This Question From Healthcare Jokes | 8 Answers
Do you really want the people that gave us; the failed “War on Poverty” and FEMA and the war on drugs, the same people that have allowed the soccial security “lock box ” to go bankrupt and mandated ethanol increases in fuel causing higher food prices not to mention what they have done to education, you want THESE people deciding health care for all of us? I don’t think so.
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You are correct and it’s not just the US government which is better than the majority of them out there.
Canadian doc on world UHC:
“…Another sign of transformation: Canadian doctors, long silent on the health-care system’s problems, are starting to speak up. Last August, they voted Brian Day president of their national association. A former socialist who counts Fidel Castro as a personal acquaintance, Day has nevertheless become perhaps the most vocal critic of Canadian public health care, having opened his own private surgery center as a remedy for long waiting lists and then challenged the government to shut him down. “This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week,” he fumed to the New York Times, “and in which humans can wait two to three years.”
And now even Canadian governments are looking to the private sector to shrink the waiting lists. Day’s clinic, for instance, handles workers’-compensation cases for employees of both public and private corporations. In British Columbia, private clinics perform roughly 80 percent of government-funded diagnostic testing. In Ontario, where fealty to socialized medicine has always been strong, the government recently hired a private firm to staff a rural hospital’s emergency room.
This privatizing trend is reaching Europe, too. Britain’s government-run health care dates back to the 1940s. Yet the Labour Party—which originally created the National Health Service and used to bristle at the suggestion of private medicine, dismissing it as “Americanization”—now openly favors privatization. Sir William Wells, a senior British health official, recently said: “The big trouble with a state monopoly is that it builds in massive inefficiencies and inward-looking culture.” Last year, the private sector provided about 5 percent of Britain’s nonemergency procedures; Labour aims to triple that percentage by 2008. The Labour government also works to voucherize certain surgeries, offering patients a choice of four providers, at least one private. And in a recent move, the government will contract out some primary care services, perhaps to American firms such as UnitedHealth Group and Kaiser Permanente.
Sweden’s government, after the completion of the latest round of privatizations, will be contracting out some 80 percent of Stockholm’s primary care and 40 percent of its total health services, including one of the city’s largest hospitals. Since the fall of Communism, Slovakia has looked to liberalize its state-run system, introducing co-payments and privatizations. And modest market reforms have begun in Germany: increasing co-pays, enhancing insurance competition, and turning state enterprises over to the private sector (within a decade, only a minority of German hospitals will remain under state control). It’s important to note that change in these countries is slow and gradual—market reforms remain controversial. But if the United States was once the exception for viewing a vibrant private sector in health care as essential, it is so no longer.”http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_ca…
The much lauded French system raises some questions as well. From their Embassy site (ambafrance-us.org) they state that 96 percent of the population receives free or 100 percent reimbursed health care. They state the system is part of their Social Security and is funded from worker’s salaries (60 percent), “indirect taxes on alcohol and tobacco and by direct contribution paid by all revenue proportional to income, including retirement pensions and capital revenues.” They state that it appears that health insurance pays less to its doctors in France than in other European countries, but that 80 percent of the public have supplemental health insurance, typically from their employers. If they’re providing so well for the needs of the public, why is there a need for “supplemental” health insurance for the majority of the public and what about the additional cost that imposes? The site states that the poorest have free universal health care, funded by taxes. Long-term illness sufferers are to be reimbursed for their treatments. They do have private clinics, as well as public hospitals, and not-for-profit healthcare. In fact, “private medical care in France is particularly active in treating more than 50% of surgeries and more than 60% of cancer cases.”
Private insurance, which the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) site said in a 2004 report, was held by 92 percent of the French, helps to cover both vision and dental care which are not well covered under the government system. “The public system is facing chronic deficits and recent cost containment policies have not proved very successful.” The government is interested in having more of the tab picked up by private insurance (Buchmueller & Couffinhall, “Private Health Insurance in France,” 2004, oecd.org).
