National Health Service bashers make me sick

[gopher]

Both the British and Canadian systems are better than ours. As for why the right wing criticizes both, they do so because they know they can always count on the Democratic party to remain silent and to acquiesce in every political conflict.

Obama was given a decisive mandate to bring about health care reform when he was elected. But his own party has stood in the way of reform legislation. Therefore, don't blame the Republicans for the lack of change. The blame goes squarely on the Democrats.

 

[Cannuck]

I have a great idea. All those people that want somebody to look after them should go join a Hutterite colony. I know they are looking for people and would be very welcoming.

 

[earth_as_one]

You quoted hearsay about what Harvard University supposedly found. "The Health Care Reform Debate Blog - cmhmd


Dedicated to gathering information on health care reform, including my thoughts on current news and data important to the discussion."

Your criticize SJP for referencing hearsay and then quote a blog to back up your point???

Here is a link to the Harvard University Study:
http://bdp.law.harvard.edu/pdfs/papers/Thorne/Illness_Injury.pdf

In 2001, 1.458 million American families filed for bankruptcy. To investigate
medical contributors to bankruptcy, we surveyed 1,771 personal bankruptcy filers in five
federal courts and subsequently completed in-depth interviews with 931 of them. About
half cited medical causes, which indicates that 1.9–2.2 million Americans (filers plus dependents) experienced medical bankruptcy.

SJP is correct.

Also only six states protect Americans from losing their homes due to illness. The rest give little to no protection. Millions of bankrupt Americans who got sick lost their jobs as a result, which means they lost their job related health benefits causing them to declare bankruptcy and eventually loose your home.

 

[Niflmir]

Believe what you like, some people need something like a Socialist State in order to exist. Give one a comfy homey feeling that someone is still taking care of you.

"USA spends more for health and gets far less in return."

Yes we do, you do get what you pay for though. Americans are by in large happier with their health system, it gets results for them. Yes it can use some tweaks like getting everyone a yearly checkup. Putting on limit on liability claims. But that is all I would change.

I can only conclude that you didn't read the original post fully, because it showed amongst other things, that Americans are by and large, less happy with their health system than the British. It showed further, that for the vast majority of quality indicators, USA is not getting what they are paying for. They pay something like triple and have higher mortality rates in everything but cancer(and heart attacks), and I imagine that occurs because of socialist style experimental cancer research taking care of individuals.

This was all there in the post and you didn't even bother trying to refute it. So I can only conclude that you didn't read it.

Let me paraphrase:

You are less happy with your health care than other nations are with theirs.
You pay more for lower quality in all but a few specialised areas where billions of dollars of public funds are sunk in.

 

[SirJosephPorter]

Your criticize SJP for referencing hearsay and then quote a blog to back up your point???

Earth_as_one, I think ironsides was just nit picking. The blog clearly referred to the Harvard study, anybody could have found the Harvard study with just one Google command. Ironsides could have found it. Thanks for finding and posting it.

But the point is, the blog quoted Harvard study, a study by a respectable, ivy league university. It is not as if the link was to some extremist website, it was to Harvard study.

Ironsides was just quibbling over details.

 

[ironsides]

I can only conclude that you didn't read the original post fully, because it showed amongst other things, that Americans are by and large, less happy with their health system than the British. It showed further, that for the vast majority of quality indicators, USA is not getting what they are paying for. They pay something like triple and have higher mortality rates in everything but cancer(and heart attacks), and I imagine that occurs because of socialist style experimental cancer research taking care of individuals.

This was all there in the post and you didn't even bother trying to refute it. So I can only conclude that you didn't read it.

Let me paraphrase:

You are less happy with your health care than other nations are with theirs.
You pay more for lower quality in all but a few specialised areas where billions of dollars of public funds are sunk in.

Never mentioned who these Americans were. As the Obama administration pushes for a national health care plan, studies show that most Americans are overwhelmingly happy with their own health care -- but they are dissatisfied with the country's overall system, because most Americans who have insurance believe that those who don't have it are not receiving care.
Those same studies, however, show that a surprisingly large 70 percent of the estimated 46 million Americans who don't have insurance say they do, in fact, receive health care, and that a vast majority of them are satisfied with it.
A survey conducted jointly by the Kaiser Family Foundation, ABC News and USA Today, released in October 2006, found that 89 percent of Americans were satisfied with their own personal medical care, but only 44 percent were satisfied with the overall quality of the American medical system. The survey is the only recent poll for which data is publicly available that allows for a comparison of the satisfaction of insured and uninsured Americans. (The data from a just-completed New York Times/CBS poll won't be publicly available for several months; the results that have been reported so far don't make the comparisons discussed in this article.)

As Obama Pushes National Health Care, Most Americans Already Happy With Coverage - Political News - FOXNews.com

 

[ironsides]

oops my apologies to SJP.

