The left's health care promises
I have been hearing for waaaay to long, that Obama and Hitlery both have health care planned for everybody...Who is going to pay for it...hmmmm..I know the govt....wait who pays them hmmmmmm....I know... the tax payers. Ok now that was obvious... Now take a look at who pays the lions share of the taxes...big business and everybody that makes over a certain yearly income.(cant remember how much at this point) The left insist that they need to take back from the rich and give it back to the poor...does this sound familiar? I dont like the fact that oil is making record nearly sick profits, and quoting us bullshit on how they justify it....I get that...they need a bit of attitude adjustment....But being on the busines end of government managed health care, as a nurse, socialized medicine scares the hell out of me...As nurses we already spend more time with the pen and paper than the patient, thanks medicare and medicaide, and JCAHO, and emtala laws, and DRG's (thats diagnostic related groups). The government does not know how to run itself, how the hell are they going to run medicine? They wont, they will make it so odious with paperwork and red tape you will have to schedule a car crash ahead of time in order to get approval for the ambulance...(a slight exaggeration)..The entitlement crowd is already abusing the system. No job, no income, multiple children thay cant afford, 2 pack a day cigarrette habit, and drink like fishes, and they whine "I cant afford to go to a clinic, they want money, so I go to the ER, its free, I got medicade /medicare"....no its not you idiot we the tax payers are footing the bill....Let me ask yall this...Can you see paying the bill for "free" health care for these people who are (on the average) poorly educated, lead very unhealthy lifestyles, non compliant with medications and follow up, grossly obese, diabetic, and refuse to follow simple directions..."don't drink, your liver is shot, dont smoke you have emphysema, dont eat 5 times what you need your too big, dont eat sweets you are diabetic"..just a few examples......These people push my compassion out the window. and yet they want to give these poor people even more leeway to continue the path to self destruction.....and hitlery has threatened to garnish OUR GODDAMN WAGES to pay for insurance if we dont have it....want it or not....and if your unemployed and on welfare "here you go the rich can afford it for you"...If they want to surrender health care to the big brother, the left, ...I hope they are ready for health care to get worse..."you get what you pay for baby"...Socialized medicine has not worked in England, Canada, Russia, and a few other countries, thier health care is crap, unless you got cash...be prepared for a DR. to be assigned to you, like him/her or not, and pray the doc isnt a quack, thats what you face when you give control of you life to others, you get what you get...so if you want even more crappy health care, vote hitlery and obama....( I don't think Mcstain is any better either)....riff
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Comment by Burns— 2008/02/27 @ 10:10 AM — (Reply)
What is it with (certain) Americans and their reds-under-the-beds paranoia about socialised medicine. Henny Penny was less, but more credibly, worried about the sky falling in. Lord knows you've got 'socialised' policing, 'socialised' defense, 'socialised' fire departments, 'socialised' education and so on - any service in fact, that is funded on the basis of achieving a social good that may outweigh individual choice.
I know that a certain strata of American society trumpets individual choice with an almost religious fervour, but if your house was burning down I suspect you wouldn't hesitate to avail yourself of the fire department's service, or stand in principled resistance as your house collapsed demanding their disbandment simply because those grasping, self-seeking, rights-asserting, uppity 'poor people' benefit from their existence from time to time without paying up front.
Our societies are constantly balancing common good with individual choice. For some reason, however, a bizarre (to those of us looking in from the outside) intensity of zeal exists in The States around medicine and its 'socialisation.' Since there's no logic in it I can only believe that it's about politics i.e. if the other side supports it we'd better oppose it.
NO system is perfect - that's a given. Let's throw some facts in, though, just for a laugh:
Under the 'socialised' medical system in my country (Australia):
Unnecessary procedures do occur (actually, they do under HMO as well) but their is no horde of lazy, welfare-cheating, tobacco-chewin', over-fertile, beer-guzzling, shiftless, job-avoiding low lifes bringing the system to its knees. The presumption that simply because something is 'free' it will, BY NECESSITY, be overused/abused is a function of an ideology regarding the low motivations of the so-called poor, not reality! Usual hand maidens to this ideology are the black and white conclusions that the poor MUST be poor by choice, and that welfare MUST, by mechanisms rarely explained, breed dependency.
People are never refused emergency treatment. No one dies an avoidable death because of lack of treatment.
No one goes into crippling debt or bankruptcy over huge medical expenses.
No one takes bus trips to another country to obtain affordable medications(alright, I admit it! This was a trick example. No one in Australia can take a bus trip to another country for ANY reason! Er, seeing as we're an island and all....)Oh how you would hate our Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. It's beyond socialised, it's damn near commie! Certain drugs which are expensive, or used extensively to the point where they would represent a severe financial strain are, wait for it, subsidised by the government i.e. me 'n' Mr. 'n' Mrs. Taxpayer. Here's a real kicker - I don't mind helping out my poor unfortunate fellow citizen by having my taxes used in this way!!! Wha?!?!?! This is Pinko-Central folks. I'm no saint. I figure it on averages - hey, one day I might be down and out and need a break, and my taxes will come back to me and I won't have to fly to Canada for cheap meds.
You can still choose Private Health insurance, or use a combo of the two. Not total individual choice, but, as with Head Start, the police department, garbage collection and the Iraq war (all those expensive humvees nobody asked me about when purchasing!! :-)), a reasonable compromise between the individual and social needs.
My country is not being sent bankrupt in funding the system. I've read complaints in the US that the system is financially crumbling. I say 1. It's the system IMPLEMENTATION that's failing, not the concept of helping citizens in need. 2. If your government spends your allotted social security surplus money on tax cuts, something has gotta' give.
