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

To: Archie Meeties who wrote (8465)	8/19/2009 10:53:51 PM
From: i-node	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Epidemiologist consider alcohol related trauma to be accidental injury. Please consider informing yourself about the basic terms of this debate before going further. Alcohol is obviously a cause in a substantial portion of traumas, as are other drugs. That does not bring it within the purview of the health care system in the context that this discussion is being held. If someone wants to consider another Prohibition, that would be a different thing.

To: Archie Meeties who wrote (8465)	8/20/2009 2:33:07 AM
From: TimF	2 Recommendations Respond to of 42652

Epidemiologist consider alcohol related trauma to be accidental injury. Sure. And tornadoes cause trauma as well, but they aren't health care issues either. "Causes injury and death", or even "is one of the major causes of injury and death" doesn't equal "is part of the health care system. IF the US has more tornadoes than Canada, that wouldn't mean that Canada's lower number of deaths from tornadoes is a sign that Canada has a better health care or health care payment system, even if tornadoes where a major source of death in both countries. Its the same with alcohol, car accidents etc. They aren't caused by the method of paying for health care.

To: Archie Meeties who wrote (8465)	8/20/2009 8:12:11 AM
From: Lane3	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Epidemiologist consider alcohol related trauma to be accidental injury. I recognize that alcoholism is a factor in lots of accidents. It is also a factor in lots of murders. Same with other drug addictions. For that matter, I suppose "epidemiologists" could consider all murders to be health problems. The result of that kind of thinking would be that all deaths by accident and murder are health care system failures. WHO apparently thinks so as do you. That doesn't mean it's a settled matter. Consider that only recently was alcoholism dubbed a disease, nature vs nurture is still up in the air and may forever be, and writing everything off as a health problem may be useful in getting insurance payments for alcoholism treatment but the lack of accountability implied may have untoward unintended consequences for our society. Another thought. If alcoholism and trauma have such a strong cause and effect relationship then perhaps the term, "accident," is being misappropriated by your epidemiologists. Accidents are, by definition, unforeseen events. If trauma can be predicted, then the trauma is not unforeseen, ergo not an accident. It's as much a health consequence from alcoholism as a leg amputation is from diabetes. As for the data, even if some accidents are triggered by a health problem, the majority of accidents aren't. My bottom line remains. Treating trauma is definitely within the scope of the health care system. Blaming all deaths from trauma on the health care system is a real stretch. Even if you accept that alcohol-related "accidents" are the fault of the health care system for failure to cure the alcoholism, the subset of accidental deaths attributable to alcohol is not sufficiently large to warrant attributing ALL accidental deaths to the health care system as in the WHO report. Please consider informing yourself about the basic terms of this debate before going further. Please consider informing yourself about the basics of logic before attempting to debate with me. Even if some deaths from accidents are considered a result of failures in the health care system, that's no excuse for jumping to the notion that all deaths from accidents and murder are attributable to the health care system failures. One subset doesn't constitute the entire set.