Quote from: P4man on November 02, 2011, 10:03:21 PM

Quote from: Red on November 02, 2011, 08:06:04 PM

It is really an interesting statistic depending on how you spin it. That means 50 million people tend to get healthcare without paying anything. Sometimes it comes from government run health facilities. Often times they get care and just decide not to pay the bills. We have no debtor's prisons for such things. (Nor am I suggesting that we should)

Someone pays. Thats the funny thing, you pay 2 or 3x more per capita than other countries while only covering part of your population. The cost per insured person is therefore closer to 4x what other industrial nations pay, yet you get worse healthcare for that. You have to be some ideologue with blinders on to defend the US system when all the numbers show so clearly its not just bad, its horribly inefficient.

No contest there, the question then is why is it so inefficient? I may be too close to see the big picture, but from where I stand it's because of government regulations into the medical industries, not despite them.

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So if you are suggesting that more people in the use should be responsible for paying for their healthcare costs, I couldn't agree more. It would bring the overhead down substantially for those now paying the bills. However, nothing proposed so far aims to make this imbalance better. That is the really sad thing.

No matter how you slice it, or how you spread the cost, the US system is ridiculously expensive while offering worse quality.

The "worse quality" meme is provablely false. The vast majority of medical advancements over the past 50 years or so came from American doctors and scientists working for companies with a profit motive, whether the doctors themselves were motivated by money or not. There is literally nothing that you can get medically that I don't have access to, even if you can get it cheaper. Your high quality care is a direct result of our highly inefficient system.

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Out of 191 countries on the planet. "The United States ranked last when compared to six other countries -- Britain, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, the Commonwealth Fund report found."

Okay, so you probably do better than Zimbabwe. Is that your benchmark? Try Cuba.

We do way better than Cuba, too; on average. Even Casto's health has benefited from American capitalistic medicine. Which is, itself, and irony; considering that our federal representatives have repeatedly tried to kill him.

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Come on New Zealand had 4 million people. The Netherlands has 16 million. California and the US are pushing those respective numbers in illegal immigrants alone.

So what, the bigger the scale, the more efficient you could make it. Its harder to get costs down on small scale, a country like the Netherlands has no leverage over pharmaceutical companies compared to the US. If you can do it on a scale as small as that, surely you could do it on a state level in the US?

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But the study is clear about one thing, we are fat and nobody likes to go to the doctor. We are fat because we are very efficient and productive in feeding ourselves. Even our poor are fat. Our food tends to be good, cheep, and restaurant service is fast. Even Europeans get fat when they come here. Should we take better care of ourselves? Yes we should.

Yeah those cliches again. While they may have some truth, they dont explain the results. Read the article. US smokes a whole lot less than europeans, and you are younger. I also dont think your babies are born fat, so how do you explain child mortality?

Have you bothered to follow this thread? I addressed this already. The methods of record keeping is different. For example, if an infant is born dead, but there was no evidence that the fetus was dead before labor began, that baby is counted as a infant in the US, but not in many other nations until it survives for several minutes outside the womb. Many other stats are skewed in similar ways, because the standard methods of record keeping is different between countries. In the US, if a pregant mother is murdered, it's recorded as a double homicide.

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Anyway, its your health and your tax dollars. If you are happy spending 3x more for worse quality just so you dont have to call something "socialist", then thats your choice. Im sure happy with my healthcare system and I dont care what you call it.

You're happy with it because you're ignorant of what the costs are, and I'm not talking about monetary costs. Pray you never have to find out.

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba596