As a US citizen who has had treatment by the UK's NH system, I can double underline all the good Reg has to say about the NHS. I was in a clinic in Oxford to have a boil lanced and I was three days in the Radcliff Infirmary for what turned out to be a non-viral meningitis. The facilities were spartan, but the staff were people highly motivated to do medical work. I was also a month in an British organized hospital in Singapore following a near fatal accident in the offshore oil-fields, and I shall never tire of telling people how much it helped me to cope that the doctors considered me an active participant in my own treatment. I was consulted each time a medical decision was in the offing, and could ask questions, or be part of the decision making. At one point, when it was still a question whether my lower leg could be saved, I asked my doctor if there was a chance it would have to be amputated. He responded with an honest frankness that still takes my breath away: he said to me that sometimes it could be the wiser choice to loose the leg, get a prosthesis, and get back on my feet again rather than spend a long time on crutches and seeing my general body musculature weaken, not to mention being unable to reinsert myself in normal adult occupations. And, if there was a choice to be made, it would be made with my participation. I do think the health system in the UK works (some complain) because the British are unusually civic minded, and do not abuse the system. If the US changed to the same system overnight, I fear the masses of people heretofore left out of the health-care circuit would storm the system. All I want is the assurance of good basic care and a medical system committed to prevention and education about good personal hygiene. The private sector can offer luxury services to people with money to burn, and I'll be the first to wish them all the best.
The American Hospital in Paris serves the rich and famous, and the kings and queens from all over the planet, for unbelievable prices, and that's just fine by me; I can live with an " not all but something" choice.
Elle, you say government can't do anything right, but I bet you support all its wars and interventionist foreign policy, don't you? I'm just guessing here, but I'm betting you as a military wife "support the troops" right down the line, including everything the Pentagon asks for and more. If government is so universally corrupt and incompetent, why would you support our military interventions and our bloated defense budget? You can't have it both ways.
So far I have seen no science, just ad hominem attacks on those who do not agree with you on global warming. I want to talk about the science of global warming, and more specifically that science which James Hansen testified to in front of a Senate committee in 1988. It is not well known and has been glossed over that this was not his first but his second testimony in front of the Senate. His first time was in November 1987, it was cold, no one wanted to talk about warming, and the media ignored it completely. This did not please Senator Wirth of Colorado, the committee chairman. But if at first you don't succeed, try, try again, and he sure did. He called up the Weather Bureau and asked them to tell him what the warmest day in Washington, D.C. was. It was June 23rd so he booked that day for his next hearing. And to make sure that the air conditioning in the room did not work properly he sent his staff out at night to open all the windows in the hearing room. It worked: the TV crew, the star witness, and the audience sweated profusely and global warming was on every television set that night. It was this publicity stunt that made the establishment of the IPCC possible. But what did Hansen actually say? He said that we were in a warming trend, and that the cause of this warming was all that carbon dioxide we were putting iinto the air. What was true was that carbon dioxide was indeed increasing steadily. What was not true was that it was the cause of this warming. Because, you see, that warming was then just ten years old, having started in 1977. There was no warming whatsoever for the preceding twenty year stretch, but carbon dioxide was then already in the air, obviously an innmocent bystander. But if you believe Hansen it had to change this behavior in 1977 and suddenly decide that it was time to start warming up the world after all. You need powerful voodoo to do this but Hansen had it in him. Just exactly where were those "climate science experts" who let him get away with that fantasy? Science it is not, a miracle maybe, the miracle that became the start of a global warming religion. It is that religion which has brought us the Kyoto Protocol, the cap and trade laws, and now that idiotuc Waxman-Markey bill that members of Congress weren't even allowed to read before the vote was taken. And if you need more science still, satellite observations show that there has been no anthropogenic global warming for the last thirty years. As for the deep past, Daniel Rothman's article "Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the last 500 million years" (PNAS 99:4167-4171)(April 2, 2002) puts it this way: "The resulting CO2 signal exhibits no systematic correspondence with geologic record of climate variations at tectonic time scales." Try if you can to digest this information and see if you still can believe that old-time religion that Hansen gave to you in 1988.
Why is it that some of my conservative friends are so willing to put their lives, literally, in the hands of private industry? Why don't they get that the goal of a company is to make money, not ensure your well being?
Government may not run more efficiently than business, but the reason governments were created was to to protect the citizenry. The government is US and therefore it exists to serve our best interests.
Whenever private insurance companies can find loopholes that allow them to save their money by not paying out benefits, they do. It's well documented. Why the h*ll would a shareholder, who invests in a company to MAKE MONEY, complain to an insurance company about its practices if it's making them money? And am I, as a sick person tied into my company's healthcare provider, supposed to rely on shareholders to keep my company honest, for my welfare?
Let's just call a spade a spade here: Those who oppose a government alternative to private insurance companies are concerned about one thing only – their financial bottom line. It begins and ends with money for them, period. I'm sick and tired of listening to the defenders of health insurance companies cry, cry cry - first that socialized healthcare can't match the privatized version, but then that the competition would undercut their beloved private institutions.
Pick a side fellas- either government-sponsored healthcare sucks, in which case you have no need to fear it, or it works, in which case it would be a threat. You can't have it both ways.
The title of Mr. Potter's piece does him no service: "The Health Care Industry vs. Health Reform."
It's not a dichotomous choice. As a former employee of United Health Group, as well as Kaiser Permanente, I know the flaws in the system, as well as how for-profit insurance schemes are susceptible to abuse. However, absent from his post is any idea of how he would reform the current system.
Should we merely transpose a Medicare-like system onto 300 million Americans? Does anyone know how Medicare "balances" its fiscal obligations? By reducing payments to physicians and hospitals.
Succinctly stated, we have a cost problem based on over-utilization because the nexus between the consumer and the payment entity has been broken, which means I can obtain $275 worth of medical services from a visit to a specialist for about $50.
I could try, but I doubt an attorney or CPA would give me the same deal, so why should we expect that from our health insurance system?
Moreover, we don't have insurance for oil changes or tune-ups for our cars, so why do we have it for routine medical visits? How did this Faustian bargain begin?
It goes back to WWII when employers were circumscribed by wage restrictions, so they began providing health insurance to their employees. The rest is a muddled and admittedly imperfect system.
It does need to be reformed, and although the profit incentive must be controlled with oversight, if you excise that entirely, you'll merely have a Medicare-like system that strives on mediocrity. I know, because I live it on a daily basis and it simply doesn't work.
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