www.ditl.org

Wow, I guess I really got things started. Anyway...

Tyyr wrote:I don't find environmental protection to be a bad idea. I do find knee-jerk legislation in response to mass hysteria over a poorly at best understood phenomenon to be a bad idea however.

I'm not even talking about global warming legislation in particular, I mean regulations that might limit the amount of industrial or pharmaceutical waste in our drinking water, or that protect endangered species from reckless oil and gas development (things that the Bush administration undermined). The responsible use of the land isn't just a liberal value, it's also a conservative value going back to Teddy Roosevelt.

Labor protection, just what about labor in the US needs protecting?

The right to unionize without intimidation would help. The US has, IIRC, the greatest levels of income inequality of any developed nation, we have a minimum wage that's far beyond the poverty level, we've witnessed the replacement of pensions with inferior 401(k)s, and we need unions and labor regulations to ensure that workers get a fair shake. (You don't think they got a fair shake before unions and regulations, do you?) Even stuff like the continuing male / female wage gap, which was helped somewhat by the recent Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

I currently have health care, good health care. I have no desire to see the government stick its nose into it.

And tens of millions of Americans have no health care, or shitty health care, through no fault of their own.

I don't want the same people who brought you the DMV and IRS running the health care profession in the US.

You would rather have the same profit driven executives who run Wall Street running it? In the US health insurance system there are real and pervasive incentives to deny treatment to people who need it. If you have a pre-existing condition, for example, you're screwed and you're treated like a pariah by the insurance companies.

To add to it the tax burden will be huge. I already pay a good portion of my pay check for my health insurance, I don't want to have to pay even more for someone else's.

You do realize that the United States has the most expensive health care system of any nation (by GDP) precisely because of corporate profits, right? The US currently spends 17% of its GDP on health care (projected to rise to 20% in the next decade), compared to 7 to 11% for most other developed nations. (In fact, the highest per GDP spending in Europe is found in Switzerland, which just happens to have the most private health care system in the region.) Defending the current system is saying that the US ought to be paying more than any other developed nation for less results.

Use what's currently available. Hospitals aren't allowed to not treat someone who comes in sick. There are free clinics and low cost urgent care clinics. Many stores now offer common perscriptions at low cost even without insurance.

"Use what's currently available" translates to emergency rooms clogged to hell with poor people who can't afford coverage. How is that good for anyone? And sadly "use what's currently available" doesn't cut it for cancer treatment or other lifesaving procedures.

I took responsibility for it myself.

I come from a middle class family, and I'm in no realistic danger of being without necessary health insurance, but if you're born into a shitty neighborhood with shitty education and job opportunities, you can't just "take responsibility for it yourself". It's a fallacy to say, I was able to do it, therefore everyone else should be able to do it if they're responsible.

The health insurance companies have one product they're offering you, health insurance. If they do a crappy job you leave.

The marketplace (such as it is) is dominated by a few large companies that operate on a continuum of exorbitant premiums <-> insufficient coverage. They all do a crappy job, and we're stuck with them.

The less they intrude into my life the better.

Again, it's either the government mandating or providing coverage for everyone, or it's bloodthirsty proft driven executives making decisions for you.

Do I wish health care cost less? Sure I do. However you pay a premium for quality and choice.

No, you pay high premiums for redundant overhead and excessive corporate salaries.

They can't refuse to treat a life threatening or serious illness.

That's wrong. They can't refuse to treat you in an emergency, but they can deny you treatment for a long term illness (which will quite often be expensive as hell).

Rochey wrote:So you have a system where you do pay tax for government health care, but also pay money for private health care? That's rather odd.

Surprisingly, yes, the US has a large publicly funded health care system already, between Medicare and Medicaid. And if Medicare was made available to everyone, not just senior citizens and a select few others, our system would be a hell of a lot cheaper.

Yeah, that's one of the major differences between Americans and....well, everywhere else. We see health care as a right, not a privilage.

But underneath government policy, there's more popular agreement: a solid majority of Americans support universal health care, and Obama was elected after saying that health care is a right. Our continuing lack of universal health care is more the result of deadlocked Washington politics than of deadlocked public opinion.

Since I'm in a bit of a rotten mood today, I'll only throw in a little bit.

Tyyr wrote:You're going to have to define crippling and treatable.

