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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (115972)	7/21/2009 9:56:04 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541936

"On a blog on Fox News earlier this year, the conservative writer John Lott wrote, “Americans should ask Canadians and Brits — people who have long suffered from rationing — how happy they are with central government decisions on eliminating ‘unnecessary’ health care.” There is no particular reason that the United States should copy the British or Canadian forms of universal coverage, rather than one of the different arrangements that have developed in other industrialized nations, some of which may be better. But as it happens, last year the Gallup organization did ask Canadians and Brits, and people in many different countries, if they have confidence in “health care or medical systems” in their country. In Canada, 73 percent answered this question affirmatively. Coincidentally, an identical percentage of Britons gave the same answer. In the United States, despite spending much more, per person, on health care, the figure was only 56 percent." That's a very good article. As you know, my whole family was in the UK medical system for a while. I was very pleased with it. In fact I was much more pleased with it than I am with our system where my husband and I both pay for the best insurance, but our insurance company, or doctor's billing office, or hospital billing, or outside contractor, still manages to screw something up on almost every bill. We just recently got a bill from the pediatrician where they had showed the write down as something paid by the insurance company, and asked me to pay what the insurance company had already paid. I called my insurance company, who then placed a call to the doctor's billing office which didn't answer - so now I've spent 1/2 hour of my time (because I had to call the top level insurance layer first, and then was referred to another layer. And the matter still isn't resolved. Pretty sucky. In the UK there was no paper work for me. I can't tell you how great that was.

To: JohnM who wrote (115972)	7/21/2009 10:46:09 AM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541936

What a thoughtful, helpful article. I wish we could hear more of this kind of discussion instead of the scare stories the cable shows are throwing at us. Yesterday I decided to try to catch up some on the debate issues and turned on Fox. There was a long, rather emotional segment on a Canadian woman who had to wait for months for back surgery, with the subtext of "is this REALLY what you want, America?". (She did say that simple problems were treated immediately and well, but the interviewer quickly returned to the issue of the surgery). And there was flamboyant and constant use of the word "socialism" by the commentators. Fox is unapologetically anti-Dem in all ways now. Fair and balanced has become a joke. MSNBC is the same way on the left. Great if you want the bias. I guess the default is CNN, but really if you get your 'information' from any cable channel, you get nothing reliable, and certainly nothing that rises to the level of your article. I wonder if the term socialism will continue to have the same impact on younger people, who won't have the same references we older people do, and may evaluate it differently. In which case, it won't have the scare impact any longer. Then the right will have to dig a little deeper for its arguments against some form of socialized medicine.

To: JohnM who wrote (115972)	7/21/2009 11:15:26 AM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 541936

>>Why We Must Ration Health Care<< John - Interesting piece. Thanks for posting it. I had a thought about healthcare costs just last week. It's about the idea that if you socialize healthcare, the profit is taken out of the system, and then the pharmaceutical companies and others have no motive to do research to produce new, life-saving drugs and therapies. It's an idea that seems to make sense, but I think there's a problem, which I will illustrate using the example of cancer. My recent experiences with cancer have left me with a fair amount of knowledge of how our healthcare system deals with it. For several decades, companies in the US have done a tremendous amount of research into fighting cancer. They have come up with a great number of drugs and treatment methodologies, and the result is that more people survive cancer now than in the past. (More people get it, too, but let's deal with that later.) The problem is that every single one of those cancer treatments is astonishingly expensive. Chemotherapy costs thousands of dollars per session. Anti-nausea drugs like Kytril are a hundred and fifty bucks per dose. Why has all this research not produced any drugs that don't cost a fortune? I find it difficult to believe that it is impossible to find a way to treat cancer less expensively. I think that the reason such therapies haven't emerged is that the companies that do this kind of research have no motive to produce inexpensive treatments. When they can make ten grand for each infusion of Oxaliplatin, a platinum-based chemotherapy drug, why would they want to look into something that might cost fifty bucks a shot? I think we need to motivate our most brilliant researchers to come up with effective treatments for our various ailments. But we should develop a system that rewards them more if those treatments are less costly. And I can't think of any way to achieve that without removing the profit from healthcare, for the most part, and having the government fund medical research. I don't advocate a system that completely eliminates the possibility of privately or corporately funded research, nor one that restricts options for people who can afford more expensive treatments. But I don't see how we make healthcare cost less when it is a for-profit business. - Allen PS: Speaking of Oxaliplatin, which was a part of the "FOLFOX plus Avastin" regimen I was on last year, Wikipedia has some interesting things to say about it. Seems the efficacy of the drug hasn't really been established. Yet it's an established (and extremely expensive) part of the standard regime for colorectal cancer. en.wikipedia.org