The French are striking again... But they do have socialized health care

Commie.

 

1) I can't be more clear. I am not tap dancing around anything. It wasn't that we are getting ripped off. I will e-mail a PDF of the McKinsey study to anyone who wants to read it and it does NOT make that bottom-line conclusion. The conclusion of that report is that we OVERCONSUME--partially because providers overprescribe and consumers overuse services they don't need. This is because there is no incentive not to. If you have insurance or are on a government program, there is no disincentive to not take as much as you can. And if you are a provider being put on price-fixed schedules undercompensating you for the services you provide, you are going to tweak a corrupt system to actually earn your living. The irony is that these are problems that are actually made worse with every intermediary system every genius is proposing--including the one we already have and including socialization, which would have those problems if it was even viable enough to provide universal coverage, which it can't, because rationing is the immediate first move under such systems (they are unaffordable, so immediately what they call universal turns into a system with waiting lists, denials of coverage and in some cases classes of people not being covered).

2) Brit nailed it pretty well, although it is not "free, free, free." They pay for it. They just pay the government for the appearance of free. Ask the average American how he feels about 10 percent or 15 percent or whatever it is more of his paycheck being taken before it is direct deposited. This stuff is NOT free, even if a government bureaucracy is running it. Of course, government bureaucracy has been proven time and time again to be the least efficient way to allocate anything. A civil servant has no incentive to act fiscally rationally. They also have private insurance in Britain for a reason--which pretty much creates the two class system we have here. And people actually leave the country to get care for serious illness for a reason. The British haven't figured out any better than we have how to make a very expensive commodity cheap. It's just the truth.

3) When I said we have the best health care system in the world, I misspoke. Our intermediary system is messed up beyond belief. But the quality of care you can get in the United States is better than any place in the world. There is more innovation coming out of the U.S. than from any place in the world (there is a good reason for this). And you can get more cutting-edge, hard-to-provide treatments for serious illnesses, much more quickly in the United States than you can any place in the world. That was what I meant by us having the best health care. I'd frankly hate to be put on a waiting list of months or years for a simple hip replacement and I'd hate to live under a forced system of health care in which a million dollar cat scan machine taxes the system so much that the country doesn't have enough of them or a place where there are not enough qualified nurses and doctors because they have taken away every incentive to get those educations. (Everyone wave to Canada).

4) I didn't quite say "health care is expensive, so we're screwed." But feel free to characterize me that way if you like. I apologize for not complimenting the naked emperor on his lovely clothes. I simply want people to acknowledge reality. Maybe then we can come up with the best IMPERFECT solution. But first you need to get past the BS and the BS gets spouted on this message board quite often. Universal health care that takes care of the little and big things--at what is approaching 20 percent of our enormous GDP--is an impossibility. Explain where that massive amount of money comes from and I'll gladly endorse the plan. My original point on this thread is that the French have ruined their economy and made their people worse off (to the point of frequent strikes and riots) by NOT acknowledging reality. They gave people things they could not pay for and created a mess. And I get frightened by the uninformed people in our country who buy the BS being fed to them that France or England or Canada have it figured out and we need to be following their lead. Following the French is a formula for destroying our already fragile economy.

 

Your economy is doing fine. But that is because you are not France and you don't have France's health care system. As for your health care system, though, let's talk about the services being cut because of the debt you are racking up, the waiting lists for simple operations, overcrowded emergency rooms with lengthy waits in your largest cities, your lack of qualified health care practitioners as a result of your "government funded" system (when you can't convince people to go to medical school, there just might be a reason, don't ya think?; Canada has a severe doctor shortage and the fewest MDs per capita of any industrialized nation because they have taken away every incentive to train for a health care field)... oh, and the cost of what you are paying for that mess. It is the second most costly in the world in terms of percentage of GDP and not that much less per capita than what we spend in the U.S. Oh, and there is a push to privatize, at least partially, because of the waits and shortages and dissatisfaction and failures (your particular love for it, notwithstanding).

And yes, more innovation comes out of the U.S. than Canada and more cutting-edge medical treatments are being tried here every day than each month in Canada. That's just fact. In Canada, you get on a waiting list for simple radiation treatments (apparently universality means that all you have to do is wait 4 or 5 months and someone will address your cancer... which should piss anyone off who has paid a king's ransom in taxes for that kind of treatment). In the U.S., new drugs are being developed and tested with the only government interference being controls and stage testing to make sure that the drugs work and are safe (these are the drugs and treatments that have benefited the whole world, not just the U.S.).

Why do simple facts threaten people so much? The U.S. hasn't figured this out... Neither has Canada. And Canada's warts look awfully large (as do the United States') when you take the time to look at the mess the country has created (which they can't afford, so rationing is getting even tighter), rather than pretend that the country has come up with something revolutionary that is making its people better off and taking a costly commodity and somehow making it free.

 

I'm no expert on the Canadian health care system, although obviously as you know, this as a broad topic that interests me, so I know a little bit about the government run systems of various countries. But the lack of doctors and nurses in Canada is just well-known fact. It is critical and it is a joke. Something like 5 million people can't find a family doctor. A quick google search of just CURRENT news gives you articles like these in just the last week:

http://winnipegsun.com/Comment/Editorial/2007/11/12/4649325-sun.html

http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/News/National/2007/11/12/4649349-sun.html

http://ellsworthmaine.com/site/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=11304&Itemid=1

http://www.thewhig.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=774160&auth=Ann+Lukits

 

By the way, the story in the Winnipeg paper sort of buried the lede for my purposes: