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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (10221)	2/2/2002 12:03:56 PM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93284

Hi Neo, Interesting posts regarding health care. The thing that strikes me about people proposing sweeping overhaul of our health care is they never seem to address TORT reform as a part of the process of reigning in costs. Without TORT reform, whether we had a government system or partially privatized one, our system would cost more due to the free reign we give lawyers to milk the system and sui, sui, sui. Some suits are warranted of course, but the pendulum has swung grossly to the side of giving lawyers every opportunity possible to extort money from our health care system. It's a travesty, and no doubt our lack of political will to reform TORT laws has to due with the millions of PAC dollars flowing into congress's back pocket. Term limits is what we need. With term limits the influence of PAC dollars is lessoned. With term limits people can serve a few years and go back to their normal life, knowing they will be effected by the legislation they passed.

To: Neocon who wrote (10221)	2/2/2002 1:16:04 PM
From: jttmab	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93284

If you needed heart surgery, would you prefer to have the surgery done in Cuba? Barbados? Costa Rica? Or the United States? You would naturally pick the country that you know most about. Not rocket science. How about Germany, France and England? Even though they have higher life expectancies you would still pick the US? I've seen nothing that indicates the state-of-the art in Germany is any worse than the US. If you were in Germany you would more than likely pick Germany. This particular point of the author is a psych game. a result of genetic and social factors (e.g., lifestyle, environment, education, etc.) rather than the quality of medical care. I'll pretty much agree with that, though it perplexes me why the author didn't then turn to the European coutries which would automatically exclude the genetic and some of the more dramatic cultural differences. The culture in the western European countries is substantially closer to the US than the US is to Asian countries. European countries still have higher life expectancy and lower infant mortality rate. European descent. None have large black populations. Unfortunately, black Americans have more health problems and shorter life expectancy (70 years in 1991) than whites. This was an interesting treatment. The author just went through an exercise where he compared Japanese Americans and Japanese to White Americans. You might have expected a similar approach with Blacks. Compare European-Blacks against American-Blacks and White Americans. Europe does have Blacks. A smaller percentage, doesn't prohibit the comparison. Does he not want to show what European-Blacks life expectancy is? Since individuals in the different groups often live in the same communities and use the same hospitals and physicians, the difference clearly is a result of something more than the health care system. BS. While there is some integration in society, you can pop over to Northern Virginia and enter "Little Thailand". I don't think we need to guess very hard what the dominant ethnic group might be. Go into Southeast DC and tell me that there is a normal distribution of ethnic/racial groups there. Who do you find living in Chinatown in San Francisco? Go near the train station in Newark, NJ. You'll find an area loaded with Portugese and Brazilians. [Great food there btw.] Re: length of hospital stays I never did understand why anyone cared about that metric; still don't. There are shortages of primary care physicians in some rural and inner-city areas, but almost nowhere else. For example, a 1990 survey found that only 28 doctors serving a population of 1.7 million low-income people in New York's Harlem were qualified to provide primary care. The explanation for such shortages has little to do with the ratio of primary care physicians graduating from medical school. There simply isn't enough money in rural and inner-city areas to support such physicians This was really interesting...I would have liked to have seen some patient per capita comparisons between rural, urban and suburban and the associated population of each, but that's probably hard. So instead he picks an illustration [Ok]: New York's Harlem population of 1.7 million people has 28 primary care doctors. I think that's worth a thoughtfull pause .........[pause]...............If I'm not mistaken...Harlem doesn't have an ethnic/racial profile that fits the normal ethic/racial profile of the US at large....Pakistanis? Earlier the author made the point....Unfortunately, black Americans have more health problems and shorter life expectancy (70 years in 1991) than whites. Yes, it is unfortunate that 1.7 million predominantly black Americans have more health problems and only 28 primary physcians. Could there be a relationship with these two facts and life expectancy for blacks? I wonder how many specialists Harlem has, if it fits the national average, as the author calculates for us, we've got 14 specialists serving 1.7 million. Do you think that this group of 1.7 million is getting adequate health care? And where do you think they'll get their heart surgery from? jttmab