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Yeah, but then where would Canadians go when they needed health care?

The same place they go now... Canada. See Phantoms In The Snow: Canadians' Use Of Health Care Services In The United States

This study was undertaken to quantify the nature and extent of use by Canadians of medical services provided in the United States. It is frequently claimed, by critics of single-payer public health insurance on both sides of the border, that such use is large and that it reflects Canadian patients' dissatisfaction with their inadequate health care system. All of the evidence we have, however, indicates that the anecdotal reports of Medicare refugees from Canada are not the tip of a southbound iceberg but a small number of scattered cubes. The cross- border flow of care-seeking patients appears to be very small.

They looked at hospital administrative data from hospitals in border states and also from "America's Best Hospitals", to see how many people from Canada got medical services there to avoid the potentially longer wait-times in Canada for some high-tech tests and for some procedures. They found that:

The vast majority of services provided to Canadians were emergency or urgent care, presumably coincidental with travel to the United States for other purposes. They were clearly unrelated ... to waiting times north of the border.

The second-biggest, but much smaller, category of Canadians receiving health care in the US are people who live in very rural or remote areas of Canada that are near the US border and where the nearest advanced hospital is in the US.

This also quotes an earlier study done in Canada, which found that

... only 0.11 percent (20 of 18,000 respondents) said that they had gone there for the purpose of obtaining any type of health care, whether or not covered by the public plans.

I am aware of the several anecdotes and examples of Canadians who have chosen to travel to the US for some procedures or tests - I do not dispute them.

Information for non UK readers.

This could be considered off-topic but it looks at the Machiavellian [Niccolò Machiavelli] practice closely associated with Mandelson and the party he serves (UK Labour Party), that of being a spin doctor.

The term spin doctor could be interpreted politely as one who is "responsible for ensuring that others interpret an event from a particular point of view." But the term has grown to cover many dirty tricks.

Now I know that the link between Paul Allen and Microsoft today is at best tenuous, but one does smile over the dreamed of connection between the UK's once King of Spin and the dastardly Microsoft.

Now witness a spin doctor, attached to the same party as Mandelson, in action. This is taken from Britain's Independent newspaper. It has a delicious ending.


While others watched the horrific television pictures from New York and Washington on 11 September last year [2001], Jo Moore, personal spin doctor to the Transport Secretary, Stephen Byers, sent an email saying that it would be a good day to "bury bad news". Obviously, it did not occur to her that emails can be stored on computers - and passed on to journalists. Ms Moore lost her job.


Spin is dreadful practise and sadly its not confined to Politics. For those wishing to pursue further reading on the matter check out SpinWatch

Note to the Slashdot staff. You should ask for readers to write in sometime of their experiences of spin in the companies they work for. Should make for some enlightening reading on a Friday afternoon or a Monday morning for that matter.

A counted number, actually; it's about 45 million Americans right this moment, and in a typical year ~75 million will lack health insurance for some of that year. (link)

So, what does that mean?

It means 18,000 dead Americans every year.

It means a 9/11 every two months.

But why should you care? It's only lazy jobless bums dying, right?

Contrary to expectations, most of the uninsured are employed full-time.

But we're saving money, right?

Not only does the USA spend $35 billion/year to treat the uninsured, much of that is for emergency treatment that could be much more efficiently (and cheaply) handled with an earlier diagnosis. Moreover, the lack of health care costs the nation about $100 billion yearly in lost productivity. (link)

But it would cost too much to insure everyone, right?

At an average cost of $9,000 for family insurance and assuming families of three, the cost to insure those 45 million Americans would be $135 billion, or very nearly the amount saved in uninsured medical costs and lost productivity. At the very least, $35 billion of that is already being paid for (uninsured emergency care), and about $20 billion would come back to the government in taxes, representing a maximum cost of $80 billion.

$80 billion for 18,000 American lives; that's $4,500,000 per dead American. In other words, each $1 billion spent on missile defense is equivalent to 220 dead Americans. The $10 billion per year we're spending on missile defense could save as many lives in two years as all the terrorist attacks on US soil have taken since the nation was founded.

In the richest nation in the world, is that acceptable?

Up to you. But know the facts before you decide how many American lives a particular government program is worth to you, and which is the most efficient way to save American lives.

...

These five basic means of saving money under a single payer system: reducing administrative expenses to the insurer, reducing administrative expenses to hospitals, reducing administrative expenses to physicians, reducing the costs of purchasing medications and durable medical equipment, and the coordination and consolidation of medical services are large enough to "decrease total health care expenditures," despite covering all the uninsured and increasing benefits for the entire population, according to the 1995 report of the State of Connecticut Office of Health Care Access, "Health Care Reform In Connecticut: Analysis of Health Reform Options."

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In the interest of time, I have employed a subtle 'arguing from the specific to the general' fallacy. In case you picked up on this fallacy, please consider that any single payer is better able to negotiate prices with its clout.

From http://www.wisconsinhealth.org/art5.html/

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What are the advantages of such a health care plan?

...

It establishes a group large enough to bargain effectively with pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and health care providers to control and significantly reduce costs.

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This is the story of the successful rescue of an Intelsat after it failed to seperate from its rocket and got stuck in a low orbit. It took 6 tries over 3 days for the shuttle crew to catch it.

The TDRS satellite has a similar mass to the Intelsat

Grab a copy of TweakUI for 2k - the official beta of it has expired, but there's a non-expiring version here, and elsewhere. This will let you change the location of system folders, so you can move "C:\Documents and Settings\Foo\My Documents" to "c:\foo\doc", if you want to.
You can also set filename completion from TweakUI, so you can use tab to autocomplete, a la Bash.
Renaming "Downloaded Program Files" to "DPrg" might work for you, but it's not going to do much good for, say, my father, who would just see "DPrg" as a random collection of letters, and further evidence that the computing world is determined to keep him from joining in...

The Computer Museum timeline is a bit limited as it only starts at 1945 and is very strictly restricted to electronic computers. Here's a more comprehensive (though less detailed) timeline which starts at 500BC with the invention of the Abacus and includes things like the first Radio Shack Catalog in 1939, Atari's introduction of Asteroids in 1979, and various events involving QDOS 0.10 (later renamed PC DOS/MS-DOS) in 1980.