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> Hurray for Obama care! =A0Then we can "catch up" with the Europeons.
Jim can't recognise party political propaganda when he sees it. The Daily Mail will use any stick it can find to beat the current Labour administration, and a bit of selective trawling through the statistics is a good way of finding places where the UK health service doesn't do as well as the competition (which costs half again as much per head).
And he seems to have missed the line
"Just 9 per cent of low income homes say they have unmet care needs, compared to 52 per cent in the U.S. and 24 per cent in Germany".
which points up one of the spectacular weaknesses of US health care system (and one that Obama - quite rightly - wants to do something about).
Mr. Obama's not doing a single thing to improve care, or reduce its cost. Quite the opposite. Have you read the House bill? (H.R.3962)
I have a copy. It's kind of amazing--a zillion handouts to favored folks: unions, car companies, trial lawyers (like the little zinger on pgs. 1431-32 that _prevents_ malpractice lawsuit reform)--and nary a useful thing to reduce costs. There are many things they could do, but they don't.
They tout it as deficit-neutral, as having $100 billion to spare after ten years. But, they only get that result by starting taxes right away, and delaying care, which doesn't start for 4 years. A gimmick.
IOW, 10 years' taxes is only enough to pay for 6 years' care--it's unsustainable on its face. And that's using their figures--adding in the actual costs they fudged or didn't include more than doubles the total tab, and the finances get really ugly.
It's just a giant kitty jar for doling out favors, and there are plenty of them. It's not 2,000+ pages by accident.
Payment? As usual, the plan is it'll be paid by increasing the national debt, a subprime mortgage to be passed to our children.
The uninsured in the US do that as well, which is why the US is behind all the other advanced industrialised countries, at 50th in the life expectancy league table
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And - as I said - the Daily Mail did cherry pick it's health statistics to make a political point.
2)
2000 pages of buying off special interests? Who'd bother.
In your ever-expert opinion.
You've stuck yourselves with a political system that is exquisitely sensitive to monied interest. Obama really should have cleaned up your political system before he started in on your medical care, but the man is a realist.
But you are ignoring the point that your medical system costs half as much again as everybody elses (while delivering poorer health care to the population as a whole than the French and German systems) which does leave room for a lot cost-cutting in the administration, which is notoriously expensvie.
The US has the best politicians that money can buy. They also have a few who are incorruptible, but not enough to form a majority in congress.
Perhaps not. Gigantic waste does offer the opportunity for gigantic savings.
Getting rid of the hugely expensive adminstative component in your current system would be the kind of change and improvement that would actually save money. The French and Germans can do better than you for about 2/3rds of the cost per head - there's an opportunity in there somewhere for someone with the sense to see it.
Neither you nor James Arthur seems to have that kind of sense.
By law, insurance companies are allowed to charge twice their payout. With judicious distribution I bet they can get that number up above
3:1.
Years ago in the US insurance companies came in, Doctors started charging more, they were happy, Insurance companies always made money, they were happy, and then people with cataclysmic health bills paid pennies and developed the misconception that health care doesn't cost much when it's spread out with payments, they were happy. As a result from all of this greed, health care costs a fortune here.
One sure way to save money on the total health care system is to ELIMINATE inusrrance companies. Then the actual, [total] costs would instantly be 1/2, and may be as low as 1/3, what the cost [total] is now. That seems to put costs more in line with other countries. Hmmm.
Luckily, pet care still is cheap, because insurance companies have not yet got a foothold in that industry, ...yet.
A huge part of the reason is infant mortality. And the difference in infant mortality is mostly a matter of definition.
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In the USA, troubled babies receive an enormous amount of effort to keep them alive, probably the best in the world. Many euro countries don't even try, or don't report the troubled babies as live births.
Deficient medical care is actually not the reason for Americans' slightly shorter life expectancy. (If you want to say people are dying for lack of medical care, you'd better check first and see what's killing them, and whether medicine would've fixed that.) Eliminate murders and car accidents, and Americans have slightly longer life expectancies than Europeans.
And that's despite our higher rate of obesity--fix that and we'd live even longer.
Yep, lots of other countries exclude stillborns, kids with birth defects, premmies, and, generally, babies they consider "non-viable." We count them all. Adding in a few extra 'zeros' dents the overall average pretty quickly.
Bill suggests we have poor care. That's not true. Americans have excellent medical care--we've got great doctors, great hospitals, fancy equipment, the latest drugs, etc.
When we talk about health care "reform" we're not really talking about medicine, about improving our care--that's excellent. We're talking about money, about whether that care could cost less.
Which it could. But, unfortunately, the House and Senate bills don't address that. They cost /more/.
It would actually be much less. Don't forget competition and the fact that there would be no gravy train for the doctors to ride. After all, won't you charge more if you know you'll get the money? Insurance is not a free market device. It simply removes competition.
For example: If health insurance was pay-go then doctors would have to charge as much as the free market dictated. This means health care *would* have to be affordable. If not then there would be no doctors(they need money to exist). If no doctors then that would create a high demand for doctors which would then create competition among the doctors creating cheaper health costs. In such a system there will always be those that cannot afford it. That is necessary for such a system to function properly. As soon as you attempt to entitely the lower, say, 20% you displate competition and there is no longer any incentive to reduce costs since you can get your money from the lower 20%.
