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[wombat]

Education has always been run by the states too - including back when it was working better, and it's not clear that federal attempts at intervention have been a good thing. So Ash has a point. But we still have to make all the states do it somehow, and I'm tired of waiting, you know?

[theinevitable]

no, yeah, that's what I'm saying. The national government says "national healthcare is now in effect. here is some funding. here is a list of the minimum of what has to be covered. figure it out, dudes and dudettes."

[Arachno-capitalist]

I think you'd find that health care wouldn't cost so much if the government got out of it. Subsidized healthcare raises healthcare prices. If the government subsidized $5 of a $10 book, the price would rise to $15 and you would buy the same book, because to you the price hasn't changed. The same can be said of education. Colleges can charge the prices they do because such a huge part of the price isn't paid by the consumer.

[littlefallsmets]

The entire rest of the civilized world seems to have figured it out.

And a lot of other things too.

The reason that things like education and transportation don't work perfectly as public devices in America is that... we're a bunch of whiny bitches who don't want to accept that being part of a society means paying taxes and... then corporate bastards and their mouthpieces twist that shit even further until everything is undermined to serve their very very private interests.

If the fault were in the stars, it wouldn't have worked anywhere as opposed to... everywhere else.

Our society confuses individualism with selgiraffeness and business interests manipulate and feed that confusion... and the fault is within us.

[Arachno-capitalist]

China, with 1.3 billion people, does not have national healthcare. India, with 1.1 billion people, does not have functional national healthcare (70 hospital beds per hundred thousand people). The US, with 300 million people, has free emergency healthcare and a plethora of medicare, medicaide, TRICARE, VA,SCHIP, etc programs. Indonesia with 230 million people does not have a functional universal health care system. Brazil, with 186 million people has World Bank and IMF supported healthcare and still can't make it work.
These are the top 5 populated nations and none of them have made universal healthcare work. Germany, with 27% of our population, has made progress, but thats a lot less people to deal with. This "everyone else is doing it so why don't we" argument doesn't hold water. It isn't a one to one application. What works in a country a quarter the size of ours won't necessarily work here.

[theinevitable]

thus, my point. Administrate that shit on a state/local level.

[AugustWest]

China, with 1.3 billion people, does not have national healthcare. India, with 1.1 billion people, does not have functional national healthcare (70 hospital beds per hundred thousand people). The US, with 300 million people, has free emergency healthcare and a plethora of medicare, medicaide, TRICARE, VA,SCHIP, etc programs. Indonesia with 230 million people does not have a functional universal health care system. Brazil, with 186 million people has World Bank and IMF supported healthcare and still can't make it work.
These are the top 5 populated nations and none of them have made universal healthcare work. Germany, with 27% of our population, has made progress, but thats a lot less people to deal with. This "everyone else is doing it so why don't we" argument doesn't hold water. It isn't a one to one application. What works in a country a quarter the size of ours won't necessarily work here.

OK.  Fine, but you still haven't addressed my point.  Are you satisfied with the way healthcare works now?  You say "socialized" medicine won't work.  I'm saying what we have now doesn't work very well either.  Does that mean we're stuck with the dysfunctional system we have?

Also, isn't China still (at least ostensibly) a Communist country?  Isn't everything national?

[Arachno-capitalist]

OK.  Fine, but you still haven't addressed my point.  Are you satisfied with the way healthcare works now?  You say "socialized" medicine won't work.  I'm saying what we have now doesn't work very well either.  Does that mean we're stuck with the dysfunctional system we have?

Also, isn't China still (at least ostensibly) a Communist country?  Isn't everything national?

China used to have national healthcare but it broke down and now its similar to the american model of subsidized health care.

We agree that improvements can be made, we agree it would be really cool if everyone had all the healthcare they need, but we disagree on the method of getting there. Some people believe the government will have some advantage to managing healthcare, I don't. I think if we removed government restrictions and subsidies, the price would go down and access to healthcare would increase.

Im also down with Inev in that if a state or a community wants to experiment with healthcare on the local level, then they should have the right to operate outside of some mammoth national administration.

That said, there are places in our country with free universal healthcare, free education, and free food, clothing and shelter. All you have to do is commit is a serious crime to get there.

