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A system that has saved several family members and my own life on a number of occasions can hardly be called lousy. It sure has its issues, and still suffers in the wake of too much neglect, but it's something the UK should be proud of.

It can be called "lousy" if you end up paying a lot more for that system than you would elsewhere, or if it substantially infringes on your or other people's liberties. Of course, you don't even known any better.

There are only a couple of other nations with single-payer health plans like the UK. They don't perform better than other systems, and are a bad idea.

"A couple of other nations" being "every developed western nation except the US" and they perform very well. As for paying a lot more - the UK spends less than half the GDP per capita compared to the US and we get better care for all citizens overall, rather than those who can afford it only.

We're not even top in the "who spends more" in universal systems.

Sure, we might not be New Zealand, but then who wants to be continually attacked by Orcs?

http://blogs.ngm.com/.a/6a00e0098226918833012876a6070f970c-800wi

The UK is pretty much right on the average line, and our outcome is not too shabby. Yes we can do better, but we're not an example of a total "lousy" failure.

"Dead fuel is free energy; its that simple." It's not FREE. Not even remotely. So are you telling me the environmental destruction from the Alberta Tar Sands is FREE? http://s.ngm.com/2009/03/canadian-oil-sands/img/candian-oil-sands-615.jpg. Are you saying that the cancer causing elements that are spewed into the air from fossil fuels are FREE? http://www.epa.gov/air/basic.html. Your misnomer is one of the reasons we are in this situation. And there are a thousand other articles and studies that say that fossil fuels are harmful to you and me. If you want me to site them I will.

It's great that you made your argument on your opinion. But let me give you some information about alternative energy that is from reputable sources. From MSNBC (and others...FYI from a study funded by Google): "Clean, accessible, reliable and renewable energy equivalent to 10 times the installed capacity of coal power plants in the U.S....What's more, the energy can be tapped with existing technology, according to the researchers. That's largely due the recent development of drilling techniques that make methods such as enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) possible." TEN TIMES what we get from coal on an annual basis without the mining destruction nor the carcinogens in the air. THAT IS FUCKING FREE ENERGY. http://futureoftech.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/27/8509629-energy-from-hot-rocks-abounds?chromedomain=cosmiclog. Or CNET if you prefer: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20125837-54/geothermal-potential-reaches-coast-to-coast/

Or maybe you'd like to hear the opine of a nobel prize laureate in economics about the economic reality of solar power? Is there a Moore's Law to solar power? Actually there probably is, but if the fossil fuel industry has it's way it will probably be stymied....oh wait it already has. " In fact, progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it, “there’s now frequent talk of a ‘Moore’s law’ in solar energy,” with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year."--AND--"Let’s face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. This political class will do everything it can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly with taxpayers’ money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs, while ridiculing technologies like solar." http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/opinion/krugman-here-comes-solar-energy.html?_r=1&hp.

So the question remains smarty are you with us or against us? Please give any sources that are not your opinion and actually sited to a reference to the contrary.

Thanks.

It's about twice as a portion of GDP, split equally between government and private spending. Here you go.

You might want to think about the meaning of the word "better" in this context.

Canadian tar sands that everyone are depending on to save America from peak oil;

http://s.ngm.com/2009/03/canadian-oil-sands/img/candian-oil-sands-615.jpg

Yeah, but it's a much smaller bill. Turns out that any level of 'government inefficiency' is a drop in the bucket beside the waste of having every company involved take its 50% off the top, plus executive salaries, plus lack of preventative medicine because that is an 'expense'.

Here is an excellent graphic from National Geographic comparing spending to life expectancy. Despite having worse outcomes than almost every nation on the chart, the US is spending so much more that they had to be placed outside the graph. In fact, most industrialized nations are spending less than half as much as the US for better outcomes. The only countries with worse outcomes are spending less than a quarter as much per person as the US does.

So while the citizens as the United States of America may not be able to afford it, I suspect the rest of the world will do just fine.

And that assumes that this causes a net rise in health costs. My guess is that, when all is said and done, replacing damaged organs will prove much cheaper than long term treatment and complications do now.

This graphic comparing costs and life expectancy (and doctor visits) is interesting: http://blogs.ngm.com/blog_central/2009/12/the-cost-of-care.html and appears to be well researched.

Another one that thinks playing with insurance will do anything to reduce health care cost. God help us all.

A single payer system will NOT reduce cost. It will only allow the Feds to ration what exists. You decry "complex and failure-prone" plans, and you want to replace that with the hundreds of thousands of pages of legislation that the US Federal government would spew out?

Damn. Just, damn.

The US spends one and a half times what the average country does on healthcare, and we have a lower average lifespan. Whatever you may think of certain bad apples like England's famously wasteful (yet still one-third as expensive as ours!) single-payer system, it's clear that we are not well served by our current, poorly-regulated mess.

A lot of the problems in our country stems from this quixotic and simplistic belief, cultivated by fifty years of Republican campaign shilling, that private industry can do no wrong and that nothing the government does can ever be good. This slogan is absurd: government does have a proper role in our nation's success, as the neutral arbiter upon which a free market is built. Removing it from that position as we have in the past several decades, first by favoring particular industries with the construction of public-enforced monopolies like the military-industrial complex, national telcom monopolies, and ever-more powerful copyright and patent laws, and later by removing necessary regulation of industry on the orders of powerful lobbying groups, has largely contributed to most of our recent economic troubles.

The original article is the commencement speech at Stanford’s School of Medicine. It gives a bird's eye philosophical perspective on the state of the medical profession. As such, I like it.
 
What I don't like are the people here trying to derive a political message from it. Health care in the US is so much less cost-efficient than the other industrialized countries, countries that have equivalent or better health care and that face the same challenges. This discussion sounds like looking for excuses not to fix the broken health care system.

even on top of the taxes they pay, is probably less per capita than Americans pay.

Have a look at this graphic. Interesting.

Actually, if you were to study the process of making all the composite materials and solar cells that solar cars are made of, I'm pretty sure that you'll discover that solar cars do more damage to the environment than old diesel trucks.

Seriously, though (as I'm sure has already been posted) the whole point of these races (or rayces asd the case was for Sunrayce) is to test the bounds of effiency. All the cars have a limited area of solar cells, so they all get rougly the same amount of energy (1 kW if I recall correctly). The challenge is to build a car light enough (composites), and efficient enough (motors from companies like New Generation Motors) to maximize the distance that you get from your limited energy supply.

In case you're wondering I used to be on UPenn's solar racing team Go Penn!!