Let me help with that: torn ACLs. I wrecked mine when I was a kid; 20 years later, I can barely walk, and in another five or ten, I'll probably be in a wheelchair. It's like someone hitting you in the knees with a hammer every day when you wake up; let's see how productive you'd be in that situation. The way things are now, I can't even afford pain medication.

It also severely limits my options for work, so, no company healthcare for me.

As for this:

Tyyr wrote:If you don't like your job at Wal-Mart, well this is the US, there's a college on every corner. Knock yourself out like I did.

Right. Because they're all free as well, aren't they?

Lazar wrote:

I took responsibility for it myself.

I come from a middle class family, and I'm in no realistic danger of being without necessary health insurance, but if you're born into a shitty neighborhood with shitty education and job opportunities, you can't just "take responsibility for it yourself". It's a fallacy to say, I was able to do it, therefore everyone else should be able to do it if they're responsible...

Thank you, Lazar. I couldn't have put that better. I grew up in a trailer as a kid; as a teenager, my mom was working three jobs just to take care of us. Which meant no extra-curricular activities, no community service, and no college money for me. Which meant no college for me.

Not to mention while you're at college Walmart is probably the best you can find. My town has suck for job opportunities and my best paying job was Walmart at 8.25 an hour last year (Min wage at the time was 6.75) shame they wanted me to forgo school for them. Now I'm at a minimum wage job Kmart (now 7.05) which doesn't give hardly any hours. But I'm ALMOST done with college. Close enough I can start applying to real places. I just can't imagine trying to live off $5,000 a year and trying to afford health care. Luckily I'm still on my parent's plan.

But yeah min wage last year of 6.75 was well beyond poverty. Usual meal at taco bell runs about $7. A microwave burrito runs $1. Gas at the time was about $60 a tank. Books ran about $200 a semester. I lived in a house with 3 other roomies needing about $400 a month for rent. Now its only about $240 in my apartment. Point is I just can't imagine trying to pay for an ambulance ride that could bankrupt me much less things like leukemia.

Wow, I'm just going to cherry-pick a few points to which I have salient comments:

Monroe wrote:BUT they can stick you with a $60,000 dollar bill when you only make a tenth that a year. That needs to change.

That needs to change? Charging ME $60k for a particular procedure, when someone else gets charged $30k, is in effect punishing me for not being quite as desperate. In fact, I am in worse shape financially as a homeowner and father of two than many people who make far less because I don't quite qualify for all the entitlements. Now, you want to punish me for that?! If something costs $60k, it costs $60k. If I have a car that costs $20,000, it doesn't cost $10,000 for person A just because they can't afford it.

Lazar wrote:The right to unionize without intimidation would help. The US has, IIRC, the greatest levels of income inequality of any developed nation, we have a minimum wage that's far beyond the poverty level, we've witnessed the replacement of pensions with inferior 401(k)s, and we need unions and labor regulations to ensure that workers get a fair shake. (You don't think they got a fair shake before unions and regulations, do you?)

This is a bit anachronsitic. The largest of the unions hold the manufacturers/suppliers by the short and curlies, and strongarm them into contracts and payouts that no true capitalist system would ever allow, and which lead (in part) to things like the current state of the US Big Three. The minimum-wage problem, 401(k) vs. pension issue, and gender wage gap you reference are all problems that have nothing to do with unionization, nor are they issues that unions have done anything but sweet F.A. about.

Lazar wrote:And tens of millions of Americans have no health care, or shitty health care, through no fault of their own.

Just to play devil's advocate, you're talking about replacing that with a system that potentially ensures that EVERYONE has shitty health care.

Lazar wrote:You would rather have the same profit driven executives who run Wall Street running it? In the US health insurance system there are real and pervasive incentives to deny treatment to people who need it. If you have a pre-existing condition, for example, you're screwed and you're treated like a pariah by the insurance companies.

Actually, that's more true of life insurance than medical. I have one of the most disallowable preexisting conditions there is, and I have been treated exceptionally well by my good ol' private PPO - more so than I believe I would by a gub'mint-run healthcare system.

Lazar wrote:Again, it's either the government mandating or providing coverage for everyone, or it's bloodthirsty proft driven executives making decisions for you.

And exactly what leads you to believe that a nationalized healthcare system would offer better (or less bottom-line oriented) care? (That's a rhetorical question, BTW.)

Lazar wrote:Surprisingly, yes, the US has a large publicly funded health care system already, between Medicare and Medicaid. And if Medicare was made available to everyone, not just senior citizens and a select few others, our system would be a hell of a lot cheaper.

And shittier. Medicare and Medicaid deny more treatment than private insurance, and are less open to alternative treatments. Further, they are far more limited in choice of doctors and provide ZERO coverage if you choose out-of-network providers - unlike most private coverage.

Lazar wrote:But underneath government policy, there's more popular agreement: a solid majority of Americans support universal health care, and Obama was elected after saying that health care is a right.

And everyone would support "free money" if nobody knew what they'd be giving up to get it. I'm not disagreeing that our current system is riddled with problems; but it honestly really galls me when people start spouting about the evils of the current system and espousing a nationalized system when they haven't really considered the drawbacks that come with the positives of a new plan.

Monroe wrote:Not to mention while you're at college Walmart is probably the best you can find.

Unless they have a job where I can sit down all day, I can't even work at Walmart.

Monroe wrote:Point is I just can't imagine trying to pay for an ambulance ride that could bankrupt me much less things like leukemia.

Exactly. A few years ago, my mom and I caught something (the doctors weren't actually able to identify it; it was some sort of super-pneumonia), and she ended up in the hospital unconscious on a ventilator for a week. I dealt with it myself, but even I was tempted to call an ambulance at one point. Other than the ventilator, some IVs, and some antibiotics, they did nothing for my mom. She ends up with bills totaling over $60,000. So, her credit is effectively screwed now, because there's no way in hell we can afford to pay that.

59% of doctors now support universal health care, so I'll go with them. In most health indicators, the US lags very poorly behind the other developed nations with universal programs.

Lazar wrote:59% of doctors now support universal health care, so I'll go with them. In most health indicators, the US lags very poorly behind the other developed nations with universal programs.

"Survey?" Only 2,000 doctors were surveyed, and there was no indication in that article of the specificity or the nature of the questions posed. Anyway, since there is no way to use faux numbers like that to quantify anything, I'll just give my doctor's anecdotal take: if I lived in a country with universal healthcare - as in most of Continental Europe - I'd either be dead, in a coma, or in a wheelchair by now.

Mikey wrote:...if I lived in a country with universal healthcare - as in most of Continental Europe - I'd either be dead, in a coma, or in a wheelchair by now.

Thanks to living here, I'll be in a wheelchair within the next decade. Not that I'm comparing my injury to your condition, Mikey; I'm well aware that yours is life-threatening, while mine is only severely crippling.

Mikey wrote: That needs to change? Charging ME $60k for a particular procedure, when someone else gets charged $30k, is in effect punishing me for not being quite as desperate. In fact, I am in worse shape financially as a homeowner and father of two than many people who make far less because I don't quite qualify for all the entitlements. Now, you want to punish me for that?! If something costs $60k, it costs $60k. If I have a car that costs $20,000, it doesn't cost $10,000 for person A just because they can't afford it.

Well 30k should change too I'm saying the whole system is wrong. But if you want to get down to it yes a bill that takes a poor person 20 years to recover from is less fair than the same bill to someone of your demographic which might take only 5 years to recover from and a drop of living expenses. But either way the system is flawed as unless you choose to take that health care plan the government should provide for its citizens.

Just to play devil's advocate, you're talking about replacing that with a system that potentially ensures that EVERYONE has shitty health care.

IF they choose. I don't think anyone is saying we should force everyone into government healthcare.


And I love the usage of anachromatic. Octavian's going to use it my next Warhammer Rp post!

Lazar wrote:I'm not even talking about global warming legislation in particular, I mean regulations that might limit the amount of industrial or pharmaceutical waste in our drinking water, or that protect endangered species from reckless oil and gas development (things that the Bush administration undermined). The responsible use of the land isn't just a liberal value, it's also a conservative value going back to Teddy Roosevelt.

Yes, responsible. As in there needs to exist a balance, an actual balance, between protecting the enviornment and the needs of humans. Right now we're perfectly willing to help strangle ourselves in order to not inconvience a few animals. Enviornmental conditions today are far better than they've been in a very long time in the US. How much more enviornmental regulation is needed? How much can you actually influence?

The right to unionize without intimidation would help. The US has, IIRC, the greatest levels of income inequality of any developed nation, we have a minimum wage that's far beyond the poverty level, we've witnessed the replacement of pensions with inferior 401(k)s, and we need unions and labor regulations to ensure that workers get a fair shake. (You don't think they got a fair shake before unions and regulations, do you?) Even stuff like the continuing male / female wage gap, which was helped somewhat by the recent Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Institutions have their time and the time of the unions has passed. The United Auto Workers has run amok and they are one of the pricipal reasons the US car industry is on life support right now. The unions, along with rising energy prices, already killed off the steel and textile industry in this country. The early unions helped to make great strides in improving worker conditions in this country. Unfortunately their time has passed and these dinosaurs are dragging down large sections of the economy.

As for pensions vs. 401ks? I'll take my mobile 401k over a pension that leaves me strapped to a single company for better or worse for my entire career. Mismanaged 401ks can be an issue but in general 401ks are far better for both the employer and employee.

And tens of millions of Americans have no health care, or shitty health care, through no fault of their own.

Define no fault of their own? Many of the people lumped into that category choose not to have health insurance.

You would rather have the same profit driven executives who run Wall Street running it? In the US health insurance system there are real and pervasive incentives to deny treatment to people who need it.

And real pervasive incentives to authorize needed treatment. The US health insurance companies are businesses, first and foremost. If they never provide the service they advertise, health care, they go out of business. Yeah, they sometimes deny procedures. Things happen, but the vast majority of the time people's health insurance pays off just like it's supposed to.

If you have a pre-existing condition, for example, you're screwed and you're treated like a pariah by the insurance companies.

Would you pay full sticker price for a car that needed a new engine and transmission? Why would an insurance company take on a client that they know for a fact will cost them money because their medical bills will never come close to their premium payments? They're a business.

You do realize that the United States has the most expensive health care system of any nation (by GDP) precisely because of corporate profits, right?

Yes, I also realize that profits are the reason the system exists. Remove the profits and the businesses go away.

Defending the current system is saying that the US ought to be paying more than any other developed nation for less results.

Do we? I'd honestly like to see the statistics on how many new drugs are developed her, medical procedures, treatment options, compared to other countries that spend far less.

"Use what's currently available" translates to emergency rooms clogged to hell with poor people who can't afford coverage. How is that good for anyone? And sadly "use what's currently available" doesn't cut it for cancer treatment or other lifesaving procedures.

The old adage you get what you pay for applies here. If you don't pay and have to rely on what's available free then yeah, it's not going to be a wonderful experience. However as someone who has insurance allow me to assure you that there's no prefered insured people line at the Emergency room.

I come from a middle class family, and I'm in no realistic danger of being without necessary health insurance, but if you're born into a shitty neighborhood with shitty education and job opportunities, you can't just "take responsibility for it yourself". It's a fallacy to say, I was able to do it, therefore everyone else should be able to do it if they're responsible.

I'm sorry, not buying it. Not even a little bit. Who's responsible for a child's education? The child and their parents. If you've got a shitty education the only person to blame is yourself with some of it getting shouldered by your parents. Sure I'm biased. I worked my ass off in public junior high and high school to get the grades to get into college. Then I busted my ass in college with two jobs and student loans in order to make it through and graduate with a good job at the end. So yeah, I have little sympathy for people who complain about where they're from or the high school they went to just not giving them a chance.

The marketplace (such as it is) is dominated by a few large companies that operate on a continuum of exorbitant premiums <-> insufficient coverage. They all do a crappy job, and we're stuck with them.

And yet I have health insurance with a reasonible premium that has done an exemplary job of paying for... let's see, 4 ongoing perscriptions, 5 surgeries, too many doctor's visits to count, etc. If they're all doing a crappy job my company is sure screwing the pooch with me.

Again, it's either the government mandating or providing coverage for everyone, or it's bloodthirsty proft driven executives making decisions for you.

Except the government can make it a law. I can tell the insurance company to go to hell and stop paying the premiums. Try not paying your taxes in protest sometime. I'll take profit driven over elected officials any day.

No, you pay high premiums for redundant overhead and excessive corporate salaries.

Redundant overhead? What in the name of all that's holy do you think the government IS? As for corporate salaries, for the love of all that's holy actually compare executive salaries to the bottom line in most of these companies. It's not even a blip on the balance sheet.