Medicare is touted by the ignorant as THE model to use in the US:
In the US, Medicare is going bankrupt. In 1998, Medicare premiums were $43.80 and in 2008 will be $96.40–up 120%. “Medigap” insurance is common because of the 20% co-pay required for service. Medicare HMOs are common because they reduce that burden without an extra charge in many cases. HOWEVER, many procedures which used to have no or a low co-pay NOW cost the full 20% for the HMO Medicare patient. ALSO the prescription coverage they tended to offer has been REDUCED in many cases to conform to the insane “donut hole” coverage of the feds. Doctors are leaving Medicare because of the low and slow pay AND because the crazy government wants to “balance” their Ponzi scheme on the backs of doctors.
“That dark cloud lurking over the shoulder of every Massachusetts physician is Medicare. If Congress does not act, doctors’ payments from Medicare will be cut by about 5 percent annually, beginning next year through 2012, creating a financial hailstorm that would wreak havoc with already strained practices.
Cumulatively, the proposed cuts represent a 31 percent reduction in Medicare reimbursement. If the cuts are adjusted for practice-cost inflation, the American Medical Association says Medicare payment rates to physicians in 2013 would be less than half of what they were in 1991.”http://www.massmed.org/AM/Template.cfm?S…
Hillarycare EXISTS in the US–in Taxachusetts with a mere 6.5 million folks:
“Massachusetts announced that spending on its health care plan would increase by $400 million in 2008, a cost expected to be borne largely by taxpayers.”http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/200…
Last modified: January 29. 2008 5:03AM
Article explains UHC is so damned expensive, CA couldn’t even launch it.
Want to provide REAL reform? This is VOLUNTARY, FREE MARKET, TOTAL CHOICE:
QUALITY, ACCESSIBLE, AFFORDABLE health care for all.
That means preventative care (physical with follow up). Real medication (no Medicare “donut holes” the really ill are ripped off again.) No bogus ridiculously low “caps” on needed medical procedures. No abuse of the ER. No paying for the silly with the sniffles to go to the doc for free. No more bankruptcies over medical bills. I want THIS plan that ends abuse of the taxpayer, takes the burden off employers, provides price transparency, and ends the rip-off of the US taxpayer at the hands of greedy insurance CEOs (which has been repeatedly documented).http://www.booklocker.com/books/3068.htm…
Read the PDF, not the blurb, for the bulk of the plan. Book is searchable on Amazon.com
Cassandra Nathan’s Save America, Save the World
Bush screwed all those things up. Hopefully Obama or Clinton will change the governments relaibilty for the better (McSame won’t so anything about it.)
If you think we don’t need a universal health care system, then explain this:http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthra…
The richest and most advanced country in the world is ranked behind countries like Isreal and Saudi Arabia.
And for clarification, if we adopt a universal health care system we won’t be communist, if anything it would be socialist, but we wouldn’t be that anyway. The health insurance companies have prevented us to changing to universal helath care and will NEVER allow it. Even if Clinton, the universal health care freak takes over.
The problem with that attitude is that you are forgetting what country we live in. We have a choice of what goes on. And it’s things like big insurance businesses that make these opinions popular. And before you make assumptions, look at countries that have universal healthcare like Canada and the U.K. It’s worked for them, so what makes you think it won’t work just as well for us. Universal healthcare does not mean the government will start acting like an insurance company, picking and choosing what procedures they will and won’t pay for and so on. It means that everything would be paid for by the government, which we kind of run, and the healthcare industry will be set to a higher standard of care with the regulations that it deserves.
Agreed. I don’t want them deciding law enforcement, road construction, public education or military defense for me either. Privatize it all, government has no business protecting people who can’t afford to pay their own way. We need to break this culture of dependency.
I listened to the news on the radio at work today. It was revealed that just 21 cents of each SS dollar collected actually goes to a recipient. Now that’s bureaucracy!
Desert F, above, needs to get his meds checked.
Your right about that, anything the government touches, it F’s up.
I don’t want them to run it, just pay for it, STFU and send a check, not manage it, control it, over see it, direct it, etc.
No one is mentioning, a large part of health care costs is due to law suits. Doing away with frivolous lawsuits and tort reform, will go a long way towards reducing cost.
Why 20% of our income is being used to pay my families health care coverage is not a joke?