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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (110313)	12/29/2007 10:09:23 PM
From: marcher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

KT, you mention drug companies and AMA as the fear mongers of U.S. universal health care. I thought it was the drug companies and health insurance industry that was scaring everyone. Oh, yeah, and the notion of 'liberty.' In some crazed way, many workers are concerned that they will lose some sort of choice regarding health care. Kuehl's universal plan for California absolutely increases choice, while completely providing for elderly, in fact, every resident...but eliminates insurance companies (big yea) and slams pharmaceuticals by ordering bulk and jumping out of the 'payment for experiments' or however one wants to justify the excessive cost for drugs in the U.S. I thought the AMA was pretty quiet, so what is their political position? Happy 2008! --marc

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (110313)	12/30/2007 9:18:09 AM
From: Freedom Fighter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

>Or, we could just cover everyone the way every other industrial nation does and immediately become more efficient and reduce costs. < IMO, that would be financial suicide. First off, the rest of the world does not give the same level of health care to its citizens that people in the U.S. "with coverage" get. So to give everyone in the US health care would require the US spending a monstrously higher percentage of GDP on healthcare than those other countries or a sharp reduction in the level of health care that most people that are lower middle class and above get now. The latter is politically IMPOSSIBLE. In addition, as is always the case with anything government does, just because something functions reasonably well for a period of time that does not mean it will continue doing so over the long haul because eventually more and more decisions will be based on politics instead of sound economics and the resources of the country. Medicare has been functioning reasonably well a long time, but everyone knows it's massively underfunded over the long haul and a looming economic and healthcare disaster. It was government/politicians that accomplished that by wildly overpromising. Similar problems loom elsewhere in the world. IMO, to expand government's role, is simply foolish idealism and short term thinking. This "goal" of covering everyone is very noble and we should work in that direction. But putting healthcare into government would guarantee long term failure and economic disaster.