 

[#juan]

As I've said before, Canada is the worlds second largest country in terms of land area but we are about thirty sixth largest in population. Canada's health care system gets spotty where the population thins out. The best systems in the world would have the same problems in our country. Most Canadians are happy with the system we have except in those areas where the population thins out and we have to pay doctors extra to practice in some of these outlying areas. If you choose to live fifty miles away from doctors or a hospital, or medical labs, you are going to pay a little more for less service. Both the Canadian health care system and the British National Health system work better than what the Americans have and it costs less per capita or as a percentage of GDP. The difference is mainly the huge costs added by large medical insurance companies, that Canada and Britain don't have. Thank God!

 

[ironsides]

I agree that your system works fine for your population, but would get lost with ours. 335 million people who don't balk to much when the goverment raises taxes do not want another major reason for the goverment to get their hands on our money. I am not rich by any means, but I do not want to get into another goverment fiasco. As I have said before, let the goverment fix Social Security, Medicare and Medicade which are governmental health and welfare programs that they ruined and tried blaming everyone else first before starting another bureaucracy that will also fail. No more "let's try it before rejecting it", it is Socialism plain and simple. Want to reduce costs, control the runaway insurance rates and claims.

 

[lone wolf]

I agree that your system works fine for your population, but would get lost with ours. 335 million people who don't balk to much when the goverment raises taxes do not want another major reason for the goverment to get their hands on our money. I am not rich by any means, but I do not want to get into another goverment fiasco. As I have said before, let the goverment fix Social Security, Medicare and Medicade which are governmental health and welfare programs that they ruined and tried blaming everyone else first before starting another bureaucracy that will also fail. No more "let's try it before rejecting it", it is Socialism plain and simple. Want to reduce costs, control the runaway insurance rates and claims.

Control the runaway insurance rates and claims..... Good luck with that, eh?

Control bankers, insurance people and lawyers. They're the ones who feed from the insanity

 

[ironsides]

Much easier to herd the sheep.

 

[#juan]

I agree that your system works fine for your population, but would get lost with ours. 335 million people who don't balk to much when the goverment raises taxes do not want another major reason for the goverment to get their hands on our money. I am not rich by any means, but I do not want to get into another goverment fiasco. As I have said before, let the goverment fix Social Security, Medicare and Medicade which are governmental health and welfare programs that they ruined and tried blaming everyone else first before starting another bureaucracy that will also fail. No more "let's try it before rejecting it", it is Socialism plain and simple. Want to reduce costs, control the runaway insurance rates and claims.

Ironsides, you are one of the hangovers from the cold war. Socialism is a dirty word. You see any hint of socialism as a communist bogeyman under the bed. It is obvious to most people that some sort of co-operative system to cut the costs to the individual is the way to go. If everyone pays the same and gets the same coverage, it has to save a pile of money in the accounting alone.
How are you going to reduce runaway insurance rates when the insurance companies control your system?

 

[ironsides]

If someone wants to control the high prices of medical insurance there will have to be a CAP put on what insurance can charge and how much a patient can claim in personal liability. They are the ones who really caused this problem with help from friends in the goverment turning their backs while they did what they did. Cannot blame doctors or hospitals, they for the most part only charge what the insurance companies allow them to charge. Socialism is a dirty word, I don't want to see the U.S. become another China or what Russia used to be. We are not a little country that can be run like a club (small groups can do almost anything they want), people will just have to learn to be more self reliant. In other words work for your needs including health benefits. Up until roughly 1995 companies paid health benefits, then the insurance companies raised the rate so much that only the very companies like Microsoft, Northrop Grumman major manufacturing companies could afford them, forcing small companies to reduce or cancel insurance all together. (the automotive companies killed themselves with unique benefit packages.)This is not a easy fix, but I still say the goverment should fix what they now have before screwing something else up.

 

[Niflmir]

Never mentioned who these Americans were. As the Obama administration pushes for a national health care plan, studies show that most Americans are overwhelmingly happy with their own health care -- but they are dissatisfied with the country's overall system, because most Americans who have insurance believe that those who don't have it are not receiving care.
Those same studies, however, show that a surprisingly large 70 percent of the estimated 46 million Americans who don't have insurance say they do, in fact, receive health care, and that a vast majority of them are satisfied with it.
A survey conducted jointly by the Kaiser Family Foundation, ABC News and USA Today, released in October 2006, found that 89 percent of Americans were satisfied with their own personal medical care, but only 44 percent were satisfied with the overall quality of the American medical system. The survey is the only recent poll for which data is publicly available that allows for a comparison of the satisfaction of insured and uninsured Americans. (The data from a just-completed New York Times/CBS poll won't be publicly available for several months; the results that have been reported so far don't make the comparisons discussed in this article.)

As Obama Pushes National Health Care, Most Americans Already Happy With Coverage - Political News - FOXNews.com

Thanks for proving my point:

1. You get the same coverage or worse (as indicated by 89% of Americans being satisfied by the coverage they receive).
2. You are not as happy with the health care system as a whole. (18% happy about costs, 44% for quality of care).

