But it isn't a right. It is a luxury.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sonic
The ability to access Healthcare is a right.
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But it isn't a right. It is a luxury.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sonic
The ability to access Healthcare is a right.
Rightly or wrongly most Americans view poverty in this country as self-inflicted. Decades of government poverty programs have only expanded poverty as people learned to eke a pretty good existence out of government benefits enhanced with some minor crime on the side. you have an entire class of Professionally poor and constantly unemployed. In a city near me, there is a grocery store that always has a parking lot full of nice cars and very stylish people coming out it's doors pushing cartloads of groceries. This state issues a card like a debit card to it's poor people to buy food. The values of the cards vary depending on the benefit level of the card holder. At the beginning of each month the card is restored to it's full value. Before you can turn your engine off, someone will be offering to shop with you and put the purchases on their card if you will pay them .50 cents on the dollar in cash. They'll take their cash and go buy cigarettes, beer, lottery tickets and go hit the casinos. The vast majority of the poor are black and hispanic. There's isn't a large gray area in benefit qualifications and there are a fair number of people working their butts off whose life style isn't much better than the benefit crowds who could use some help but don't qualify. They have too much.
Illegal immigrants. We don't mind them coming over here and picking produce. We mind them coming here and working as carpenters, brick layers, concrete finishers, mechanics, and other higher paying jobs. In addition, if you want to come pick our lettuce thats fine, but don't bring your wife and 4 children with you because we don't want to pay for any benefits they may get or medical treatment they may need.
In a nutshell, this bill is being kept in secret because it provides decent healthcare to the poorest of the poor, who also happen to be minorities and illegals, at a cost to the working people of either going to the "universal plan" which they suspect, probably rightly, will be inferior to what they enjoy now or keeping what they have now but having to pay a massive tax to opt out of the "universal plan".
Thats it. People are sick of the constant barrage of tax increases, they are tired of new taxes (New York has a tax bill out to levy a one cent per ounce on soft drinks for "health reasons") and they don't want to pay the health care costs for a bunch of poor minorities. Thats all there is to it.
The money we are spending in Haiti alone could've gone a long way for American healthcare.
Fiero, your points are excellent and I cant disagree with them based on the fact I am not there, and b) I don't know enough about the good or bad in the way healthcare is provided in the USA other than to say, Most Americans when pushed like what they have. Polls have said that.
I have said it before, the biggest misconception Americans have about healthcare in Canada is that it is FREE. It is FREE if you are not paying any taxes, but to do that, you are not having much of an income. If you have a job, it isn't free, nor should it be. You pay more in taxes in Canada per person on average than the average American pays in taxes AND health insurance. We Canadians get fleeced pretty good. If our system worked as well as the average American's does in terms of wait times and the type of treatment available, then I wouldn't want better. The thing is, this is my health, I want the BEST, and instead, I hear lots of news of how my healthcare system is undersiege by rising costs and technologies (we don't have the malpractice insurance issue the Americans have), and how my system is VERY lacking in GP's and some specialists.
Bureaucratic bumbling has created shortages where a free market system would have ensured supply. IN THat, instead of some bureaucrat deciding how many spots in medical schools would be provided, they stayed out of it and let the universities take as many students as they could handle and let the market settle things. OH no...cant do that...they were scared of too many doctors in Ontario not 20years ago when the average GP was 50!! Only an idiot would mess with the numbers going through the medical school, but in a cost cutting binge (too little too late) the local Ontario premier chopped funding for medical schools. Again...politicians being clueless.
You guys in the UK if you are truly honest will find small issues with your public system, and the ONLY thing that mitigates this is the private system is there to bring up the slack, innovate and invigorate. In Canada, we took on the Cuban model...and THAT is what many Americans thought Obama was going to lead them towards.
IMO it should be public. If a doctor turns his back on a sick poor man, the vow of Hippocrates is being destroyed.
IN the US, a doctor in a hospital is by LAW supposed to treat the person. That vow is to "First, do no harm"...not take "every one who asks to be a patient is my patient". It is simplistic at best to say doctors have to treat everyone all the time.Quote:
Originally Posted by F1boat
The thing is, you can be anyone in the US, an illegal or a citizen, or a tourist, and if you were hit by a car or caught in some horrific accident, you would be rushed to hospital and treated. They may at some point during all of this try to find out who you were and whether you had insurance, but you would be treated and looked after. The billing comes after......
The point I heard best was we as a society (in the developed world) are willing to pay for almost ANYTHING, except what is most valuable to us, our health. Then we are always trying to cut corners or sucker someone else into paying it. That is fine, but society as a whole starts paying for everyone's healthcare, and then society will therefore have some claim on what you eat, what you smoke, what you do for exercise and other lifestyle choices. If I am going to pay for your healthcare, I don't want you eating fatty foods, not going to the gym or smoking 3 packs a day and drinking on the weekends. You would then be upset at these demands by me, but hey, I am paying too....
Americans look at it this way: You are free to not look after yourself, live with poor choices, but YOU only will pay for that, not I. The inverse is also true. Now in modern day times insurance companies get in the way of that partially, but no one says you have to join one.
I wont knock anyone for having government healthcare or having the US style of healthcare. We all live in our our soverign nations where the people of those nations made decisions a few decades back on how they would structure and pay for healthcare. Just because I live in a socialized system doesn't mean I think it is better than most, but I wont think it totally inferior than most. I decry the waste and mismanagement, and I get mad if I have to wait for care, but I am sure if I had first hand experience with the US model ( as opposed to talking to umpteen Amercians about its pros and cons) I could pick. THAT is the problem. Those of you in the UK or Finland are ripping the Americans up as stupid for their healthcare reform foibles, yet you miss the point. THey like what they have, and the US has a pretty good record in research, development and putting out Nobel Prize winners in medicine. YES they spend a lot on it, but it is THEIR business.....and as we saw in Massachusetts, there is a backlash for trying to fool people with a healthcare bill that will be the worst of all worlds. A private system paying for a very badly run public system that civil servants and politicians WONT participate in. At least in Canada, the pols have the balls to have to access the same system as I do....