Let me help with that: torn ACLs. I wrecked mine when I was a kid; 20 years later, I can barely walk, and in another five or ten, I'll probably be in a wheelchair. It's like someone hitting you in the knees with a hammer every day when you wake up; let's see how productive you'd be in that situation. The way things are now, I can't even afford pain medication.

It also severely limits my options for work, so, no company healthcare for me.

If I may, can I ask what was done for it 20 years ago?

Right. Because they're all free as well, aren't they?

Nope, mine cost a hell of a lot of money that I'm still paying back. Interestingly enough our origins aren't that different. I grew up in a trailer park with a mom that worked and my dad had two jobs as well.

In the nearer term, if the government made a public option available (but not mandatory), it would help reduce insurance costs through competition. Also note that a universal plan doesn't even have to involve nationalization: from what I've read, Switzerland has a very good universal health care system with no public provider at all, just managed competition with premium caps. I think their system is the closest to what the mainstream Democrats are proposing.

Tyyr wrote:

Let me help with that: torn ACLs. I wrecked mine when I was a kid; 20 years later, I can barely walk, and in another five or ten, I'll probably be in a wheelchair. It's like someone hitting you in the knees with a hammer every day when you wake up; let's see how productive you'd be in that situation. The way things are now, I can't even afford pain medication.

It also severely limits my options for work, so, no company healthcare for me.

If I may, can I ask what was done for it 20 years ago?

They told me I'd need extremely expensive surgery (it's now $50,000 per knee, with a 30% success rate). Naturally, we couldn't do anything about it.

Tyyr wrote:

Right. Because they're all free as well, aren't they?

Nope, mine cost a hell of a lot of money that I'm still paying back. Interestingly enough our origins aren't that different. I grew up in a trailer park with a mom that worked and my dad had two jobs as well.

My dad was injured on the job; the insurance company refused to treat him, we took it all the way to the US Supreme Court, where the case sits, doing nothing, to this day. He left the picture when I was 12, and then it was just my mom working her ass off just to support us.

Like I said, without extracurriculars, community service, and scholarships, you can't get into a real college. I'm unsure how old you are, but when my college prospects came up in the late '90s, those were the conditions, and now, it's even worse.

Whoops, missed this bit:

Tyyr wrote:I'm sorry, not buying it. Not even a little bit. Who's responsible for a child's education? The child and their parents. If you've got a shitty education the only person to blame is yourself with some of it getting shouldered by your parents. Sure I'm biased. I worked my ass off in public junior high and high school to get the grades to get into college. Then I busted my ass in college with two jobs and student loans in order to make it through and graduate with a good job at the end. So yeah, I have little sympathy for people who complain about where they're from or the high school they went to just not giving them a chance.

This is some kind of joke, right? The US school system is way down the list as far as quality among industrialized nations, and half of the reason we're getting clobbered by overseas markets is the lack of affordable quality education here.

You can bust ass as much as you want in High School, and if you don't have the required extracurriculars and community service, you don't get accepted into any decent college. All High School proves is how good you are at conforming; my aptitude tests were in the top 2 percentile, and my I.Q. put me well above the majority of the world. Just because endless paperwork and kissing ass wasn't my thing, I didn't get to graduate. Again, I don't know how things were where you went to school, maybe they rewarded knowledge, and didn't force you to do meaningless repetitive bullsh*t.

Your blanket statement that it doesn't matter "where you're from or what school you went to" seems to demonstrate a lack of knowledge regarding school systems outside of your state/county/district. Things are not the same everywhere, due to different levels of funding, curriculum, demographics, etc.

Tyyr wrote:Yes, responsible. As in there needs to exist a balance, an actual balance, between protecting the enviornment and the needs of humans. Right now we're perfectly willing to help strangle ourselves in order to not inconvience a few animals. Enviornmental conditions today are far better than they've been in a very long time in the US. How much more enviornmental regulation is needed? How much can you actually influence?

Protecting endangered species doesn't mean halting development, it means ensuring that companies take reasonable precautions not to ruin the environment. The Bush administration worked for higher levels of arsenic in drinking water, and I think they were too eager to delist long recognized endangered species. The Republicans did nothing to earn my trust on environmental issues, and the Democrats themselves are a very corporate influenced party that would be considered center-right by European standards.

As for pensions vs. 401ks? I'll take my mobile 401k over a pension that leaves me strapped to a single company for better or worse for my entire career. Mismanaged 401ks can be an issue but in general 401ks are far better for both the employer and employee.

