Hey, the U.S. is 6th in the world...NOT.
The latest W.H.O. report (and it was complied with pre-faith-based-Busch statistics) put the U.S. at 37th in the world for it's healthcare. Good god, we rated behind fucking Morocco in quality!
Posted by phidipides at May 15, 2007 07:46 AMFrance and Germany have over double the unemployment rate as the US. In addition, their GDP over the last few years has been horrible. They're also running budget deficits.
The middle class in England (Around $55,000 if you translate the pounds to dollars) pay a 47.9% tax rate. So, go ahead and promise a 47.9% tax rate on the US middle class if elected in 2008. Go for it! I know many of you wouldn't oppose this as you feel Americans are undertaxed, so maybe it's just preaching to the choir.
Posted by muckdog at May 15, 2007 07:48 AMWhl Bll fght lk crz fr crp NFT nd GTT, h stmbld n ths ss, bcs t wsn't mprtnt ngh t hm t trl ffr ssstnc t pr ppl.
sct
[Editor: ignore=off]
Posted by at May 15, 2007 07:55 AM
"...because to them, health insurance coverage is an earned privilege, not a societal necessity."
That is it exactly and why "socialized" medicine scares the shit out of them. We need a little more 'socialized' in this society.
Posted by Jim DeRosa at May 15, 2007 07:59 AMMuckdog, they have better health care than we do, plain and simple. Raising straw men like your tired, knee-jerk tax arguments don't advance the debate about fixing the system, but it does allow people like you to continue to benefit from doing nothing. What in this post argued for a 47.9% tax rate, when nothing advocated by any Democrat calls for such a thing?
It is all too predictable that the first things out of your mouth are your usual bleats about their GDP and unemployment. Deal with the issue at hand in this post. Why should the United States continue to tolerate a health care system that is less efficient and more costly than rival nations? And what are your remedies, besides the complaints about their GDP and unemployment, and your straw men arguments about taxes?
Posted by Steve Soto at May 15, 2007 08:03 AMstv, r sstm s nt bt trtmnt, bt prft. ndd, t s hghl lkl tht th nl trtmnts ffrd r th ns mst prftbl. n nthr w, f trtmnt ws chp, fr th sck, h wld rcv nl trtmnt tht tks hs mn.
Wht th crp lrds dn't wnt s nthr dn trtmnt.
t's NT th hlth sstm tslf, t's r wn bsc ntr f dprvt, cmbnd wth th slf flfllng prphc f lpng dtc fls dctn dsgnd t dstrt nd cnfs.
Lk t r wn st: tlk th tlk f dmcrc, t fl t wlk dmcrc. wnt t hr nl wht r hmnstc rlgn f prvrsn prmts.
Wll, th crp lrds knw ths fct, bcs th r th n's tht pt t nt r prcptn.
sct
[Editor: ignore=off]
Posted by at May 15, 2007 08:11 AM
what is with this fucking muckdog? are you a zillionare? are you dick cheney, half dead from self abuse and not a single money health worry? how can you spew this crap? who the fuck are you? do you roll around in dollar bills in bed at night, imagining bush cares about keeping those dollars worth something and yourself prosperous?
jesus fucking christ. and you think all the dead iraqis and shattered american soldiers are cool too.
i think you're just a rovebot. or at best, a sad, sick, propagandized koolaid guzzling piece of ignorance who would happily die in a gutter, shunned by a privatized ambulance you couldn't afford, wrapped in your love of money as something real, to the very end.
sorry, just sick of muckdog's utter bullshit.
Posted by Sharkbabe at May 15, 2007 08:18 AMI know a couple people who have traveled to Europe for healthcare; Jerome a Paris at dkos has chronicled his experiences with his son's brain tumor nightmare and recovery in detail. Excellent healthcare, and he paid not a sou (or whatever the currency is!) We are so backward in our healthcare, it's ridiculous. Poor mucky, he couldn't stand it if he was on equal footing with the riffraff. What's the good of having lots of cool stuff if you can't lord it over the neighbors, right mucky?
Posted by iamcoyote at May 15, 2007 08:22 AMYears ago, we were in Germany and my allergies were driving me up the wall. I was directed by our hotel to go to a medical clinic in town for treatment.
They gave me Claritin. I paid $9.00 US. This was before Claritin was OTC and my insurance in the states forked over $98.00 for the same dosage and count.
The medical system in the USA is broken.
