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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SilentZ who wrote (196051)	7/28/2004 12:41:22 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1575422

Why not? It's not "willy-nilly." Two people who love each other would like to say that they're married, so why can't they? Your argument is clearly reactionary. Two people can say whatever they want. They can proclaim themselves to be rhinos for all I care. The question has to do with the LEGAL MEANING of the term. The term "marriage" or "married" appears tens of thousands of times the USC and various state codes. There is no reason to disrupt the meanings of these documents. Are you telling me that the HMO system is a good one? It's awful! I can't imagine a state-run system being much worse. First of all, HMOs do not predominate American healthcare. And HMOs generally provide first rate healthcare. But people who don't want to use HMOs need not do it. It is a choice you make. You can't have the best conceivable healthcare for everyone. It simply cannot be done. You end up with something like the nightmare in Canada. I just put systems in a medical oncology center in which the physicians, out of their own pockets, spent over a million bucks to have a CT scanner installed. In Canada, they will tell you it is redundant because patients could be sent across the street to the hospital to get CT scans. But for patients who are undergoing chemo treatment, scheduling a separate appointment at a different location on another day to get a CT scan, THEN to have to return to the physician's office on YET ANOTHER DAY to get it interpreted is a scenario that has made more than one patient (my mother included) give up fighting cancer. It is just too damned much trouble. Independent health plans ENCOURAGE this treatment. Your government run health plan will do no such thing. People bitch about the high cost of drugs. But that high cost is what causes those drugs to be developed. If the drug company cannot expect to make A LOT of money, they're not going to RISK A LOT of money to develop a drug that may or may not produce profits. WHY DO YOU THINK THE UNITED STATES IS WHERE MOST OF THE MAJOR DRUG ADVANCES ORIGINATE? WHY DOESN'T CANADA DEVELOP ITS OWN DRUGS? I'll be glad to discuss this subject at length with you, but if you are closed minded about it I don't want to waste the effort. This is stuff you have to give some serious thought to if you're going to take a position on it. Because you can take the best healthcare system in the world, ANYWHERE, and fu*k it up so badly it cannot be repaired. When you look at the disasters government programs such as SS, Medicare, Medicaid, and others have become, if you don't have second thoughts about what you're proposing there is something wrong with you. We have a great healthcare system. Only 14% of our population is uninsured. And that 14% receives FREE healthcare from thousands of state and county run hospitals and other facilities. That 14% still gets better healthcare than they would get in any other country on earth. One other point. The aforementioned cancer clinic -- yes, it makes millions of dollars a year. BUT THEY HAVE NEVER, EVER TURNED A PATIENT AWAY WHO WAS UNABLE TO PAY. NOT ONCE. If a patient is so poor they don't have insurance, they totally accomodate them in getting signed up for Medicaid or clinical trials. And under the unusual circumstances that Medicaid won't pay for treatment of the poor, they treat them anyway. THESE ARE MEDICATIONS THAT OFTEN COST $5,000 OR MORE FOR A SINGLE DAY'S TREATMENT. And treatments can go on for weeks. The patient never even sees a bill. When you talk about people not getting healthcare, you simply don't know what you're talking about. Yes, there are mentally ill people who do not take advantage of available services. But you're going to have these people regardless of what you do to our current healthcare system. It simply is not a true statement that people in the United States go without healthcare due to their poverty. IT IS A LIBERAL LIE. And it has been since Carter stood up at HIS convention 25 years ago and claimed we needed nationalized healthcare.