unfortunately, are petty and corrupt politicians and bureaucrats. No thanks.
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On July 14 2009 07:25 Aegraen wrote:
He picked her because she is Pro-Obamacare. While she has done fine work, she obviously hasn't spent much time in Canada or Britain. (But that is for another topic)
I have spent decades in both, what is wrong with our health care? :0
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On July 16 2009 12:27 Eskii wrote:Show nested quote +On July 14 2009 07:25 Aegraen wrote:
He picked her because she is Pro-Obamacare. While she has done fine work, she obviously hasn't spent much time in Canada or Britain. (But that is for another topic)
I have spent decades in both, what is wrong with our health care? :0
+ Show Spoiler +you being canada, nothing
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On July 16 2009 12:20 s_side wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2009 04:44 D10 wrote:
I think many people are missing the whole point of universal health care, the US is being left behind in terms of coverage (as in people covered) and thats quite ashaming for such a rich country, here in Brazil even the poorest people have acess to the top treatment, and for making drugs cheap we simply ignore patents and make generic medicine. Other coutries have other situations but most of them make the priority to give coverage to as many people as possible, cost reduction comes after broad coverage, otherwise you wont even know where to start reducing from.
But in the US people start attacking the government and questioning its credibility, but it seems to be credible enough to have a huge army and wage wars all around.
If you guys keep delaying health care reform, eventually you will will be paying for the whole world's scientific research/health care because it will be so insanely profitable that they will only do it there, we will keep breaking patents and treating our poor while you fight for the scraps of a system that is focused in doing the companies good instead of the people depending on them.
edit: here everyone that can, has a private insurance option, and they are extremelly regulated and effective, its really hard to screw someone who has insurance being the insurer, and it works wonders, specially because everyone knows that public hospitals = lines Do you have any conception of how the pharmaceutical industry (or really any intellectual property based industry) works? Freeloading off of American (and British and Swiss etc.) R&D investment is fine until the US adopts the same irresponsible policies of your government, and investment in new drugs and health care technology vanishes like a squirt of piss in a hurricane.
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050001
Drug companies in the US already spend more money on advertising (which is only legal for prescription drugs in the US among western countries) than R&D so if you're worried about all this R&D money "vanishing" maybe you should be more concerned about the fact that drug companies would rather show you commercials for boner pills than develop new drugs.
It's no surprise that impotency pills for millions of baby boomers make a drug company more money than researching and selling drugs that treat deadly diseases that don't affect nearly as many people.
If the end goal of whatever you're advocating is to have more people live longer on average, putting people in charge of that who have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder profits is not a wise course of action.
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On July 14 2009 07:56 Misrah wrote:
The thing is- people want things to be taken care of. For some reason the US public enjoys the idea of cradle to grave care, and obama is going to be giving it to them. Obama is 'helping them' when in reality he is only helping the minority or people in the US. The majority and going to be faced with crushing taxes- and now my generation and the next and the next are going to have to pay off all of the 'stimulus package'
What i find to be so wrong is this: When you are in dept (as america is) you should not spend more, instead you need to cut back and start saving. Obama is going in the complete opposite direction.
It is conventional wisdom even among the most ardently conservative that World War II ended the Great Depression.
During that time our debt to GDP ratio was higher than it has ever been in our history, certainly much higher than it is today. In fact, it reached over 120% at its peak in the mid-1940s and gradually inched down before beginning to rise again in the 1980s.
In wartime, the spending was almost exclusively on things that do not create further economic value once manufactured (a truck adds economic value through trade, a tank does not add economic value, it merely protects existing value).
Why is it I never hear anyone from previous generations complaining about the crushing debt burden of World War II that they had to pay off? The answer is simple: the debt was not crushing. Even though building weapons does not add value to the economy, the act of the government to create a demand for manufactured goods when there wasn't any helped every sector of the economy, from raw materials to manufacturing to consumer spending.
In the decades that followed, the momentum from these activities spurred the growth of private enterprise as they took government R&D from that time such as computers and jet propulsion and developed new products and services based on them. These companies were able to leverage the assets and momentum generated by deficit spending to increase revenue and create jobs, drastically increasing government tax revenue and allowing the debt-to-GDP ratio to gradually sink back down.
