At first glance it looks correct.
I'll take another look at the letter when I get home.
Posted on 10/09/2007 2:22:17 PM PDT by ml/nj
Normally I don't forward forwarded emails I receive to FR but this one has so much stuff in it that if even half of it is true, attention must be paid. The red emphasis was in the original I received.
>>>>
People with the parasite mentality will still want the unearned and undeserved and will still think they are getting something for nothing.This plan will sound great to them.
Well, at least socialized medicine supports Darwin’s theory of natural selection - only the fittest will survive.
LOL! That would make a great tag line. ;-)
Wow.
Pretty powerful e-mail.
Thank your friend for me.
Wow, it’s nice to hear from someone who has seen paradise and can report back.
This should be required reading for all candidates, Republican and Democrat.
On the other hand, my sister was diagnosed with micardial valve prolapse last week, and she’s having open-heart surgery this week.
Is your sister a Canadian?
ML/NJ
WANT FREE HEALTH CARE - MOVE TO CANADA AND YOU CAN EXPECT THE FOLLOWING:
Soliciting comments on this piece.
At first glance it looks correct.
I'll take another look at the letter when I get home.
“We have waiting lists out the ying yang some as much as 2 years down the road.”
Of course, this only applies to the common folks.
Hillary, her family and members of congress will have immediate access to any available healthcare without having to stand in line.
1) Premiums vary by province — some don’t charge any. The premiums only cover a fraction of the costs; with the rest coming from taxes. It’s not “free”, regardless.
2) We have a lot of walk-in (”free”)clinics in B.C. — they take most of the nonemergency load from hospital emergency rooms, so it’s not that bad. If you do have an emergency, be sure to get to the hospital by ambulance. Anyone on a stretcher goes right past all the walk-ins in the waiting room. That rule seems to apply everywhere.
3) The health care system works reasonably well for most people most of the time. That’s why it remains sacred (literally) to most Canadians. The writer’s point #2 is mostly right.
4) The “health diagnosis system” breaks down when expensive, cutting-edge equipment (e.g. MRI) is required. Canada has a fraction of the MRI machines per capita compared to the U.S., and there are long wait-lists for potentially life-saving diagnosis.
5) The system is addictive. Once you’ve got it, you’re probably stuck with it. This is partly because people forget that they’re paying for health care from their taxes — or, they’re happy to let other people pick up the tab. People also forget that there are alternatives — in particular private insurance.
Ping to read later.
You can still get that? That might be good to know. Possibly the few conservatives we have down here can stick that provision into the bill. I don’t doubt it’s coming. Few Americans still believe that it’s wrong to take money from others.
And thanks for this bit of advice:
If you do have an emergency, be sure to get to the hospital by ambulance.
Anyone on a stretcher goes right past all the walk-ins in the waiting room.
I walked into a clinic once, complaining of severe chest pains (true), and they had me on a table in 30 seconds. You just don't get service like that anymore...
John Tory, who is running as Conservative leader in Ontario’s election tomorrow said today that one million people in Ontario do not have a GP. That’s out of 12 million, or one in twelve.
No you can’t — the Canadian Health Care system is a complete monopoly (sorry for any confusion my previous post caused). We used to have private insurance, before they brought in the government system — that’s what I meant people forget. They seem to think that the only alternatives are a government monopoly, or pay the whole shot yourself. Compared to paying cash, the government system looks good. Compared to private insurance — well, we have no way of knowing, because we don’t have that option. In fact, in most provinces, you can’t pay cash for (say) speedy MRIs — unless you make a trip to the U.S.
The government does not have such a strong monopoly in most European countries, where there are some alternatives to the government system.
From the mid 1980’s until recently, the governments (federal and provincial) conspired to severely limit medical and nursing school admissions. The theory was: “doctors create their own demand”. The move was designed to ration health care on the supply side.
Now, infuriatingly, socialized medicine advocates use the shortage of doctors as their main argument against any private care alternatives. They say the private clinics, etc. would take doctors away from the public system — without ever admitting that the shortage was deliberately created by the public health care system in the first place.
People need to be made aware that rationing is a necessary and inescapable part of any socialized medical care system.
I live in Canada, my parents have no family doctor now. They went without a doctor for a couple years a while ago too before they found the doctor they just lost (he has cancer now and closed his practice).
Some guy on the local radio call in show was arguing for re-electing the Ontario Liberal Party in our provincial election. He said they improved health care so much that his wife only had to wait 7 weeks to get her ankle problem fixed, and he only had to wait 3 hours in Emergency when he was having chest pains. No, I’m not making this up.
I beg to differ. Here's a letter I wrote to someone who wrote a column about health insurance in the Cavalier Daily:
I am a CavDaily reader since I adopted UVa as an alter alma-mater when my daughter attended UVA a decade ago. So I saw your article about health insurance today.ML/NJIt starts off with the canard about 47 million uninsured as if someone counted, or it mattered. I wonder if you could come up with even three names of people who were denied health CARE last year in the United States. Care and insurance aren't quite the same thing. I had an aunt who lived a lower-middle-class existence in England. She had insurance all right, but when she needed care she had to go to Switzerland (on her own shilling BTW) because the NHS didn't think her problems were life threatening.
You are simply wrong that a free market does not work for health care. Back in the dark ages when I grew up almost no one had health insurance. I just do not recall people dying in the streets. Maybe I was young and naive. But a visit to the doctor's office cost five bucks, and the doctor would come to your house for seven! (Multiply by ten for all the inflation since then.) When you went to the doctor's office there might be one other person there, frequently the doctor's wife, checking patients in, &c. On my last visit to my doctor, I counted seven people in the office. (Four doctor practice, but not all the doctors there all the time.) All these people need to get paid, but they don't provide any "care." They're not the only ones. If you drive any distance through populated areas in this country, you are sure to pass assorted Taj Mahals that weren't there 40 years ago housing armies of folks to process all the paperwork created by the doctors' offices. They get paid too.
And insurance companies exist to make profits. They may tell you they want lower medical costs but that's BS. They essentially make a certain percentage profit on every dollar that passes through their office on its way from the payer to the provider. And, of course, if medical costs were in line with automobile maintenance costs no one would bother with insurance at all. They need routine medical events (e.g. having a baby) to have stratospheric costs. They'll tell you all the new technology is expensive and those days of five dollar office visits are gone. But isn't it amazing that real prices have plummeted in all the other areas technology has touched. (Consider: computers, stereos, TVs, air travel, &c.)
There's one other group that sucks up our "health care" dollars these days that got none of them when I was growing up. These are the lawyers. Most doctors have to have huge medical malpractice insurance policies, and the costs of these have to be passed along. Now it might be that some doctor somewhere comes into his office drunk or otherwise unable to do his best for his patients, but that hasn't been my experience. Yes. Things go wrong. Conditions get worse. People die. But generally not because of poor performance on a doctor's part. But a grieving widow in front of an uneducated jury is like a lottery that pays off 20% of the time, so there are lots of "settlements." We use to call this extortion.
So if you truly want to use you youthful zeal to reform things regarding health care costs in this country, I suggest you try to eliminate the two major non-care costs associated with medicine. These are insurance and legal costs. Eliminate them and maybe some day, people will be able to regard medical costs the same way they regard automobile maintenance costs: hardly free but not ruinous either.
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