Quote from: rainingbitcoins on November 02, 2011, 03:38:52 AM

Quote from: MoonShadow on November 01, 2011, 08:06:16 PM

Quote from: rainingbitcoins on November 01, 2011, 06:09:48 PM

Your definition of socialism is so diluted as to be meaningless. Adam Smith qualifies as a socialist under that convoluted meaning.

He might at that, but the word has differnet meanings to different people.

Then he probably shouldn't run around telling people they don't know the definition of socialism when his is one shared by maybe 0.00001% of the world's population. You can argue over the little details of socialism, how it should be achieved, the proper place of unions, all of that stuff, but the definitions shared by no actual socialists and only fierce opponents who see a socialist lurking in every shadow are most assuredly not what Marx had in mind.

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Taxpayer funded healthcare isn't the answer to that either. There are many Canadians who cross the border just to be able to get timely health care.

Oh good, this again. Canada has a higher life expectancy and lower infant mortality rate than the U.S.

They have a higher life expectancy because they have a lower infant mortality rate. They have a lower infant mortality rate because they record infant deaths differently. In the US, if a fetus is delivered naturally, and was not known to already be dead before labor began, it's counted as an infant death instead of a late term miscarriage. Thus skewing the life expectancy stats compared to nations that don't include infants that die during or shortly following birth. I'm not sure how Canada does it, but it's still apples to oranges. There is also the differences in a higher likelyhood of a US citizen dying as a young adult due to risker lifestyles. Extreme sports have participants from everywhere, but they are almost invariablely invented here for a reason. Also, Canada doesn't have nearly the minority population that the US has, and blacks are prone to heart disease for genetic reasons, just as an example. There are so many things affecting the overly simple metric of life expectancy that comparing two different nations like that is apples to oranges.

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Also:

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In a Canadian National Population Health Survey of 17,276 Canadian residents, it was reported that only 0.5% sought medical care in the US in the previous year. Of these, less than a quarter had traveled to the U.S. expressly to get that care.

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A 2009 Harris/Decima poll found 82% of Canadians preferred their healthcare system to the one in the United States, more than ten times as many as the 8% stating a preference for a US-style health care system for Canada while a Strategic Counsel survey in 2008 found 91% of Canadians preferring their healthcare system to that of the U.S. In the same poll, when asked "overall the Canadian health care system was performing very well, fairly well, not very well or not at all?" 70% of Canadians rated their system as working either "well" or "very well". A 2003 Gallup poll found only 25% of Americans are either "very" or "somewhat" satisfied with "the availability of affordable healthcare in the nation", versus 50% of those in the UK and 57% of Canadians. Those "very dissatisfied" made up 44% of Americans, 25% of respondents of Britons, and 17% of Canadians.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Canada

Once again, unpleasant facts stand in your way, but I'm sure they'll be forgotten by tomorrow, to be replaced by uncited assertions that line up more properly with your beliefs.

Those aren't facts, they're statistics. Numbers never lie, but the polled sure as hell do. What kind of result would you have expected?