Posted by Christopher at May 15, 2007 08:43 AMI know a very sharp MBA who studies the field full time. The story I get is that in America "health care" is only incidentally associated with health and has absolutely nothing to do with care.* A medical condition is fungible asset to the industry. A patient is a medium, an object, an opportunity.
The disconnect between the interest of the patient and the financial interests of everyone else makes treatment solutions artificially expensive for those covered by insurance and unavailable to the rest. This makes vital statistics for our nation - life expectency and infant mortality - strictly second-world.
It doesn't have to be like this. But there would have to be incentives to solve the problem. If one really wanted to make things better, some sort of single payer system is in order. It's what a civilized nation does.
Alternatively, we could outlaw health insurance and create extremely favorable bankrupcy laws for people with large medical bills. ( medical bills being the largest single cause of bankrupcy today.) This would quickly align the financial incentives in care with the patient's interests. I think progressives need to talk about this idea more openly not because it is the best idea but because: it might put the "fear of God" into those who want things to stay the same only more so.
---
* I read a recent piece by a good-hearted doctor at dKos who is completely apoplectic about the need to get pre-approval for treatment in emergency situations. the HMO in question will not pay for treatment even though the telephone waiting period could have been long enough to be fatal to the patient in the case in question.. My argument is not that the people who deliver health care do not care. It is that the system consistently thwarts them. People who actually do care get driven out.
Sorry folks. This is not a serious study. It is based on old subjective data (e.g. self-reported patient opinions).
Posted by Catron at May 15, 2007 08:55 AMThe traditional ethos of the "conservative" mind is knee-jerk defense of the existing status quo, even if one is not directly defending one's priviledged status.
Conservatives are always the opponents of the future, deeply unimaginative, fearful of what change will bring, because they know they cannot really understand abstract concepts and fear that they will do "worse" if any major system changes.
Every one of today's "conservatives" would have opposed ratifying the constitution in 1789, if they understood themselves in the slightest.
Professional analysis reveals that our existing health care financing "system" delivers worse care for higher cost to fewer people. Pretty damning indictment. So logically it should be changed.
But change, however needed, brings panic and fear to the insecure Right, and all they can support are superficial facelifts to a completely dysfunctional system, which is starting to drag down our entire economic system.
For over 25 years one of either the executive or the legislative branches have been in the hands of do-nothing conservative ideologue extremists who opppose any change to any domestic system, and who bleat "free market!" or "let the market decide/handle it!" as the "solution" to every domestic problem.
Surprise, the "market" on its own does nothing about existing social problems, and so we haven't solved any or even advanced the ball on any social problem in a quarter century. The bills for all this cement-footed, status quo defending do-nothingism are now coming due, from energy crisis to health care crisis to environmental crisis.
Historians will lay our national decline and upcoming collapse, as well as the upcoming destruction of the planet, rightly at the door of the head-in-the-sand, naysaying "conservative" movement. They gained influence at a particularly inappropriate time in world history; RIP everyone.
Posted by euzoius at May 15, 2007 09:01 AMFrance and Germany have over double the unemployment rate as the US.
France and Germany have the same unemployment rate as we do. They calculate theirs to include everyone without a job, and they even include underemployment. We don't count those entering the job market, and we stop counting a person as unemployed after 6 months of unemployment.
what is with this fucking muckdog? are you a zillionare?
No. He is just a guy who consistently underperforms the market.
Sorry folks. This is not a serious study. It is based on old subjective data
Sorry folks, this is a morons subjective opinion based on beliefs rather than facts .
Posted by phidipides at May 15, 2007 09:05 AMWhat's the difference between the US tax rates plus the cost we pay for health insurance (even if our employer pays, that's comp to us and if it was paid to us in cash rather than the benefit, arguably we'd pay for health insurance on our own which would by way more expensive) and England's tax rate?
The inefficiency of our system is what costs us in premiums and less than stellar health care. There are multiple versions of medical billing, extra paperwork for routine testing like blood, urine and mammograms, and doctors have to squeeze more patients in to make up for the discounted PPO and HMO rates that are negotiated for them. I don't hear a lot of seniors complaining about the Medicare system, so what exactly is wrong with a single payer health system?
Posted by ann at May 15, 2007 09:08 AMeuzoius- well said
Our current healthcare system has no incentives for preventative care, no incentives for those of us who maintain a healthy lifestyle. We get discounts on our life insurance for not smoking, but no discount on health insurance. I pay the same rates as a similarly aged schmo who smokes, eats pork rinds for breakfast, and chases them down with a sixer of Bud.
