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Award of $200M Supercomputer To IBM Proving Controversial
An anonymous reader writes "According to documents accidentally placed on a federal government Web site for a short time last week the national science foundation (NSF) will award the contract to buy a $200M supercomputer in 2011 to IBM. The machine is designed to perform scientific calculations at sustained speed of 1 petaflop. The award is already proving controversial however, with questions being raised about the correctness of the bidding procedure. Similar concerns have also been raised about the award of a smaller machine to Oak Ridge national lab, which is a Department of Energy laboratory, not a site one would expect to house an NSF machine."
Exactly! That's why we have the cheapest, highest quality health care system in the world!
The Farewell Tour II
Excuse me, but to which punctuation mark are you referring?
www.purevolume.com/martyd
We haven't had a free market in the health care area for 50 years. It was probably the 60's or early 70's when government started controlling it so heavily that is wasn't free any more. You can look at the prices for hospital stay and procedures and see this too.
And if you really look at the cost, it still is cheaper then other places like Canada and england for some services. Look at the excess in taxes that they pay just to get the service they do. Now imagine the cost of that over a lifetime compared to the amount you would actually use. Unless you have something terribly wrong with you and don't die during the waiting period for specialized treatment, you would be spending a lot less in America over a life time. In all, their system is more or less government mandated insurance, you usually don't use more then you pay into insurance over the life time of the policy if you don't have something major happen.
I sure hope so... (I'm a member of PETA, but not one of those looneys you hear about on the news)
You're missing a few key points there.
1)Its cheaper than private insurance. No middle man taking a cut. And before you go into the government inefficiency bullshit, private corporations of a similar size are just as inefficient, if not more so.
2)You get better service, since that middle man taking a cut doesn't have a profit motive to deny you service.
3)Everyone actually gets treated, and has access to preventative care. This likely increases the savings from 1, as preventative care is far cheaper and lower risk than care late in a problem's life cycle. Think of it like a computer bug- the earlier you find it, the easier it is to fix.
4)Insurance is only as cheap as it is in the US because they force higher risk people to pay premiums they can't afford, or refuse them coverage at all. From a profit view this makes sense, but this means those who need care the most won't have coverage. It artificially deflates the true cost of insurance by biasing the covered towards fewer problems. This makes a straight out dollar to dollar comparison useless.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
That would be a comma.
And no, It likely isn't cheaper then private insurance. You have taxes on your gasoline, tobacco products, food, income and most other items that pay for the health car. The US and Canada both spend about 7% of their GDP on health services for citizens and Canada funds about 70% of their health care the US only funds 50%. But Canada taxes their citizens about 10% of their GDP more then the US. Currently I believe it is at 37% of the GDP compares the the US's 27%.
Now the interesting part is that canada's GPD is $1,269,096,000,000.00 (USD) and there are roughly 32,982,900 people in Canada. So IF my math is right, and 10% of the GDP dived by the amount of people there, this works out to about $3848 per year in extra taxes per person which comes to around $320 a month per person.
Now, I understand that people who make more cover a lot more of the costs. But lets put this myth of everything being cheaper to rest. I picked Canada because I had the numbers close by for a project I am working on and I mentioned them in the post you replied to. Almost every could get health insurance in America for less then $320 a month per person covered. Especially if they went with the HSA and catastrophic insurance coverage. Mine is only $135/month for a smoker with a $1500 deductible that is sitting in a tax free savings account. I have a 5 million dollar payout so if I manage to stay under 5 million in medical expenses, I should be ok.
Almost every free health care system is full of stories and long waits and so on for procedures. It is commonly know that a lot of the wealthier people goto other countries to get around some of these rates. In england, there is a private system operating directly beside a public system for those who can afford it. In France, there are riots and property damage all the time because they don't like their health care system. In Australia, which is probable the most sane system, you can have private insurance and medical procedures on top of th public system and because the private stuff is limited in what it can do by the Government, it is more affordable.
Change actually to eventually and I would agree. However, You should see above
I agree that it is useless. In the first replay, I mentioned about the increased taxes levied on the citizens of canada. We could actually complicate it more by showing that about 50% of health care in the US is covered by the government where 70% in Canada is. When we add that to the mix, they are paying an extra $320 (USD) per month in Canada for 30% more coverage.
Here is an article from Wiki that has some of this information. Of course you need to take wikipedia with a gain of salt with it's history and all. I am for a public health system but the Idea of
What you missed in your report is that medicaid overhead is less than 5% (IIRC, it is around 2%), while insurance is around 30-40%. So how is it that USA spends less on medical than canada? Because, those that can not afford insurance do not buy it. These ppl literally die from lack of medical attention. Regardless, in this next election cycle, I think that we will see socialized medicine hit America. Why? Because businesses are all calling for it. They are saying that medicine is more expensive in America than any other country that they operate in. And that is from the fortune 100 companies, not mah/pah shop. Oddly enough, the same businesses that hated HRC's ideas in the early 90's, are apparently the same ones that are calling for her ideas. Weird.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
you can't generalise taxation. taxation varies so much between countries and what the tax revenues are spent on varies a lot too.
the free health care system in the UK, NHS, is only so because of government policy (total neglect and failure to adapt) and that's why there are long waiting times, etc. however, when you say you can have private and public systems in place together, it doesn't always work. public health services take the brunt of the stuff that private health clearly will not touch because it is not profitable. thus making the system even more complicated than if it were just a public health system. anyways, it's the public health system that trains up all the doctors and nurses that work in the private sector anyways (especially in the uk).
if you go back to economics and externalities, health care is a merit good. people should consume more of it and without government intervention there would be under consumption of health care. public services are here to stay and people should invest their money into public health care as private health is just a waste of money for the whole economy.
