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Strategies & Market Trends : Ride the Tiger with CD -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: russet who wrote (174766)	9/16/2009 9:11:19 AM
From: LoneClone	7 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 312720

Proving once again the US is full of nut cases. I have an assignment for you. In order to avoid becoming suicidal, you should find and post at least one optimistic article each time you visit the board. LC

To: russet who wrote (174766)	9/16/2009 12:30:13 PM
From: teevee	1 Recommendation Respond to of 312720

If the "will of the people" precludes a second stimulous package, which will likely be needed by late first quarter 2010, the next downturn in the markets will easily go through the previous lows.

To: russet who wrote (174766)	9/16/2009 12:41:59 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 312720

It's not that socialized medicine is too expensive for the people in Canada. It's not. It is cheap. CDNs pay for it, out of their wages. It is a bit more than Blue Cross in the States. The trouble with it is the administration cost to the government. The cost of Health Care in BC exceeds the entire tax base of that province. All the local taxes, corporate tax, personal tax and sales tax does not equal the cost of providing medicare to British Columbia. If it weren't for gas tax, and provincial oil tax Canada would not have the transfer payments to fund the BC provincial budget. And that comes from Alberta mostly. Alberta, Hibernia, and the oil sands are keeping the country afloat. If we turned Medicare back to private insurance we would lose one of the biggest tax bills in our country, and the quality of the care would improve. All we would have to provide is the government insurance for those who are indigent, on assistance or could not pass a means test for payment. This is not hard to do. It could be made, no fault rather than punitive, in order to avoid hardship, i.e. are you employed etc.. and still not come to within 10% of the present cost. Most people have jobs and can afford payroll deductions for medicare type insurance. If we made it like car insurance as in employers have to deduct some nominal amount for an insurance program, then we would not have employed left-outs. Right now our medicare ensures the least average quality of care by not allowing people to get extra tests if they feel they are in a high risk group. This probably kills tens of thousands of people per year where in the States these services are provided. The strange thing is, the quality of health care in the United States whilst not that easy to get for the indigent, and unemployed is probably much better than in Canada. I have unique insight into this as a friend once ran a business he tried to list on the TSX whose raison d'etre wwas to provide heath care for Canadians, partially funded by provincial medicare - in the United States. You can travel to the States and pay for better care, especially in oncology and treatment of Cancer, and get operations faster, if you pay cash, but you cannot do it in Canada. He started the company because a daughter died of Cancer and he found out that because of delays in the system in Canada due to the inefficiency of medicare her case was not diagnosed in time. If it were she would have survived. The rationale of medicare under the CDN system was not to test symptoms such as she had as they had statistically determined they did not often result in serious illness. In other words bureaucracy dictated medicine. It is Dollares not Hippocrates. That is what the States have to guard against. A poor standard of care made "fair" for the greater group only to become unfair for many who need more, soaking up boondoggle dollars handed out by corrupted committees of a greedy and bloated civil service. The Canadian standard is to give no better health care to any person than we can afford for every person. Unfortunately that is not triage. Triage of the national system would be to work on those who can survive if operated on now, work on those next who may survive in the meantime and put the last priority into those that cannot be helped at all. At first this sounds cruel but in fact it guarantee urgent cases and high risk people get help first. Instead the system puts everybody at even priority and assigns statistical levels of best practice, guaranteeing that people who need more help will not get it. If it seems the triage system indicate above does not work for the terminally ill that is false. They need palliative care badly and they do get it under all systems. The strange thing is, if a family can afford to go that extra mile to try to save a very ill relative by paying for extraordinary services, then they are disallowed. The reason being is someone else cannot afford these services? I dunno. I hate like hell to tell a person who is poor, "well you can't get that life saving operation", but I would hate it a lot worse telling him, "but don't worry, neither can the Prime Minister!" EC<:-}