patrick.net

Go Mooses! Meese?

rdm, good post, although I disgree with you that the Dems "solution" is a move in the right direction. Most of problems regarding spiraling health costs can be traced to government spending and govt. restrictions. Medicare and Medicaid are broke, and what the Dems are suggesting is to Medicaid-ize private healthcare.

Health care rationing will occur under govt control or under (somewhat) free markets and I don't like the waiting lines and lack of available drugs and treatments that govt run systems produce. Many of the wealthy in Canada come to the US for treatment because they have the money to pay for it. The poor there do not have such an option. The countries that allegedly offer better health care than the US do NOT offer better care than those with insurance here in the US. The statistics are jiggered by different countries counting infant mortality different than we do (we go to costly extremes to save newborns that those countries do not) and there are other non medical societal factors at play which count against US life expectancy such as gang violence, obesity and drug abuse. Cancer survival rates here in the US are the highest in the world. If you survive to 60 here in the US, you have a longer life expectancy on average here, than in any other country on earth. The other countries are not "just as good" at delivering health care, and I see those who want to have govt play a greater role as trying to drag our care down to that level

Some Canadian provinces do not have access to certain drugs because their province decided not to. Waiting lists for operations in Canada are at an unacceptably long level and the number of MRI machines per capita are well below that in the US. It's worth noting that most other countries are permitted to sponge/leech off our drug research. Canada, for example, threatens to break patents on drugs unless our drug companies sell it to them at whatever they offer them, pennies on the dollar. These countries have made it uneconomical to do drug research in their countries through govt mandates, so the USA is dominating drug research, while other countries are permitted to mooch off of ours through threats. This is wrong, and it places an unfair economic burden on American healthcare as Americans shoulder all/most of the costs and it needs to stop

Most of the problems in our current system can be traced directly to govt.. More govt healthcare will make things worse. We all need food to survive and would pay anything to get it, so perhaps govt should take over the grocery store industry too, complete with demonization of 'evil greedy' grocers who don't want your children to eat properly.

4x,

Can we stop ragging on the USPS postal service? They get a letter cross-country for 42 cents in 3-5 days. Nobody else can provide that service. USPS had a 2008 loss of $2.8B, or $2800M on revenue of $75B. That is is less than a $10 loss per citizen of the US.

You cannot be serious that this is an example of "government screwing things up". FedEx has a 2008 loss of $2B on revenue of $38B !! There's private enterprise at work for you, dude.

In general,

the blatant lying that "government cannot do anything right" has got to stop. It is false, counterproductive an plays into the hands of those who want nothing better than wrecking the government. Do not forget, the government belongs to *US* [that could perhaps be a new slogan].

I'm pretty sure the generalized hatred of all government programs without regard to how effective they are is due to well-place propoganda (eg, Fox News) funded by very rich people who easily manipulate social tensions, patriotism, religion, whatever, to make sure they themselves can evade taxes and yet receive corporate welfare. See:

http://www.amazon.com/Rules-America-Politics-Social-Change/dp/0072876255

"there is a corporate community (Chapter 2) that is the basis for a social upper class (Chapter 3). This intertwined corporate community and social upper class have developed a policy-planning network (Chapter 4) and an opinion-shaping network (Chapter 5) that give them the means to win a majority of seats in the electoral process (Chapter 6) and to shape the policies of interest to them within the federal government (Chapter 7)."

You guys are thinking Kitty when there's a Tiger coming down the trail.

"Health insurance" is not "Universal Healthcare" you guys are throttling Irony.

Right on, Patrick, that is exactly how it works.