Wow... so much stupidity.. so little time....
1. First of all, the countries you're talking about -- Canada, UK, etc -- have a SINGLE PROVIDER system. That is, there is a single provider of healthcare coverage, in the form of Gov't run hospitals and clinics, and you go to them if you want free care. (Yes, in the UK there are private clinics and hospitals, but only for those that can pay cash)
Nobody has EVER suggested that the US be a SINGLE PROVIDER system. The idea has always been a SINGLE PAYER system. That means private enterprise still is responsible for delivering services. The difference is at the "insurance" level. Some plans call for the elimination of insurance companies, with Medicare expanding to cover everybody. Other plans call for the existing insurance companies to stay in place, the only diff. being that instead of your employer paying the premiums, the government will pay them.
BIG DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SINGLE PROVIDER AND SINGLE PAYER.
2. The history of employer-funded heathcare in this country is not exactly an idea endowed from our founding fathers. It's only been postwar--since the 1950s-- that the tax code was changed to reward companies for paying premiums. This made a LOT more sense in the days of career employment than it does today.
3. The GOP--during their 7 years of hegemony--had a great idea: Since the freemarket is supposed to bear fruits of efficiency, why don't they take the amount they're currently paying for some people on medicare, and, instead, give 95% of that amount to a private insurer, giving the citizen that would usually have Medicare actual private insurance that's paid for by the gov't at a rate cheaper than Medicare would otherwise pay.
Their idea was that if their theory held, the private companies could deliver services cheaper than Medicare itself can, which would allow them to expand this program to EVERYONE. Furthermore, they thought that it would be so efficient that they could even cover things that Meicare can't, like dentures and such.
Do you know what happened? Months into the program, they couldn't find hardly any insurers willing to insure these people at a cost of 95% of Medicare costs for that same person. So the congress upped it. First to 100%, then to more than 100%. That is, they were paying private insurers more to take care of a person that was previously on Medicarae than it was costing Medicare itself to take care of that person. Again, they felt that SURELY the freemaket would delvier, if only they gave it chance.
It didn't.
The Medicare Advantage program FLOPPED.
At the end of the day, the "Free Market" just couldn't deliver services cheaper than Medicare itself could.
4. The amount people pay for healthcare cannot be simply compared to Canada or anywhere else because so much of the cost is paid by employers. How much more competitive would our corporations be without this burden? Practically none of their overseas competitors carry those costs. How do you quantify that? How much more wealth would there be in the pockets of Ameircan employees and investors if our corporations were relieved of this singulary burden? How much higher would your wages be?
5. At the end of the day, we're ALREADY PAYING FOR EVERYONE TO GET HEALTHCARE. Anybody, no matter how destitute, can walk into your county general hospital and get care, and the bill is footed by the state. So you're ALREADY PAYING. Except, instead of treating the infection when it starts, at a cost of, say, $200, you're treating it after it's spread to the whole arm and requires an amputation at the cost of $10,000. Etc.
And no matter how much you dislike that fact, THERE IS NO OTHER OPTION. Because if you just stopped treating people that didn't have coverage, disease would fester. A true sub-class would emerge with ghettos full of truly sick people. It would be the 19th century all over again.
So let's ACKNOWLEDGE that we're ALREADY PAYING FOR THIS and let's focus on preventive care and early treatment that w
What the fuck kind of 'geek' are you anyway? Fucking imbecile...
Blar.
I know the feeling. I'm wondering why your adding to the problem though?
It doesn't matter, The effect is going to be the same regardless. The money will have to come from somewhere and it will be your pocket. Well, rather your paycheck because they like to get this stuff before you can miss it as often as possible. It really changes nothing I what I posted except maybe the degree to which it will effect you. But anyone wishing for this is foolish to think it won't cost them more money over their life time in increased taxes then they are likely to use from the system. They are even more foolish if they think they will have the same amount of disposable income to blow on things other then their insurance. It would be taken from them before they get it.
I don't see anyone cutting education, national security, the military or anything else in the near future to pay for a program like that. And if the cut anything, it would likely be the military budget and that would get those responsible turned out on their but the very next chance the voters get. They know this and this is why they will not defund the military like they did during Vietnam. The hippies and draft dodgers of the 60's have for the large part, grown up.
Any funded healthcare other then funded by yourself is not exactly an idea endowed from our founding fathers. I don't see why this would even come up?
More specifically, I was only showing that the free gift from the government will not and can not be free. It will carry a price in the form of taxes. I believe I said at the very beginning of that post, OK, I'm not getting into a free health war. It isn't as cheep as you think. That's all.
Yep, I think so. I guess I will reply to some of your other arguments as long as it is indirectly connected to my assertion of The vast majority of people could sack the equivalent of the extra taxes into an interest bearing savings account and give some money to their survivors after their death.
That sounds like a good Idea. I'm not against doing something with the health care system. What I am against is the idea that somehow people won't notice a difference in their standards of living because they can still go out and buy all the cable channels, boats, motorcycles, second cars and recreations vehicles or whatever else that has a higher priority then medical insurance with the government magically picking up the tab and no cost to them.
However, I don't think taking what goes into medicade and using it to provide coverage for the remaining 50% of the people without governmen