Even now to some extent we're seeing the same sort of thing with the beginnings of private space ventures. The rocketry research pioneered by the government and military was a cost no private company would reasonably bear, but they are now well-positioned to take advantage of the scientific advancements of that era. As these businesses grow, they will create new jobs and new revenue, and in the long run the extra taxes paid as a result of the space industry will end up exceeding the sunk costs of NASA's work.
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Actually I think it's interesting that Cuba is in the same life expectancy range as US is considering they are often touted as having the best health care. Not sure on the facts, but I think they have the most physicians per capita.
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On July 16 2009 13:07 gchan wrote:
Actually I think it's interesting that Cuba is in the same life expectancy range as US is considering they are often touted as having the best health care. Not sure on the facts, but I think they have the most physicians per capita.
There are some misleading things about cuba though, specifically that they spend far less money on "lifestyle medicine" and have a much lower obesity rate due to a higher percentage of jobs which require physical labor and much less exposure to refined carbohydrates and other highly processed foods.
Probably the best comparison to the US is Australia, especially given that Aus now has the world's highest obesity rate.
The thing that many people miss about the US healthcare system is that the uninsured will use the emergency room as their only health option. Since it's not especially moral (or from a purely pragmatic view, good for workforce productivity) to have people dying in the streets, the insured pay for these people one way or another. If these same people were insured and had access to preventative medicine, they would use the ER less and the entire system would end up costing less money. Preventative medicine also has the added benefit of reducing the amount of time the patient would take off sick or reduce the risk of permanent disability, and a healthy citizen is able to generate much more economic value than a chronically ill or disabled one.
Preventative medicine = cheaper healthcare
Preventative medicine = healthier worker
Healthier worker = more economic value = more tax revenue = more mitigation of healthcare costs
Compared to the current reactive system of having workers live shorter, less productive lives while taxpayers still end up subsidizing their medical care anyway simply makes no sense, either from a moral or economic perspective.
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Zepplin, devaluation of the pound and other currencies after WW2. It isn't that there was no problem, it was that pretty much everything went to shit together.
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On July 16 2009 13:16 Ecael wrote:
Zepplin, devaluation of the pound and other currencies after WW2. It isn't that there was no problem, it was that pretty much everything went to shit together.
That's true but at the same time the US was also dispersing its wealth outside of its borders by investing large amounts of dollars in other countries, first with Lend-Lease then with the Marshall Plan and rebuilding of Japan. You can certainly argue the fact that the US was helped by coming out of the war in better shape than the other powers, but the fact remains that the investments the government and military made at that time have generated all their cost and then some in economic value in the decades that have followed.
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On July 16 2009 05:01 Arbiter[frolix] wrote:
A gigantic money-sucking military, spread across an archipelago of bases all over the world, seems like just about the biggest of big government projects one could possibly think of.
It's very much a double standard to say that the government is inefficient and wasteful but should be given a virtual blank check for military endeavors. Defense is necessary, but is the magnitude of it necessary?
Similarly, it's very much a double standard to say that the government is inefficient and wasteful but should not be allowed to operate a public health insurance plan because it will cost less than for-profit insurance and too many people will choose it.
All I have been told about the free market is that it leads to the best price because of tough competition. Earlier this year major health insurance companies all agreed to lower their rates by 20% across the board as a compromise to the Obama Administration.
If these companies are making so much money that they can take a 20% cut from their gross revenue and still remain profitable, there is not sufficient competition going on in the marketplace.
In the current system, healthcare is tied to employers, so even if Blue Cross offered a great plan with lower rates, I can't shop for it because my company uses Aetna and Blue Cross would only be a better deal with my employer's subsidy and group purchasing power applied to it. Another drawback to the employer-based system is that would-be entrepreneurs who have families may deliberately avoid starting their own business because they need an employer to subsidize their insurance costs. Who knows how many Pages and Brins there are out there who are afraid to start the next big thing because they have two kids and a third on the way.
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I feel that my freedom is infringed upon when I have to pay taxes to the government so that they can inform me that being obese is bad for me. The government is not my mom or my dad and I can figure out what is good and bad for myself on my own.
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On July 16 2009 14:17 nomsayin wrote:
I feel that my freedom is infringed upon when I have to pay taxes to the government so that they can inform me that being obese is bad for me. The government is not my mom or my dad and I can figure out what is good and bad for myself on my own.
If the government didnt MAKE food companies put ingredient labels on their food, their would be none. Or nutrition labels. Think about that.
I for one, in the absense of proper information, would find it very diffficult to assess what was bad and good for me.
