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

To: combjelly who wrote (346128)	8/8/2007 10:36:26 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575115

How many times do I have to repeat the reasons? You can find them in great detail in my posts to Ted and John or even more in any of my posts here Subject 55439 The shorter version - 1 - Doctors make more in the US, often a lot more. To the extent that you try to reduce their income through political decisions enforced through the single payer system a - They will resist it b - Your moving further from John's claim that the health care system would be the same but the we would save money from the government being more efficient. 2 - Prescription drug prices are higher in the US. Its possible that they could be forced lower but if you implement such direct, or indirect price controls then you will lower investment in this area and reduce the supply of new drugs being developed. 3 - The US is wealthier than most countries with a single payer system. That contributes to 1 and 2 above, and generally to the demand for health care. 4 - We have more medical lawsuits and on the average bigger awards. The main cost is not the size of the awards, although that has an impact as does the insurance costs, and the time and money spent defending against the suits, but the defensive medicine to try to prevent the lawsuits. 5 - In the US we have a "medical culture" that supports the idea of more aggressive and extensive intervention even for relatively small chances to save a life, or when the person is very old and likely to die of some other factor soon anyway. 6 - This is speculation, but I think the US would be more resistant to the type of long waiting lists you see in Canada and a few other places, people would insist that more resources be spent to bring down these waits. There are other minor differences but I just wanted to hit the main points here. Edit - I said the point under the dashed line below is not related to cost, but really it is. If we have more violence and accidents that will raise health care costs. ------------------------------------- Not related to cost, but strongly related to supposed benefits of single payer in other countries I recommend you read city-journal.org or if that's too long the important point from it is ""...One often hears variations on Krugman's argument—that America lags behind other countries in crude health outcomes. But such outcomes reflect a mosaic of factors, such as diet, lifestyle, drug use, and cultural values. It pains me as a doctor to say this, but health care is just one factor in health. Americans live 75.3 years on average, fewer than Canadians (77.3) or the French (76.6) or the citizens of any Western European nation save Portugal. Health care influences life expectancy, of course. But a life can end because of a murder, a fall, or a car accident. Such factors aren't academic—homicide rates in the United States are much higher than in other countries (eight times higher than in France, for instance). In The Business of Health, Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider factor out intentional and unintentional injuries from life-expectancy statistics and find that Americans who don't die in car crashes or homicides outlive people in any other Western country. And if we measure a health-care system by how well it serves its sick citizens, American medicine excels. Five-year cancer survival rates bear this out. For leukemia, the American survival rate is almost 50 percent; the European rate is just 35 percent. Esophageal carcinoma: 12 percent in the United States, 6 percent in Europe. The survival rate for prostate cancer is 81.2 percent here, yet 61.7 percent in France and down to 44.3 percent in England—a striking variation..." Message 23760644