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

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (8905)	8/31/2009 9:58:50 PM
From: i-node	1 Recommendation Respond to of 42652

Don't feel badly. I was a bigtime liberal when I was younger & in school. Then, at the ripe old age of about 24 or 25 I became at once a father and self-employed. That was the end of that.

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (8905)	9/1/2009 6:20:58 AM
From: John Carragher	1 Recommendation Respond to of 42652

as programs developed they were for low or no income. However, they quickly expanded to middle class who knew how to work the system. season jobs that were decent yearly paid jobs were quick to jump on getting laid off and collect unemployment. then many do side jobs for additional income in addition to unemployment under the table. in the end these people are making more than ever before. Head start was another program as it was brought into the system i noticed just about everyone was sending their children to free pre school. they didn't get the lunchs as i believe you had to provide evidence of earned income. However the remainder of program went unchecked. quickly families learned to take mom and pops savings in order to qualify for free nursing home. some of us watched the federal gov take their hard earned savings to pay for medical care.. Well, that went over like a lead ballon as dependents felt they were entitled to that money not the federal gov. Why should mom and dad pay for medical care and us children or relatives end up with nothing. Now they are required to distribute the savings i believe five years prior to going into any nursing home. I heard last night 90% of medicaid money spent on elderly is nursing homes fees. Sounds like a quick fix on that one is extend any savings distributions by mom and pop to ten or more years. that may put a slow down in give away programs. It might even bring back mom and pop getting home care from their kids ,, the other program that came into being was the senior communities for low or zip income. It was amazing how middle class and upper middle class all of sudden filled these new communities as they were built. Again , transfer mom and dad's funds to avoid them paying for housing. Here is another opportunity to cut cost by extending requirement for transfer of family wealth vs free or subsidized housing.. Hell, mom might have to live with one of the children vs having federal paid housing. Many of the reasons for run away federal programs are because of others working the system not because the system was a good idea. child care was another whooper to open up payments for children without a dad.. now we no longer have married couples. recent poll in los angles those in low income(66%) said they get pregnant to get welfare. the government has terrible controls, lousy auditing and a major reason for ballooning costs. imo in some states you can go on welfare just by filing. they are so far behind in checking your application it takes them a year to determine if you are qualified.. once they find out you are not qualified they drop you from welfare programs.. However, there are no penalties , no back collection of prior payments. applicants know this in advance and many are encouraged by social workers to complete the applications knowing they are not qualified but it will save the applicate a great deal of costs.. ie medical procedure for premature born babies etc.. just another abuse of various systems that could be cut out of slowed down through better controls. We do not need another huge federal program for people to figure out how to game the system.

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (8905)	9/1/2009 7:17:23 AM
From: Lane3	3 Recommendations Respond to of 42652

Forty years ago when young and naive When I got out of college and registered to vote I planned to register as a socialist. It turned out that my state didn't register by party so that never happened. I attribute my early socialist preferences to good-heartedness, sheltered youth, and the notion that socialism was upscale thinking. Then I got out into the world and grew up. Every experience I subsequently garnered has demonstrated how childish and foolish my position was. Fortunately, I began to wise up before I got a chance to vote it so I have little to regret.

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (8905)	9/15/2009 8:55:27 AM
From: Peter Dierks	2 Recommendations Respond to of 42652

Government Medicine vs. the Elderly In Britain in 2007-08, 16.5% of deaths came after 'terminal sedation.' SEPTEMBER 14, 2009, 7:39 P.M. ET. By RUPERT DARWALL London Rarely has the Atlantic seemed as wide as when America's health-care debate provoked a near unanimous response from British politicians boasting of the superiority of their country's National Health Service. Prime Minister Gordon Brown used Twitter to tell the world that the NHS can mean the difference between life and death. His wife added, "we love the NHS." Opposition leader David Cameron tweeted back that his plans to outspend Labour showed the Conservatives were more committed to the NHS than Labour. This outbreak of NHS jingoism was brought to an abrupt halt by the Patients Association, an independent charity. In a report, the association presented a catalogue of end-of-life cases that demonstrated, in its words, "a consistent pattern of shocking standards of care." It provided details of what it described as "appalling treatment," which could be found across the NHS. A few days later, a group of senior doctors and health-care experts wrote to a national newspaper expressing their concern about the Liverpool Care Pathway, a palliative program being rolled out across the NHS involving the withdrawal of fluids and nourishment for patients thought to be dying. Noting that in 2007-08, 16.5% of deaths in the U.K. came after "terminal sedation," their letter concluded with the chilling observation that experienced doctors know that sometimes "when all but essential drugs are stopped, 'dying' patients get better" if they are allowed to. The usual justification for socialized health care is to provide access to quality health care for the poor and disadvantaged. But this function can be more efficiently performed through the benefits system and the payment of refundable tax credits. The real justification for socialized medicine is left unstated: Because health-care resources are assumed to be fixed, those resources should be prioritized for those who can benefit most from medical treatment. Thus the NHS acts as Britain's national triage service, deciding who is most likely to respond best to treatment and allocating health care accordingly. It should therefore come as no surprise that the NHS is institutionally ageist. The elderly have fewer years left to them; why then should they get health-care resources that would benefit a younger person more? An analysis by a senior U.K.-based health-care expert earlier this decade found that in the U.S. health-care spending per capita goes up steeply for the elderly, while the U.K. didn't show the same pattern. The U.K.'s pattern of health-care spending by age had more in common with the former Soviet bloc. A scarcity assumption similar to the British mentality underlies President Barack Obama's proposed health-care overhaul. "We spend one-and-a-half times more per person on health care than any other country, but we aren't any healthier for it," Mr. Obama claimed in his address to Congress last Wednesday, a situation that, he said, threatened America's economic competitiveness. This assertion is seldom challenged. Yet what makes health care different from spending on, say, information technology—or any category of consumer service—such that spending on health care is uniquely bad for the American economy? Distortions like malpractice suits that lead to higher costs or the absence of consumer price consciousness do result in a misallocation of resources. That should be an argument for tackling those distortions. But if high health-care spending otherwise reflects the preferences of millions of consumers, why the fuss? The case for ObamaCare, as with the NHS, rests on what might be termed the "lump of health care" fallacy. But in a market-based system triggering one person's contractual rights to health care does not invalidate someone else's health policy. Instead, increased demand for health care incentivizes new drugs, new therapies and better ways of delivering health care. Government-administered systems are so slow and clumsy that they turn the lump of health-care fallacy into a reality. According to the 2002 Wanless report, used by Tony Blair's government to justify a large tax hike to fund the higher spending, the NHS is late to adopt and slow to diffuse new technology. Still, NHS spending more than doubled to £103 billion in 2009-10 from £40 billion in 1999-2000, equivalent to an average growth rate of over 7% a year after inflation. In 1965, economist (and future Nobel laureate) James Buchanan observed of the 17-year old NHS that "hospital facilities are overcrowded, and long delays in securing treatment, save for strictly emergency cases, are universally noted." Forty-four years later, matters are little improved. The Wanless report found that of the five countries it looked at, the U.S. was the only one to be both an early adopter and rapid diffuser of new medical techniques. It is the world's principal engine driving medical advance. If the U.S. gets health-care reform wrong, the rest of the world will suffer too. Mr. Darwall, a London-based strategist, is currently writing a book on the history of global warming, to be published by Quartet Books in Spring 2010. online.wsj.com