it has been revealed that the United States is now the only developed country in the world without a national health care plan. Even Mexico and Thailand, two of the poorest countries in the world, have now adoped one, but yet, we still have nothing. Why is it that our government is so much against providing health care to everyone? Mexico and Thailand have just started the health care programs, but they were poor countries even before that. They are not poor because of their health care. I feel it's what we NEED in this country. And not everyone chooses not to work either. With everyone downsizing and outsourcing to places like India and China, a lot of people can't get any jobs here, and when they lose their jobs, they also lose their health benefits. Sure, they can get COBRA, but that only lasts for 18 months, and it costs a fortune, good luck paying that with no income. Unemployment, if you are lucky enough to even get it, hardly gives you enough for anything. In Michigan for instance, the maximum payment is $326 per week. Who can possibly live on that? Because to many people are making outrageous amounts of money with things the way they are. America is run by greed and greed alone. The rich could care less what happens to the people and will do anything they can to keep their cash cows alive. So they pay off our elected leaders for the right to screw us over. The insurance industry is a heavy lobbier in Washington. People who are fortunate enough to have employer covered health insurance just don't understand what it is like to not have that luxery. They don't know that most of us don't have $1500 a month to spend on insurance. Because the U.S. is evil, silly!!! Like when it races into disaster zones all around the world, even in muslim countries like Indonesia whose people hate the U.S. and provides billions of disaster relief. Jeeez. Why do foreigners come here if the Health Care system in their countries are so great. It looks as if their panacea is not all that it is cracked up to be. America has the best quality health care in the world. universal heath care will destroy that.
Notice how all these people from countries with universal healthcare are coming to the US for treatment? How many Americans go to Mexico or Thailand (your expamples) for medical treatment. None, because the healthcare in those countries suck.
in order for a universal health care system to even be close to feasable in the US would require a budget much higher than the defense budget. and that just aint gunna happen Because the American Medical Association is against it. The AMA is an extremely powerful lobby in Washington. The reason the AMA is against it is that their members - the doctors - will become employees of the system and stand to lose their huge paychecks. Not to mention the ability to control their practice.
Follow the money - that is always where the answer lies in this country. Why is it that you "open your wallet for my healthcare" types consistantly forget about medicare and medicaid? Between those two, almost 50 million people have taxpayer funded health insurance.
Why are you so intent on making everyone else pay for your healthcare? OK ... and then how about giving everyone a supermarket credit card ... to be paid by taxpayers? Everyone has the right to eat and not starve. And how about we give everyone a clothing allowance? Or how about an expense account for eveyone ... and not just our congressman? Yeah ... that's it ... and make those rich corporations pay for it all ... so we citizens don't hve to work at all! Wow. Let's be like Mexico and Thailand!! You said so yourself--'two of the poorest countries in the world'. If national health care is so wonderful and Mexico has it why are the Mexicans pouring into the USA by the millions? Anyway the answer to your question--I'll bet most Americans would like for all Americans to have health care/insurance but not according to the liberal socialist plan. Do not ask me(working 3 jobs) to pay for the health insurance of those people who are here illegally, will not work, or do not want health care/insurance. because it doesn't work...it increases taxes and lowers the quality of health care Because what we have is better. Americans with health insurance are not required to wait 2 months to see a doctor for a non life threatening condition. Generally speaking, we can see a doctor in a matter of days versus a matter of months. We also have the most technically advanced medical equipment with the best doctors in the world. We have these things for an easy to understand reason, we allow doctors, pharma companies, and other medical related industries to actually make money. Countries with universal health care usually have price ceilings on virtually every medical service. Simply put, people in the medical industry in those countries don't make much money. There is a reason why at least 50% of the med school graduates in Canada practice in the United States...so they can get rich. It doesn't work in any country that has it. Why do you think the best doctors choose to immigrate to the US? They make more income. I used to work in a hospital in the northern US. We always had lots of Canadians coming in for treatment. They could not wait the 3 to 4 months to be seen in their country. They needed immediate treatment. Mostly because they don't' want to wait months for critical care and they don't want the gov'ment to pay their way with higher taxes....(health care is NOT the gov'ments job!) Because govt run health care doesn't work & there are enough smart minded people out there who know that. We don't need to be like Mexico - we've got enough of their citizens as it is. & if ALL the other countries are so great, then why do so many of their 'doctors' come to train here & then stay here?
Also we've got gov't health care for those who honestly need it. It's called medicare & medicaid. & if you are making $60k a year but choose not to buy insurance because it would crimp your lifestyle then boo-hoo to you. I for one do NOT want to pay for your healthcare. Unfortunately you listened to Michael Moore and others who lie. UHC does NOT work. The FACTS, easily found if he did his homework, are these:
"Staff are being laid off, and deficits are at an all time high (拢1.07bn for 2005-2006)鈥?(Hazel Blears, Labour Party Chair and Minister Without Portfolio, labourachievements.blogspot.com/2006/08/...
In the National Review Online article, Coburn & Herzlinger state 鈥渕ore than 20,000 Brits would not have died from cancer in the U.S.鈥?Just recently Alex Smallwood of the BMA (British Medical Association) was quoted in the Scotsman as saying: 鈥溾€橰ationing is reduction in choice. Rationing has become a necessary evil. We need to formalise rationing to prevent an unregulated, widening, postcode-lottery of care. Government no longer has a choice.鈥欌€?(Moss, 鈥淣HS rationing is 鈥榥ecessary evil,鈥?says doctors,鈥?26 June 2007).
"Doctors are calling for NHS treatment to be withheld from patients who are too old or who lead unhealthy lives." 28/01/2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jht...