The system, commie-like as it seems, was VOTED in under a democratic system and was never seen as the thin end of the wedge of a Cuban takeover. NOBODY PANICKED
I work in health care. Once the systems were in place, our socialised medicine Medicare left the nurses (and the rest of us) no worse off than we'd ever been i.e. mountains of paper and reams of red tape, under-funded, under-appreciated and over-worked!
Usual complaint. "I aint having no doctor I don't even know and and didn't choose who could be a hack who's trained in some 3rd world backwater. Instead I'll take a HMO bureaucrat who I don't know and didn't choose, who will tell me whether I can even have medical care in the first place. Nice choice. Here, if i don't like the look of the medico I can a. shut up and thank god my country allows me to at least get into medical care rather than a voodoo practitioner or, if I'm luckier, stick with my private insurance and choose choice! And the fact is, the medical care over here in the public system is, generally in my personal experience, excellent. The government paid the fire fighters who ran up the buildings during 9/11. The government pays the professional army in Iraq. So does that mean they have to be, for that reason alone, hacks and no-hopers. A 'socialised' system can still make choices about standards of care.
You worry about your wages being "garnished" to pay for a social service which will attend those who can't pay on the spot. I hate to tell you, but your wages are already garnished to pay for services (hell, it's garnished to pay for services you don't even like, want, use or even know about). It's called taxation! (Those Tomothy McVeigh-type militiamen agree with you - "no garnishment of income. Federal tax is unconstitutional!")
If I garnish it to pay for something you like or use, I'm sure you'll suck it up and cope. It's only when it's called 'garnish' or is for "the entitelment crowd" that you seem to baulk.
Hey! I just realised - if you use and approve of ANYTHING your government does with your tax - and even more so if you EXPECT your taxes to provide a benefit to you - YOU are one of the "entitlement crowd! The only difference is you believe YOUR entitlements are justified and the other fellah's aren't.
So I choose be taxed/garnished to provide universal health care
When someoene looks into another country's system they are bound to see things from a different angle. I'm sure I'm as blinkered as you about aspects of my own system. What I can see from the vantage point of not being caught up in your system though, is that you've become overly bound up with the notion that unregulated capitalist individualism is inherently better in ALL things rather than some things, that governments are inherently incapable of running anything (when quite clearly there are things that ONLY governments are in a position to manage. Boy you oughta' see the mess that privatisation made of our transport system) and that SOME poor models of 'socialised' medical systems equates to ALL models being poor.
And hey, if Canada's system is so bad, how come your citizens go there to get health care and not the other way round?? Actually I'm not sure at all by what criteria you judge other system's as failures. In terms of health care outcomes there's nothing so bad about any of the countries you mentioned and in some areas they clearly better the US model. There's one healthcare bench mark that doesn't lie - life expectency. You'll be saddened to here that health care, as reflected by life expectancy (W.H.O. 2007), puts Australia (socialised) at number 5 with 82.6 years, and the States (mixed care, mainly pay as you go or die - alright I made that bit up :-)) at, take a deep breath, number 45 (78.06)!!!! The top 20 countries for life expectancy is filled with mainly socialised systems. Death cuts through ideology any time!
Plus, they aren't any where near as financially overloaded).
I believe you've thrown the baby out with the bathwater and ended up dismissing ALL scenarios that might even have a whiff of 'socialism,' simply because of the branding. What you're left with in the states is a clunky, hybrid system that pleases no one, contains the worst of both systems, has had it's future funding gutted and is falling apart as a result.
I have some friends who live in up state N.Y. and when I went to visit them I was amazed at what you guys stress about when it comes to left wing/right wing. Your so-called left wing is so tepid, so timid, to unbelievably scared of being tarred as 'left' or 'liberal', so, well...., RIGHT, that it seems to us that you only have the very right or the fairly right to choose from. Vanilla or vanilla lite is still vanilla to me. I can't imagine that even if the Democrats win the election, anything will change significantly. Bit like politics over here really. sigh.........
Hell, don't get me wrong, our system is flawed. The flaws, though, are in the branches. The fundamental root - what you fearfully call socialised medicine and what we gratefully call universal health care - is sound.
Take care
Andy Turner
Comment by andy— 2008/08/21 @ 05:09 PM — (Reply)
I found in Wikipedia this nice little piece on the politicisation (is there such a word?!
If anyone is perplexed as to why they live in such an amazingly rich and wonderful country as America that..."according to some sources...is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not provide universal health care," I'd recommend they read the whole article. It aint long or complex (not like my blathering!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialised_medicine
As the article points out, "most industrialized countries, and many developing countries, operate some form of publicly-funded health care with universal coverage as the goal. According to some sources, the United States is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not provide universal health care.[12][13]
The term is often used in the U.S. to evoke negative sentiment toward public control of the health care system by associating it with socialism, which has negative connotations in American political culture [14]. As such its usage is controversial.[5][6][4][15] A 2008 poll indicates that Americans are sharply divided in their views on socialized medicine, with a large percentage of Democrats holding favorable views, while a large percentage of Republicans hold unfavorable views. Independents tend to somewhat favor it.[16]"
Comment by — 2008/08/21 @ 11:02 PM — (Reply)
Comment by riffran— 2008/08/22 @ 06:31 AM — (Reply)
Comment by Ed— 2008/08/22 @ 07:29 AM — (Reply)
Comment by riffran— 2008/08/22 @ 10:16 AM — (Reply)