That is 80% of your citizens feel the costs are too high and the evidence supports them. (I posted it in another thread, will dig it up if you like.) You pay triple what the "socialist" demons pay for equal quality. Heck, don't even compare to a socialist country if you think its a dirty word, compare to Germany, where I for instance am covered by private insurance. You pay far more, for less.

In Germany, the private insurance companies have to compete with an incredibly efficient public system which can cut most of the costs that a private provider must tackle. This is the basic fact of the matter: for something like insurance, because of the business model, the government is the only organization in the position to be efficient----costing the actual cost of the product and little more for administration.

 

[ironsides]

Feeling the costs are to high and not liking our healthcare are two different things. Yes the costs are high, but most of us do like our healthcare system as it is. Go ask those who have no or very little care and of course they would like to see a change. Would we like to see it cheaper of course we would. We want the Cadillac of healthcare for the cost of a Chevrolet, as does everyone. Just do not change what benefits people now get to fund everyone else.

 

[#juan]

Cannot blame doctors or hospitals, they for the most part only charge what the insurance companies allow them to charge. Socialism is a dirty word, I don't want to see the U.S. become another China or what Russia used to be. We are not a little country that can be run like a club (small groups can do almost anything they want), people will just have to learn to be more self reliant. In other words work for your needs including health benefits.

Rampant Capitalism is also a dirty word. Why are insurance companies running your health care system?
The difference in population is merely academic. If it works for 35 million it will work for 350 million.
"Work for your needs including health care". What happens when you get sick and can no longer work? I know what happens. In the U.S., you go bankrupt, lose your house, etc.

 

[pgs]

Going bankrupt and losing your home might be prefferable to some people ,
than dieing on a waiting list.
Sorry Juan but no matter how you slice it the Canadian health model is not worth the paper its written on.
Ask the departing head of the CMA or the incumbent for that matter.
And if he is to right wing for you .try Debra Macphearson of the nurses union.
She is constantly on her soapbox bemoaning the working conditions of her members.Or how about the court case in Quebec were the court ruled that it is
against the charter to force people to wait for medically neccesary procedures.
Our system is seriously flawed and all you idiologs refuse to see.
But that doesn't really suprise me it is free health care afterall.But only for those
who don't pay taxes.Are you one of those?

 

[#juan]

Going bankrupt and losing your home might be prefferable to some people ,
than dieing on a waiting list.
Sorry Juan but no matter how you slice it the Canadian health model is not worth the paper its written on.
Ask the departing head of the CMA or the incumbent for that matter.
And if he is to right wing for you .try Debra Macphearson of the nurses union.
She is constantly on her soapbox bemoaning the working conditions of her members.Or how about the court case in Quebec were the court ruled that it is
against the charter to force people to wait for medically neccesary procedures.
Our system is seriously flawed and all you idiologs refuse to see.
But that doesn't really suprise me it is free health care afterall.But only for those
who don't pay taxes.Are you one of those?

It would be really good if you had any idea what you were talking about but you don't. People in Canada are not dying on waiting lists. Canada's health care system is affected more by our geography and population than any other factors. I have had open heart surgery and I experienced no life threatening delays. I know that there is a waiting list for joint replacement but that situation is improving. I pay a monthly premium for extended medical and dental coverage and all my health costs are covered by a single payer system that has worked very well for me and others I know. If you live up north your service will not be as quick, or as convenient, but it is there.

 

[SirJosephPorter]

In Germany, the private insurance companies have to compete with an incredibly efficient public system which can cut most of the costs that a private provider must tackle.

Niflmir, I think that is precisely why the insurance companies are fighting any attempt at health care reform tooth and nail.

Public system can keep the costs down because of low overheads and large volume. Insurance companies are afraid that if they have to compete with government, it will cut down on their profits substantially.

Far right comes at it differently, to them government getting involved into health care is nothing short of Socialism or Communism. Which is fine with the big corporations, if the extreme right is carrying the torch for big companies, that is all right by them. But of course, when big companies need money, they do not hesitate to ask government for it (AIG, General Motors etc.).

On this issue, same as on environment, the far right and business interests coincide.

 

[SirJosephPorter]

Sorry Juan but no matter how you slice it the Canadian health model is not worth the paper its written on.
Ask the departing head of the CMA or the incumbent for that matter.
And if he is to right wing for you .try Debra Macphearson of the nurses union.
She is constantly on her soapbox bemoaning the working conditions of her members.Or how about the court case in Quebec were the court ruled that it is

Pgs, none of them want an American style health care system here (as evidently you do), they want to reform what we have. And certainly our system can be reformed, any system could be made to work better.

As to the doctors, a sore point with them is that doctors in USA earn much more than doctors here (though doctors here Canada do very well indeed). So it wouldn’t surprise me if some doctors look across the border with envy.

But the point is, they are all talking of reform, not introducing American style, Devil take the hindmost system here.