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

To: skinowski who wrote (9492)	9/14/2009 4:01:33 PM
From: i-node	Respond to of 42652

>> But then, we know that money is power.... and lust for power is a pretty strong emotion It must really be. I've never felt that need (and in fact, they couldn't GIVE it to me). For some people I think, power is all that matters. Of course, if you have power, you can have money -- and pretty much everything else people are apt to covet.

To: skinowski who wrote (9492)	9/15/2009 10:45:57 AM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

<<<Throughout human history the strong could abuse the weak. Therefore, having a big benevolent dictatorship which we all together elect -- and which always likes to do a little redistributing -- must have a powerful appeal, on a subliminal level.>>> Throughout human history there have always been examples of how civilization made tremendous progress under a benevolent ruler. But we all know those were exceptional cases and that the norm was for the strong to abuse the weak. Our founding fathers knew all about human nature and designed our system that addressed those concerns. By and large we are still an experiment - a work in progress, but I am optimistic that we can make government work. We have put in place a lot of checks and balances and I agree more needs to be done. Ultimately however, we need government to function - no matter how we define government. That means, as a civilization, we need a better educated populous that can elect higher quality representatives to perform government services. Enabling and encouraging leaders that have limited intelligence and no respect for education and intellectual pursuits is a recipe for a self fulfilling prophecy about not being able to trust government and perpetuate a vicious cycle. Bottom line, it is about people and government by the ....and so forth.

To: skinowski who wrote (9492)	9/15/2009 4:35:14 PM
From: Maurice Winn	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Hi Ski. Having lived my life under various government owned and run "health" systems, I am against them. I'm also against insurance. "I bet I get sick and die." "We bet you don't". That seems a ridiculous bet to take, made rational only by one person's fear and inability to calculate the odds and the insurer's ability to make a load of money from the bets. It's like saying "I bet I crash my car". "We bet you don't". I have never understood that bet and have saved a fortune by not taking part. Just a week ago our 2 year old grand daughter was denied treatment at the Starship children's emergency facility because they were too busy and the death panels decided that there were more important people to treat. The death panel in this instance was just a triage nurse and I agreed with her decision so it's not as though I thought anyone there did anything wrong. It's the nature of any business that there are peaks and troughs in demand and when there are peaks, there has to be a way of rationing service. For things like who gets to use a cellphone and who gets dropped, or finds it too expensive to make a call, price is the best way to decide who gets treated. For something like who gets to live and who gets to die, we need death panels. It's currently fashionable to say that of course there wouldn't be death panels, but there has to be. There is simply not enough money for everyone to get all possible treatments for life extension [life meaning some semblance of brain function, not simply a few living cells remaining in part of a cadaver]. Somebody has to decide, "Okay, that's enough folks. We are giving up now". The grand daughter's conjunctivitis was unlikely to be death dealing but I really don't know how much it can deteriorate and perhaps kill an eye. I went to the only open pharmacist and bought some non-prescription eye drops which claimed to have some anti-bacterial properties. Even that involved a debate because I said to them that I wanted some eye drops for her and they said they are only for adults and children have to be seen by a doctor. I explained that no doctors were available to see her so she was being refused treatment. In the end, I suspect I broke the law by buying them anyway [a shop assistant sold me the drops when I said they were for me - they were unsettled by the situation]. The legal and medical cartels backed by the government's abusive monopoly was happy to refuse treatment to a 2 year old for a very rapidly developing eye infection. The hospital said I'd have to wait at least another couple of hours [but that assumed that more urgent people didn't arrive]. Being night time and loss of sleep not being all that great for children, I had decided that the risks were not too great so opted for self-medicated commercial grade eye drops. That was the best decision and the next day the doctor got her money and confirmed that was the right treatment. That's one little story of little consequence of many over a lifetime [60 years] of such experiences but much, much, much worse involving actual death-dealing hazards. Here's one - count the dead people from socialized medicine which the USA already has with the FDA, the government protected medical cartel and state-controlled pharmaceutical industry: Message 24119968 That existing situation is bad enough. To then copy the UK's or New Zealand's system to fix some problems in the existing system is hazardous to health. The fix is presented as an insurance problem. An open market would be a far better solution. Leave willing buyers and sellers to contract for products and services they choose to buy. Insurers could join in too. The FDA could remain as a body for those who want such official stamps of approval. Pharmaceutical companies could get to market much faster and they wouldn't need special "orphan drug" methods. They'd just need to get pages of legalese signed by various parties to acknowledge that rat poison might or might not cure the end-stage coronary heart disease and return the patient to 4 minute miles within 7 weeks with $3.14 million payment from the escrow fund guaranteed to the estate if the treatment fails. Well, that post went way off in another direction from where it was going to go. I'm so against health insurance that it's hard to discuss the theory of government, Stockholm Syndrome, why governments get bigger and bigger and bigger ... Not to mention that the USA citizen now has got far more government intrusion and taxation, regulation, duties, tariffs, quotas, tea taxes, imposts and burdens than under King George III, yet they celebrate 4 July each year, failing to see the irony. The uninsured are considered somehow to be in a dire situation in the USA. I was uninsured but was able to make an appointment with Scripps hospital in San Diego and get attention for our son's non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Unfortunately, the same ignorance and process resulted in the same inadequate treatment as back in NZ [no Rituxan which is now standard for such cases and it was obvious then that it should have been]. I'm sure uninsured people in the USA could also show up at Scripps or any other place, hand over money and get treatment. Heck, we didn't even have to pay before treatment and we were foreigners there just for a short visit. I think we only paid after we were back in NZ and they sent the account. But perhaps it was right after the consultation [I forget]. From the government control on how many people are allowed to get medical training, to the cartel rules surrounding the industry, the government-owned hospitals restrictions of medicines and whatnot, the costs and harm of government control and rationing are enormous. Supermarkets are far more important to far more people for survival and they function well without a government department owning, running and insuring people against the need to buy food. After failing to get medical treatment for a 2 year old, we called into a supermarket to get some salmon and it was a fast, pleasant, good all around experience and cost hardly anything. The tiny quantity of eye drops cost twice as much as the salmon, but there was a government subsidy so there will be paperwork on the eye drops for the pharmacist to collect the money, which adds to the cost. The salmon was simply a straight money transaction with no subsidy. Once Obamacare is up and running, the government could start food insurance and Obamafood supermarkets. I could queue for 3 hours to get approval to buy some poor quality salmon for 10 times the real cost. I'd probably give up and go home and give the two year old rice to eat. DON'T DO IT! Learn from the mistakes of others. Harold Shipman could only get away with murder for decades because the "company" he was working for was not obsessive about quality control, patient outcomes and ensuring a great brand image. If he was working for a company with a global brand to protect, he'd have been caught really fast. Mqurice