CANADIAN doc who studies health care throughout the world and thus lives in the US now:
"...Another sign of transformation: Canadian doctors, long silent on the health-care system鈥檚 problems, are starting to speak up. Last August, they voted Brian Day president of their national association. A former socialist who counts Fidel Castro as a personal acquaintance, Day has nevertheless become perhaps the most vocal critic of Canadian public health care, having opened his own private surgery center as a remedy for long waiting lists and then challenged the government to shut him down. 鈥淭his is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week,鈥?he fumed to the New York Times, 鈥渁nd in which humans can wait two to three years.鈥?br>
And now even Canadian governments are looking to the private sector to shrink the waiting lists. Day鈥檚 clinic, for instance, handles workers鈥?compensation cases for employees of both public and private corporations. In British Columbia, private clinics perform roughly 80 percent of government-funded diagnostic testing. In Ontario, where fealty to socialized medicine has always been strong, the government recently hired a private firm to staff a rural hospital鈥檚 emergency room.
This privatizing trend is reaching Europe, too. Britain鈥檚 government-run health care dates back to the 1940s. Yet the Labour Party鈥攚hich originally created the National Health Service and used to bristle at the suggestion of private medicine, dismissing it as 鈥淎mericanization鈥濃€攏ow openly favors privatization. Sir William Wells, a senior British health official, recently said: 鈥淭he big trouble with a state monopoly is that it builds in massive inefficiencies and inward-looking culture.鈥?Last year, the private sector provided about 5 percent of Britain鈥檚 nonemergency procedures; Labour aims to triple that percentage by 2008. The Labour government also works to voucherize certain surgeries, offering patients a choice of four providers, at least one private. And in a recent move, the government will contract out some primary care services, perhaps to American firms such as UnitedHealth Group and Kaiser Permanente.
Sweden鈥檚 government, after the completion of the latest round of privatizations, will be contracting out some 80 percent of Stockholm鈥檚 primary care and 40 percent of its total health services, including one of the city鈥檚 largest hospitals. Since the fall of Communism, Slovakia has looked to liberalize its state-run system, introducing co-payments and privatizations. And modest market reforms have begun in Germany: increasing co-pays, enhancing insurance competition, and turning state enterprises over to the private sector (within a decade, only a minority of German hospitals will remain under state control). It鈥檚 important to note that change in these countries is slow and gradual鈥攎arket reforms remain controversial. But if the United States was once the exception for viewing a vibrant private sector in health care as essential, it is so no longer."
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_ca...
FRANCE:
The much lauded French system raises some questions as well. From their Embassy site (ambafrance-us.org) they state that 96 percent of the population receives free or 100 percent reimbursed health care. They state the system is part of their Social Security and is funded from worker鈥檚 salaries (60 percent), 鈥渋ndirect taxes on alcohol and tobacco and by direct contribution paid by all revenue proportional to income, including retirement pensions and capital revenues.鈥?They state that it appears that health insurance pays less to its doctors in France than in other European countries, but that 80 percent of the public have supplemental health insurance, typically from their employers. If they鈥檙e providing so well for the needs of the public, why is there a need for 鈥渟upplemental鈥?health insurance for the majority of the public and what about the additional cost that imposes? The site states that the poorest have free universal health care, funded by taxes. Long-term illness sufferers are to be reimbursed for their treatments. They do have private clinics, as well as public hospitals, and not-for-profit healthcare. In fact, 鈥減rivate medical care in France is particularly active in treating more than 50% of surgeries and more than 60% of cancer cases.鈥?
Private insurance, which the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) site said in a 2004 report, was held by 92 percent of the French, helps to cover both vision and dental care which are not well covered under the government system. 鈥淭he public system is facing chronic deficits and recent cost containment policies have not proved very successful.鈥?The government is interested in having more of the tab picked up by private insurance (Buchmueller & Couffinhall, 鈥淧rivate Health Insurance in France,鈥?2004, oecd.org).
BTW, France, from the Candian doc's article:
"In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave鈥攚hen many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity鈥?5,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren鈥檛 available. And so on."
And the RATIONING in ALL of these countries looks at times a little something like this:
"Jewish World Review Feb. 12, 2008 / 6 Adar I 5768
In Canada, the Schiavo case with an outrageous twist
By Jonathan Rosenblum
An elderly Orthodox Jew is on life support. His children have adamantly opposed his removal from the ventilator and feeding tube, on the grounds that Jewish law expressly forbids any action designed to shorten life. If their father could express his wishes, they say, he would certainly oppose the doctors acting to deliberately terminate his life. The director of the ICU told the children that neither their father's wishes nor their own are relevant, and he would do whatever he decided was appropriate"
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/jonatha...
California tried to do UHC:
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/200...
Last modified: January 29. 2008 5:03AM
A month later reality hit them harder:
"L.A. County may close most of its clinics
Facing a deficit, health officials want to pay private centers to take up the
slack. Critics say the plan's logic is faulty. "
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition...
ll.story?ctrack=1&cset=true
Romney instituted Hillarycare on the state level in Taxachusetts. Here's the result:
"Massachusetts announced that spending on its health care plan would increase by $400 million in 2008, a cost expected to be borne largely by taxpayers. "
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/200...
Last modified: January 29. 2008 5:03AM
No need to go bankrupt while telling assorted people they're not worth keeping alive. Sensible plan:
http://www.booklocker.com/books/3068.htm...
Read the PDF, not the blurb, for the bulk of the plan. Book is searchable on Amazon.com
Cassandra Nathan's Save America, Save the World |