[Golfhaus]

Now, the more important race: If the beagle wins Westminster tonight, I have to get up tomorrow morning and start trying to turn in a story about it by the end of the day.

Get to typing.

Health care... eh. It's plain to see that unless you get awesome insurance from your job or are just rich, health care in this country sucks. But you hear the horror stories of European-style health care, and it makes you wonder if that would be any better.

And let's face it, being a doctor sucks. For someone who is willing to make a career out of stepping up to the plate and fixing us when we break, we sure like to treat doctors like shit in this country. Hospital resident doctors on 16-, 18-, 24-hour shifts. I'm sorry, but if I'm bleeding out of something that I shouldn't be bleeding out of, I want the guy or gal that punched in this morning, not yesterday afternoon. My mom has been a receptionist for the same doctor for about 15 years, and she gets worried sometimes about the pace he has to run to keep the office moving. Part of the problem is the cost of malpractice insurance, because we're so gawddamm litigation-crazy. I would support an upper limit on malpractice claims if it brought the overall cost of health care down.

[littlefallsmets]

But you hear the horror stories of European-style health care, and it makes you wonder if that would be any better.

To be fair, though, those are "horror" stories of people saying "Oh, I had to wait in liiiiiiiiine" or "Oh, I had to hold off on my elective surgery for a couple of weeks and I shouldn't have to do that, I'm rich and being rich should give me more rights than people who aren't!"

No one goes broke because of a catastrophic medical condition, everyone gets life-saving medicines and nobody has to choose between a slow painful death and ruining the finances of everyone you care about.

Nothing will ever be perfect anywhere ever... but there are imperfections out there that are at least humane in their imperfection.

If we aren't humane, we're nothing.

[Arachno-capitalist]

To be fair, though, those are "horror" stories of people saying "Oh, I had to wait in liiiiiiiiine" or "Oh, I had to hold off on my elective surgery for a couple of weeks and I shouldn't have to do that, I'm rich and being rich should give me more rights than people who aren't!"

No one goes broke because of a catastrophic medical condition, everyone gets life-saving medicines and nobody has to choose between a slow painful death and ruining the finances of everyone you care about.

Nothing will ever be perfect anywhere ever... but there are imperfections out there that are at least humane in their imperfection.

If we aren't humane, we're nothing.

Really? http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/04/12/autism-scoc.html

[theinevitable]

but... that problem exists for every health problem in America if there isn't socialized medicine.

The fact that these people are petitioning to have this case covered is only possible becaue... everything else is covered.

This same story happens all over the US, with many different problems, except they don't have the hope that the government will pay.

[littlefallsmets]

Isolated tragic cases don't disprove the broad strokes of an idea or a system. You could definitely find a case of a seatbelt killing someone to put up against ten thousand cases of a person only living because of a seat belt.

Canada's system isn't perfect, that isn't what I'm saying.

It's a lot better for a lot more people and that's what matters. Hopefully, it'll improve as time and medical understanding improves? But at least they're not at square one like we are.

Babies and bathwater and so on.

[Arachno-capitalist]

Isolated tragic cases don't disprove the broad strokes of an idea or a system. You could definitely find a case of a seatbelt killing someone to put up against ten thousand cases of a person only living because of a seat belt.

Canada's system isn't perfect, that isn't what I'm saying.

It's a lot better for a lot more people and that's what matters. Hopefully, it'll improve as time and medical understanding improves? But at least they're not at square one like we are.

Babies and bathwater and so on.

What you did say was that those horror stories are people waiting in line. What you did say was that no one could ever go broke paying for healthcare in a socialized healthcare system. What you did say was that no one has to choose between pain and finances.
You're wrong. Problems don't disappear just because someone says there is universal health care. Some problems are remedied, new problems emerge, old problems persist.
The point is, there are problems with socialized medicine, just as there are problems with our system of semi-socialized medicine.

[littlefallsmets]

Frankly, that particular case sounds like it has little to do with the state of socialized medicine in Canada and a lot more to do with cultural misunderstandings about autism and with the way medical understanding of autism and related disabilities/disorders is still developing.

And it is certainly bad that sometimes medical understanding is slow to develop, especially in areas attached to social stigma...

But that's something to be said about medicine in culture, not about the overall efficacy of universal health care... I don't know if you purposely chose an anecdote that confused the issue but there we are.