By using uninsured worker savings to finance retirement, they're giving workers much less security. My parents have fared much better with a public pension (as city-employed medical professionals) than some of our relatives have with 401(k)s. But maybe I'm just nostalgic for some era when we had stable employment.

Define no fault of their own? Many of the people lumped into that category choose not to have health insurance.

Some, yes, but for a huge number it's that they can't afford it.

And real pervasive incentives to authorize needed treatment. The US health insurance companies are businesses, first and foremost. If they never provide the service they advertise, health care, they go out of business.

Underinsurance is a real problem for tens of millions of Americans. A lot of people are just financially unable to get the kind of health insurance that they need, and the nation's health suffers for it. I think the HMO system, as it currently exists in the US, has failed to provide the level of value and variety that might be used to justify a private system.

Would you pay full sticker price for a car that needed a new engine and transmission? Why would an insurance company take on a client that they know for a fact will cost them money because their medical bills will never come close to their premium payments? They're a business.

Yes, that's the way our system works today. But I believe that a human being is not the same thing as a car, and that as a society, we have a moral duty to ensure that people aren't financially devastated or provided insufficient treatment when they're struck with a life threatening disease. Yes, lifestyle plays some part, but life threatening illnesses are more often the result of shit luck than of irresponsible living.

Yes, I also realize that profits are the reason the system exists. Remove the profits and the businesses go away.

You could still have managed and mandated private insurers like in Switzerland. Less profits don't mean no profits. By neutralizing quantity based competition and only having quality based competition, we would be preserving some of the advantages of competition while satisfying the very clear desire of the American people for universal care.

Do we? I'd honestly like to see the statistics on how many new drugs are developed her, medical procedures, treatment options, compared to other countries that spend far less.

Every study I've seen has placed the United States low in most categories. As far as I know, the only area where the United States leads is response times.

The old adage you get what you pay for applies here. If you don't pay and have to rely on what's available free then yeah, it's not going to be a wonderful experience.

Okay, but I find that view too inhumane to accept. We don't have tens of millions of uninsured and underinsured people because they're all lazy and irresponsible, it is in large part because they have no realistic prospects of rising out of poverty (I'm not denying that some people can, like you, but it's often prohibitively difficult), and they just can't afford the care that they need. I think we, as a society, have a duty to ensure that everyone can receive decent education and health care so that they can have an equal opportunity to succeed. Health care is fundamentally different from other needs such as food, clothing and housing because of its catastrophic, luck-based component.

However as someone who has insurance allow me to assure you that there's no prefered insured people line at the Emergency room.

I'm not saying that there is, I'm saying that emergency rooms are overused by people who shouldn't be there, but are because they can't afford insurance.

I'm sorry, not buying it. Not even a little bit. Who's responsible for a child's education? The child and their parents.

And the state. Do you think we should abolish public schools and leave it all to the free market?

If you've got a shitty education the only person to blame is yourself with some of it getting shouldered by your parents.

That is nonsense. It's just as likely to be the fact that you have neglected, under funded public schools and your family has no money.

Sure I'm biased. I worked my ass off in public junior high and high school to get the grades to get into college. Then I busted my ass in college with two jobs and student loans in order to make it through and graduate with a good job at the end. So yeah, I have little sympathy for people who complain about where they're from or the high school they went to just not giving them a chance.

What you've done is really admirable, I'm not kidding. But you can't expect everyone to be able to that - I'm not buying it.

And yet I have health insurance with a reasonible premium that has done an exemplary job of paying for... let's see, 4 ongoing perscriptions, 5 surgeries, too many doctor's visits to count, etc. If they're all doing a crappy job my company is sure screwing the pooch with me.

Yes, we can get good care if we've got the money to pay big premiums. But I think Americans get too little value for the money they pay.

Redundant overhead? What in the name of all that's holy do you think the government IS?

Redundant overhead, in this case, means multiple companies providing the same thing with needless duplication, and corporate profits. Tell me, why are all of the European systems so much cheaper than ours in terms of GDP? Look at the per GDP spending, look at the studies of national health performance, and tell me how we're getting more value under the current system than the other developed nations do under theirs.

Oh, this is a great thread. Nothing like a good dose of different opinions.

Capt. Jethro wrote:Oh, this is a great thread. Nothing like a good dose of different opinions.

Well, mine at least, is complemented by a healthy dose of facts.