Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (5066)	2/29/2008 3:53:44 PM
From: gg cox	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

<<The number one area in which I differ from the fans of Socialized Medicine is that I choose to see beyond the short term to the unavoidable long term effects.>> <<It will take many more examples of the Socialized Medical system making clear they don't appreciate a person sentenced to death by them questioning their authority to before the political capital to restore responsibility is built.>> Have you ever spent any time in a country with socialized medicine? <<..American unreason is why a white-collar New Yorker conflates the Vietnam War with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. What half-remembered whispers of fact rustled in this man's mind? He regards history as a series of generic anti-American explosions, but then, he probably never took a high school history class. He is normal; Jacoby is the odd one out. In the U.S. today, literate thoughtful people are regarded as freaks..>>. cbc.ca

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (5066)	2/29/2008 3:58:34 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

WHO's Fooling Who? The World Health Organization's Problematic Ranking of Health Care Systems by Glen Whitman The World Health Report 2000, prepared by the World Health Organization, presented performance rankings of 191 nations' health care systems. These rankings have been widely cited in public debates about health care, particularly by those interested in reforming the U.S. health care system to resemble more closely those of other countries. Michael Moore, for instance, famously stated in his film SiCKO that the United States placed only 37th in the WHO report. CNN.com, in verifying Moore's claim, noted that France and Canada both placed in the top 10. Those who cite the WHO rankings typically present them as an objective measure of the relative performance of national health care systems. They are not. The WHO rankings depend crucially on a number of underlying assumptions— some of them logically incoherent, some characterized by substantial uncertainty, and some rooted in ideological beliefs and values that not everyone shares. The analysts behind the WHO rankings express the hope that their framework "will lay the basis for a shift from ideological discourse on health policy to a more empirical one." Yet the WHO rankings themselves have a strong ideological component. They include factors that are arguably unrelated to actual health performance, some of which could even improve in response to worse health performance. Even setting those concerns aside, the rankings are still highly sensitive to both measurement error and assumptions about the relative importance of the components. And finally, the WHO rankings reflect implicit value judgments and lifestyle preferences that differ among individuals and across countries. cato.org Full paper (HTML) cato.org (PDF) cato.org