Posted on 09/17/2009 4:52:23 AM PDT by Scythian
Boy did he destroy the myth's of the American health care system and the cries that all other countries have socialized medicine. What a sham, governments of other nations are covering everybody via private health care, in fact, most do, the myth of socialized medicine is largely that, a myth. It was a very in depth interview.
It was a real eye opener, what you think about Germany, France and so on and other western nations and their health care might actually suprise you. I hope others were able to see that interview.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/21/AR2009082101778.html
That one line makes a total fool of him.
If only Arab Sheiks have the money to come here for medical treatment, he is pointing out that they are the wealthiest of the wealthy and that only they can go anywhere they want to go for medical treatment.
Now if they are the wealthiest of the wealthy and can go anywhere in the world they want to go, why do they come here if it is not the very best in the world?
Therefore, it is obvious that we do have the best system in the world other wise they would go to that best place.
So the author is not worth discussing.
Here’s some text from PBS:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/etc/notebook.html
The other point about countries like Germany is that the tax rates are much higher there than they are in the US. The Germans pay a federal income tax plus a 15% federal sales tax.
http://denverdemocrats.net/node/3215
Candidate for State Representative, HD3: T.R. Reid
I firmly believe that health care should be a right, not a privilege, for every American – and I’m convinced Colorado can lead our country toward that goal
**calendar of events at link
Dude, TR Reid is a shill for single payer. You should check out his Frontline special:
http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/Frontline_Sick_Around_the_World/70098734?trkid=1211018
He goes around the world checking out different systems, and anytime he sees something that seems better in the foreign land he blames it on “America’s corporate profit motive.”
Never once does he question anything else about our system, such as how we let doctors limit the number of doctors we train here (that certainly isn’t a corporate profit motive maneuver!). The reason I bring that example up is that there are a couple of the countries he visits where he is amazed that they have almost zero wait time for all medical services, and that feat is clearly directly related to provider numbers and almost nothing else.
That is slanderous crap and you know it.
I meant Universal. Watch the Frontline special. He pretends to be doing an unbiased piece, then goes and fills out a Japanese “prayer card” praying for a Universal health care plan as soon as possible.
bookmark
He just didn't answer how.
For instance, are there government subsidies to offset the losses of insurers due to being forced to offer coverage
For the company to pay all claim and accept all insuerd they must generate enough money to pay claims. That can be from one of 3 places:
The question is where does the money come from? The consumer, the investment market or the government?
I think the title of Mr. Ried's book says it all...
One of the problems with the folks on the right is that so many of them never travel out of the country. So, they don't realize that the US has become the second most over bureaucratized underpreforming country in the world. The only country I know of that is worse than ours in this regard is the Soviet Union, and they died for their sins of regulatory excess. Think it is all the fault of government? Hah, try walking into any large corporation and you will see privatized bureaucracy run amok.
It is all part and parcel of our current economic crisis, which we have not fixed, yet. American love getting paid for doing nothing. It is our national industry. Of course you have to wrap it around some service that folks do need, but if you find something they cannot do without, a drug, or a fighter plane, yeah ha, it is open season for useless administrators. We love it.
For every doctor or nurse you see, how many health care administrators and managers do you deal with here? I spend more time trying to get a doctors appointment than I do seeing a doctor.
Health care needs reforming. It is 1/6 of our economy and growing, and no one actually likes it very much.
But the dims are clueless about how to make the required changes to make it truly competitive.
There is a fourth source which stares all Americans in the eye so long we cannot see it. You stop paying for all the middlemen who take an enormous cut and provide nothing for their "service." The United States economy is the most administratively overbloated economy in the world. I know nowhere else in the world where even the most simple transactions are so complicated and convoluted by useless fee takers.
PS think ACORN. They did not invent the scam. They are not even very good at the scam. A lot of well educated folks run the same shakedown and make it look like legitimate business. But they provide nothing for the “service.”
Lessee - TSA, FEMA, VA, IRS, USPS . . . . . . name me ONE thing that the government does well, efficiently and makes a profit!!
Anyone who thinks that they will receive the SAME level of care available today by private practitioners if the health care system is nationalized is delusional. We may be able to get health care from the government - but whether or not it is either adequate or has any quality to it is dubious at best.
ANY effort by either zero OR Congress to alter the healthcare system we currently have is an effort to take us even deeper into mediocrity. zero AND Congress needs to keep getting the message that healthcare, like cap ‘n tax, are nonstarters and ANY efforts to ram this down our throats will be met with significant opposition!!
why is it that several of the countries we are talking about here have higher life expectancies than the US does?
Apparently he has never heard of these countries called Canada and Mexico
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Benjamin Disraeli
It depends upon the age group. The older you get in the US, the more likely you are to live longer than folks born in the same year in other nations. As for why our mortality rates for younger folks are higher, it's due to a variety of causes: higher infant mortality, accidents, crime, etc. But if you want to live to be a geezer, live in the US.
Think of it as a lifestyle choice.
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