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On July 14 2009 07:25 Aegraen wrote:
He picked her because she is Pro-Obamacare. While she has done fine work, she obviously hasn't spent much time in Canada or Britain. (But that is for another topic)
You obviously watch too much Fox News.
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On July 16 2009 12:41 zeppelin wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2009 12:27 Eskii wrote:On July 14 2009 07:25 Aegraen wrote:
He picked her because she is Pro-Obamacare. While she has done fine work, she obviously hasn't spent much time in Canada or Britain. (But that is for another topic)
I have spent decades in both, what is wrong with our health care? :0 + Show Spoiler +you being canada, nothing
This really says it all right here. Health care shouldn't be a private business issues, period. Fuck this country I'm moving to Canada.
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YouYube video about economic situation.
The most relevant recent thread i could find was here.
I didnt want it to be in you tube thread, but doesn't quite deserve its own.
+ Show Spoiler +
And just PS... pls stop with the Obama is a socialist stuff. Really? You dont see any big corporations upset that he is president, any news, oil, banking or otherwise. Thats where the power is and the debate isn't even about where the power is.
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On July 16 2009 15:01 Louder wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2009 12:41 zeppelin wrote:On July 16 2009 12:27 Eskii wrote:On July 14 2009 07:25 Aegraen wrote:
He picked her because she is Pro-Obamacare. While she has done fine work, she obviously hasn't spent much time in Canada or Britain. (But that is for another topic)
I have spent decades in both, what is wrong with our health care? :0 + Show Spoiler +you being canada, nothing This really says it all right here. Health care shouldn't be a private business issues, period. Fuck this country I'm moving to Canada.
It isn't an issue of private business, but our current system. If it's a matter of private business, why, of all the industries, is health-care's costs ballooning out of control? Obviously something is different. In fact, in most other industries, we have become much, much more efficient. Food is more important than healthcare, where's your rage about it being private?
I think Arbiter earlier made a comment about most free-market defenses of our healthcare coming down to "blind free market fundamentalism." Well, it goes both ways. I hear a lot of "health-care is a right", "health-care should be free", and "governments should take care of its people" without seemingly appreciating the complexity of the issue.
Should somebody who doesn't care for his body, never exercises, and eats junk have to be paid for by somebody who does the opposite and rarely has to visit the hospital? Where is the incentive for medical innovations, or for one doctor to be better than another? Aren't monopolies bad? Why are we encouraging it for the one of the most important issues?
I want to pay for my own care, with my own money, to any doctor (who will be competing for my money), licensed or not, that I choose to, without any shackles from government. I want to be rewarded by low medical bills if I live a healthy lifestyle and penalized by high ones if I don't. Maybe you don't like that, and would prefer Canada's system. That's fine, but what right do you have to coerce me to use it?
Of course, neither of us are happy under the current system, but why does the only alternative have to be complete socialization? How about a free-market in healthcare? Both are radically different from our current system, and I believe a free-market approach deserves at least some consideration (at least on this forum, it will never receive any politically).
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United Kingdom2674 Posts
On July 16 2009 05:01 Arbiter[frolix] wrote:
A gigantic money-sucking military, spread across an archipelago of bases all over the world, seems like just about the biggest of big government projects one could possibly think of.
I am going to quote my own post and elaborate ever so slightly in order to avoid any confusion. The elementary point I was making was that for many in America, society, through its democratic representatives, deciding to allocate part of its resources to providing universal healthcare for its citizens is condemned as "big government" (a curiously American idea itself, since I have never heard the phrase uttered in political discourse even in the hopelessly US-influenced United Kingdom), whereas spending (I am tempted to say "wasting") money on military bases across the entire globe does not attract the same criticism.
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United Kingdom2674 Posts
Personally, I think universal healthcare is a moral imperative for any civilised, developed nation.
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United Kingdom2674 Posts
On July 16 2009 13:07 gchan wrote:
Actually I think it's interesting that Cuba is in the same life expectancy range as US is considering they are often touted as having the best health care. Not sure on the facts, but I think they have the most physicians per capita.
Amusing. You do realise that Cuba is a poor nation, subject to ongoing decades-long sanctions from the global superpower, right?
The "interesting" thing is that Cuba is even on the same chart as the wealthiest, most powerful nation on the planet when it comes to healthcare performance.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://i28.tinypic.com/qx17qe.gif)