Given the nature of people it is impossible to have a system that is more ideal than the free market. All other methods result in a less functional system. The free market is a negative feedback system as has inherent stablization. The problem is that because of that stablization certain anti-market people have been able to greatly perturb the system and "get away" with it... at least temporarily. i.e., insurance and entitlements/welfare.
Many liberals believe that "free healthcare" is the way to go. In an ideal world this would work... Because of there mental retardation they are not able to realize how bad this is and the ultimate consequences. But this is the kinda shit that happens when you let the lunatics run the asylum.
It is a very brief insult, andentirely appropriate to people who discuss the US health care system without paying any attention to its most obvious weakness, which is that it costs half again as much per head as the best performing health care systems in other - comparable
- countries.
Am I susposed to congratulate you for exhibiting this particular blind spot?
But Australia, which does seem to work with the same definitions - they also report that one third of infant deaths occur in the first day of life - has an infant mortality rate of 4.7 per 100,000, only slightly worse than Canada (at 4.3) while the US is a lot worse at
6.37.
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Unfortunately, the very premature babies that you can keep alive often do rather poorly as they get older - it turns out that you can't always keep as much of the brain alive as you'd like, and the consequent damage doesn't get repaired.
The pragmatic Dutch save their efforts for babies who have an appreciable chance of growing up to be healthy adults, although this does generate a certain amount of unrest in religious circles.
doesn't make any such claim, though they do mention that US life expectancies are lower than those in a number of other countries
Begging the question of whether obesity is a medical condition. There are - tolerably heroic - medical treatments that can cure it.
Australia doesn't - one third of Australian babies die in the first 24- hours of life, as they do in the USA and Australia has and infant mortality of 4.7 deaths per 100,000 births, where the US has 6.37.
If you can afford it it. The uninsured often can't, or don't want to, and thus put off the financially crippling trip to the hospital until it is later and even more expensive than it should have been.
American health care can be excellent, for those who can afford it. Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" includes a short piece about her visit to barely-post-Katrina New Orleans when she and her husband - as fully insured reporters - were involved in a car accident and promptly whisked away to an almost empty private hospital where they recieved excellent and immediate medical care at a time when the New Orleans public hospital system was swamped with many more flood victims than they could handle. It is a strange kind of system where the public hospital system couldn't have sub-contracted some of the emergency load to under-utilised private hospitals.
And whether more people can be persuaded to take advantage of it when they should, rather than when things have gotten so bad that there isn't any choice.
They haven't had a chancve to cost more yet, since they haven't yet been signed into law. You merely expect them to cost more. Given your ideological blinkers, it would be surprising if you expected anything else. What is really surprisng is that you don't seem to be conscious of the waste built into your existing system, which is half again as expensive as the comparable systems in France and Germany that do treat everybody.
So why does universal health care in France and Germany work out cheaper than the free market system you've got in the USA? Admittedly, the French, German and Dutch systems do have a free market component - the health insurance companies shop around the hospitals for the cheapest places to get a particular procedure performed, and the Dutch insurers have been known to send patients over the border into Germany for operations that were too expensive - or for which the queues were too long - in the Netherlands.
The English National Health system is cheaper again. They try not to have any more than the minimum of spare capacity, so waiting lists do exist. The waiting lists got embarassingly long under Thatcher's Conservative administration, but it has been suggested that this was a deliberate policy to encourage people to get private health insurance which would allow them to jump the queue and get treated early in private clinics. The subsequent Labour administration promised to reduce the waitng lists and eventually managed to deliver, though it took a while to unwind the effects of years of under-funding.
U.S. roads don't appear to kill significantly more (or fewer) people per capita than European roads.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
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"Per capita" is a ridiculous way to display such data. It ought to be by vehicle-mile or some such. ...Jim Thompson
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| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
Help save the environment!
Please dispose of socialism properly!
They are 2 to 3 times more lethal in the USA than in most of Europe.
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I don't think there is much wrong with US roads apart from potholes in some big cities. They are largely empty outside of the big cities. The nut behind the wheel is the main problem - automatic cars don't require much hand eye coordination to drive but they do require some.
Actually it is about a factor of two or three worse driving in the USA per capita depending on whether you choose a safe European driving country like the UK or Denmark or a crazy one like Belgium (with its mix of priorite a droite and non-priorite junctions). Off hand I think only Greece is worse. Germany is roughly twice as safe per capita and still well ahead per passenger mile despite having truly derestricted high speed autobahns and a lot of fast cars. Numbers online at:
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The map uses too many shades of barely distinguishable yellow. If they coloured
This might be related to the astronomical childhood obesity, diabetes, and autism rates - it's like the medical industry is overriding Mother Nature, who clearly didn't intend for that particular infant to survive. I don't see a problem with Mother Nature culling the herd, so to speak, because whatever spirit was supposed to incanate will simply find a healthy body to inhabit.
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