Read the US Constitution. It is unconstitutional for any US President to be subservient to any body outside the US.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rollo
As for ignoring the UN, when it got hi jacked by a bunch of little tinpot nations that don't respect human rights while flaying others for not having them, you lose all credibility.
When it comes to what the UN dictates, it isn't anything but nice thoughts. Just ask the Rwandans how well the UN protected them. Ask the Bosnian Serb's how well they were stopped by the UN if they attacked on a Friday afternoon. UN staff in NY wouldn't answer the phones for orders from the UN commanders of the member nations involved in trying to stop the genocide there. Apparently that weekend in the Hampton's had to be had, and they waited til Monday to return calls.
The UN's thoughts on what is proper healthcare is feckless and useless. No nation should give up its sovereign rights to this useless bunch of idiots. The UN is a great place to talk about human rights and debate issues, but it was bypassed in the 50's as a truly useful organization on a lot of things.
That UN dictate if followed means there is NOT ONE NATION on the planet has followed it 100%
For the "poor" in the USA, any service or benefit provided that is paid by any sort of income tax generally is a free benefit. What taxes they do pay are refunded at the end of the year. In an ironic sense, Obama is not good for the black American male. Obama is the stereotype gone wrong that kicks the crutches of self-pity out from under oh-so-many people. Obama is half white, half black, a condition not cheerfully accepted by either side. Obama's daddy ran off and left them. On top of that, his momma dumped him on the grandparents and left him too. Statistically, Obama ought to be putting on a ski mask and robbing liquor stores with a pistol for a living. But he's not I wonder what Obama would be now if he had been raised by another government poverty program instead of the loving grandparents that remained interested and focused on him?
I can see your position but I don't agree. At present I have private health cover because I am fortunate enough to afford it. However if my luck changed and I found myself unemployed and therefore insuranceless through no fault of my own I would still want to be treated should I suffer from a serious illness.Quote:
Originally Posted by anthonyvop
By getting me well and back to work the gov regains a tax paying worker. Whereas without the public health service I couldn't recovered an therefore would become a drain on other public services without being able to work and contribute towards their costs.
All hypothetical, granted, but I still feel happier knowing whichever way my life works out my health is as well protected as it can be.
But how does that make healthcare a right?Quote:
Originally Posted by Sonic
I will agree with you on a lot of this Sonic. It is very comforting to know that yes, the state is "rich" enough to cover me when I am unemployed. I think that as someone who espouses conservative ideals in Canada, the public healthcare system is one thing that we have lived with feeling slightly hypocritical. We know state healthcare isn't a right of any one by our definition of what rights we have, yet we tolerate the idea and there is no great hue and cry to scrap it. We do however want accountability by the citizenery and do want a private option. IN the UK, you have that private option.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sonic
I see having a public healthcare system as a very expensive entitlement that the citizens of a nation, no matter how "smart" or "misguided" they may be (depends on what side of the political fence you sit) would elect to do. In Canada, up until 1960, Canadian values and concepts of rights pretty much dovetailed Americans, and without a Roosevelt and his "New Deal", Canadians really were MORE conservative than our American cousins. Yet, in the late 40's, Provinces began a state healthcare system, starting from Saskatchewan and spreading out until in the 60's, the Canada Health Act was passed and all healthcare was run through the provincial governments and their tax bases.
We used to think it worked pretty well, or at least that was the prevailing view of the chattering classes and we the public bought it. However, when MRI's were coming out, it was a big deal for a community to raise money to buy one, and there were long waits for MRI's to be done, but people who needed the service were running across to Buffalo NY where umpteen clinics were taking almost same day appointments for cash and giving the results to you to run back to the doctor in Canada with. NOW, what is wrong with that picture? IT taught me that our governments, no matter how well intentioned couldn't fund the upgrades in technology as fast as the private sector for one, and it taught me that maybe all I had assumed (as a teen and young man I rarely gave it much thought) that the Canadian system wasn't as GREAT as I had it rammed down my head by the prevailing wisdom. If dumpy ole Buffalo had 8 times the MRI's per 1000 of population as the city of Toronto, the richest city in Canada, then this public healthcare system must be wasting a lot of money.
What people have to remember always is the public system, no matter how well intended is run by government, and government can do less with 1000000 dollars than the private sector can. They tend to have more money tied up in redtape, and the accountability that should be there isn't there. IN the private sector, when a company sets out to provide a service, they know they have to do it right, and they have to minimize waste. THey also know though that they will have to pay for the right people or they wont get them, so they will pay decent wages for the right people, hold them accountable, and have the flexability to fire them if they dont' do the job. Government? They will see a task, appoint 3 committees to figure out how to do it, put out tenders, make sure everyone passes muster, hire civil servants to run it, hire people to work in it while putting them in a very militant public service employee union, and when the services offered either run behind or don't work, scream they are underfunded. Well of course they are, because money was spent wildly and wasn't on anyone's mind until it ran out. The waste is just ridiculous in publically run operations, whether it be in healthcare, or collecting garbage.
What I would like to see is for the Government to prove to me they can run a health insurance system available to the poor and actually use some business principles and make it work on that level....and as we see in the US, Medicare and Medicaid are BROKE. So there you go, why would you let them take over all healthcare?