Posted by Trieatalot at May 15, 2007 09:31 AMApparently, a conservative these days is somebody who won't blink spending $1 Trillion dollars on an ill-defined imperialist war fantasy half way around the world, yet somehow thinks that it's too expensive to provide health care for the commonwealth of this country.
Posted by cheSF at May 15, 2007 09:58 AMI pay the same rates as a similarly aged schmo who smokes, eats pork rinds for breakfast, and chases them down with a sixer of Bud.
Then you must be for genetic testing and determining health risk factors based on preexisting genetic propensities for illnesses. Why should I pay for some schlub whose family is so genetically weak that they tend to die of heart attacks and make my rates increase?
And you are very welcome to be self congratulatory for your healthy lifestyle, but if you do get ill you will likely be forced into bancruptcy, because 3/4 of medically related bancruptcies had health insurance. No doubt it's related to pork rinds. Or maybe those dickhead runners who blow their knees, or bicyclists who give themselves brain injuries, or any number of possibilities.
Posted by phidipides at May 15, 2007 10:00 AMmaybe it was the pork rinds, maybe it was all that red meat:
LYNCHBURG, Virginia (AP) -- The Rev. Jerry Falwell was found unconscious in his office Tuesday and taken to the hospital, a Liberty University executive told a newspaper.
Posted by ann at May 15, 2007 10:00 AMThe Rev. Jerry Falwell was found unconscious
No doubt he choked on some tube steak.
Posted by phidipides at May 15, 2007 10:03 AMThen you must be for genetic testing and determining health risk factors based on preexisting genetic propensities for illnesses.
Exactly what I was thinking. Not to mention the fact that many poor folk can't afford healthier alternatives to cheap, but non-nutritious foods.
No doubt he choked on some tube steak.
Heh, wouldn't be surprised. I almost wish there were a hell, and he's getting a glimpse of it right now. As it is, I hope he's suffering. He deserves it for the amount of suffering he's caused.
Posted by iamcoyote at May 15, 2007 10:52 AMNo doubt he choked on some tube steak.
I hear Munchkins singing!
Ding dong, the dickheads dead. Which dickhead? The bible-thumpin dickhead. Ding dong...
Posted by phidipides at May 15, 2007 11:36 AMIt's not the healthcare that's bad. The U.S. has the best healthcare in the world. It has the best medicine, the best doctors, the best technology, etc.
It's access to healthcare that's getting worse. Please be clear about this when commenting on this subject.
Posted by Mike at May 15, 2007 11:46 AM
How are you going to pay for free health care for the uninsured?
"How are you going to pay for free health care for the uninsured"?
Well, we found money for the War didn't we.
How are you going to pay for free health care for the uninsured?
I say we make muck pay for it!
Posted by Seven of Six at May 15, 2007 12:24 PMI say we make muck pay for it!
I think you may be onto something, SoS! As it is, I can't wait for a Dem president to finally set things right. Mucky's gonna need that free healthcare when he blows a gasket!
Posted by iamcoyote at May 15, 2007 01:54 PMYou might note that Japan, where I live, also has single-payer health care, considerably cheaper than US costs. In addition, we are free to choose our own doctors, and dental care is also included.
Of course, some of the same limitations that exist in US health-care insurance apply here, as they would to any system: coverage is limited to approved treatment, sometimes for financial reasons (such as steel-alloy fillings instead of gold).
Complaints among Americans about bureaucratic rules can easily be dismissed, for the so-called insurers in the US are far more bureaucratic; we fill in no forms, just make a co-pay at time of visit (usually between 10 and 25 dollars, sometimes less, very occasionally more).
For example, I had three sebacious cysts removed for less than a hundred dollars--imagine getting to see a skin doctor once for that price. I also have a hypothyroid condition, which costs me about 12 dollars a month for doctor and medicine combined.
Insurance is taken from payroll, bundled with social security and unemployment insurance. The retired or unemployed are billed (with exceptions for poverty).
More painful for those of us over 65 is nursing care insurance, which costs almost a thousand dollars a year on top of ordinary health insurance. Since this is a new program, costs and benefits are still in a state of flux; whether I'll benefit if I'm ever bedridden is uncertain, given that cash-strapped local governments are trying to siphon off some of the money for other programs.
Why Americans are so conditioned to believe that single-payer insurance is a mark of the beast owes more the the power of the drug, insurance and advertising industries than to rational contemplation of the issues.
Posted by notjonathon at May 15, 2007 09:44 PM