I sincerely appreciate well-founded, opposing views. Wish these were among them.ince HaloScan limits both characters and links, I'll post my latest response here, as well as the three preceding comments.)
No other country comes close to spending what we do, and we do not have, by any common measure, the best health care at all.
Statistics usually show that we spend over $7200 per person per year, while the OECD average is about $2900.
Many countries which spend less are much healthier than America.
Cost controls in Japan sound pretty cool, they've made it so an MRI costs only $90, and people don't even bother making appointments at the doctor's office, they just show up.
So, if all that's true, you tell me, why would a government program cost an extra trillion dollars?
Josh SN (Thursday, September 10, 2:12 PM)
If the original cost estimates for Medicare and Medicaid published by Demoqrat Congresses at the times they were passing and subsequently "reforming" those government programs had all been true, there would be no reason for any of us to be having these particular discussions now.
Estimates published by the Demoqrat House Ways and Means Committee in 1966, show that we should have been spending a total of $12 billion on Medicare in 1990. (Actual total spending on it that year was $107 billion -- only about 800 percent more than Demoqrats promised the American people it'd be.)
Our country originally spent 2.9 percent of her total health care related expenditures on Medicaid, but was spending 15 percent of that total on it by 2000.
Controlling the costs of just the Medicaid Special Hospitals Subsidy has been ugly, with the Demoqrat Congress estimating in 1987 that they'd be $100 million in 1992, then seeing them reach instead an extremely uncool $11,000 million (i.e., only 10,900 percent more than Demoqrats promised the American people they'd be).
What this tells me is that more and more government programs and more and more and more government spending approved by Demoqrat Congresses are the sole reasons we keep having to have these particular discussions every time their respective cost estimates prove so commonly false.
Libsareb Raindead (Friday, September 11, 4:17 AM)
So, the fact that every other civilized country on Earth has this, and many other countries have better health results than America, and we pay more than all these other countries, and we are known to have a (since you prefer % comparisons so much) 800% more administrative costs in America, you think the problem is with Congress, not, say, with insurance companies or doctors or nurses or anyone else.
Just Democrats.
This makes me think one of us is a bit braindead, but I wouldn't say me.
Josh SN (Friday, September 11, 10:16 AM)
I disagree with you, therefore I think you're a bit braindead. Good. Let's make this personal then.
Not sure the minimum number of functioning brain cells one would need inside his skull to include a link to or else his own recitation of verifiable and specific evidence showing that the U.S. has 800% more administration costs than many conveniently-unnamed countries. But it certainly doesn't appear to be the number of them in yours.
However, to be fair, if Demoqrats repent the fact it was the Congresses they ran which proudly created and expanded the government programs that are now, without peer, exterminating competition and propelling the rise of overall costs to extreme levels, I would be willing to consider jumping on the bandwagon recklessly driven by Former Junior Senøtard BarAcørn al-Heartless Øfascist vilifying insurance agents, doctors, nurses, and every other laborer in the alleged private sector forced to attempt the near impossibility of providing affordable, quality services within the overbearingly regulated, strictly limited confines imposed by those same gargantuan government programs, all on top of having to endure his and other mindless Demøfascists' wild-eyed, desperate efforts to scapegoat each one of them. With the only exception being that the objects of my vilification won't expediently exclude greedy lawyers who're additionally forcing doctors to either routinely order superfluous procedures intended to preclude greedy lawyers' lawsuits or simply stop offering the services greedy lawyers primarily target as subjects of their most profitable ones, as well as "Present" Øfascist's favorite special interest the greedy pharmaceutical manufacturers.
Now a few may say massive rationing and importation of doctors and nurses due to government-created shortages, health care "rights" unconscionably delayed or denied solely because of costs, cancer and heart-attack survival rates poorer than Americans', lower numbers of screenings and clinical trials than those conducted in the U.S., egregious government-guided "pathways" to death, more so-called medical tourists going to the U.S. than coming from it, and an imploding system that an overwhelming majority of adults believe needs either "fundamental change" or "complete rebuilding," are the things that characterize a civilized county. Unfortunately for them, the Former Junior Senøtard himself let it slip that he's not interested in duplicating such countries' models here.
Moreover, unless international comparisons of outcomes are properly adjusted for demographics, including incidences of immigrants from countries having higher illness rates, and other factors indirectly but significantly affecting any general population's health, such as indigenous levels of natural and artificial stress and physical-risk aversion, and unless their statistics not only respectively assume and measure actual systemic interaction and impacts but are collected consistently across all countries without reliance on limited, unprofessionally subjective self-reporting not clinically validated, their efficaciousness towards persuading anyone that one country's results are relatively inferior cannot be readily demonstrated other than exclusively among persons who possess an even lower number of functioning brain cells. Persons whose only perceptible intention in citing those faulty comparisons invariably runs counter to every other they noisily state:
Rather than "help" anyone (besides himself, of course), each wants, even needs government (run totally and permanently by his preferred party, of course) to be more and more in control of other people's lives (his own specially exempted, of course) until they all become so dependent on its "caring" for them that none within those unprivileged masses has any real power to again question, much less actually threaten, hinder, or otherwise oppose, anything he ever "thinks" or does, lest he should remain in a position where he risks having to take what he dishes out and, thus, they in one to offend his precious feelings. Because such persons know, instinctually, what you completely control can never harm you.
Extremely difficult to convince anyone else the reason you want something done is that you "care" when what you clearly want is to make others — addle-brained bureaucrats and soaked taxpayers alike — do it, instead of you and as many of your fellow citizens as you can possibly find willing to become self-starting proactionaries, together taking on the task of doing all the necessary hard work to get it done yourselves or to at least try and, by doing so, discover and learn new things from your attempt. It's the opposite of "Yes, We Can." More hopelessly like "Nah, We Let Someone Else Figure It Out And Do It All For Us Because We Always Want And Need To Feel (Or Have The Excuse, Really) That We Ourselves Never Can And Therefore None Of Us Should Even Try." A very non-American negative attitude. The only one, it more and more seems, capable of progressing from the rapidly decreasing number of neurons somehow surviving in any leftist's moribund "brain."
Original LU post: 'I *Urgently* Need To Save My Own Butt' (Wednesday, September 09, 12:38 PM)
Labels: a Republic if we can keep it, dangerously incompetent liberals (BIRM), fascist totalitarian liberals (BIRM), neither Hope nor Change, spread the misery around, tax'n'spend liberals (BIRM)
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