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US House Democrats Unveil a Health Care Plan
gollum123 sends in this piece from a political blog in the NY Times. Here is the text of the bill in question (PDF). "House Democrats on Friday answered President Obama's call for a sweeping overhaul of the health care system by putting forward [an] 852-page draft bill that would require all Americans to obtain health insurance, force employers to provide benefits or help pay for them, and create a new public insurance program to compete with private insurers — a move that Republicans will bitterly oppose. ... But the chairmen said they still did not know how much the plan would cost, even as they pledged to pay for it by cutting Medicare spending and imposing new, unspecified taxes. The three chairmen described their bill as a starting point in a weeks-long legislative endeavor that they said would dominate Congress for the summer and ultimately involve the full panorama of stakeholders in the health care industry, which accounts for about one-sixth of the nation's economy. ... House Republicans, who have had no involvement in the development of the health legislation so far, quickly denounced the Democrats' proposal as a thinly disguised plan for an eventual government takeover of the health care system. ... The House Democrats' plan is one of three distinct efforts underway on Capitol Hill to draft the health overhaul legislation. In the Senate, both the Finance Committee and the health committee have separate bills in the works, and in recent days those efforts seem to have stumbled."
Legend! http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/socialism.asp
Because under a socialist government everyone gets paid the exact same averaged dollar amount per year regardless of what job they do and how good/efficient they are at it right? No one is advocating that kind of system, not even the real socialists nutcases.
What you described is not socialism or socialist policy and it's intellectually dishonest to call it so.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
I am a 45 year old Canadian and no one has EVER told what doctor I may/may not see.
It has never been mentioned or hinted at by any of the doctors I have seen or by any government bureauocrat.
I call B.S. on your claim.
Singapore uses medical savings accounts and spends less than 5% of GDP. http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/01/singapores_heal.html
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
And yet, despite the right-wing horror stories (with their purely anecdotal basis), Canada's national healthcare system remains extremely popular, with Canadians expressing high levels of satisfaction with the care they're getting. See? Only about 90% of Canadians express satisfaction with their system! There has to be something wrong with it!
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
Define "better". According to a recent Lancet Oncology study (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1560849/UK-cancer-survival-rate-lowest-in-Europe.html) for males the average cancer survival rate in the UK is 44.8%. Compare to 66.3% in the USA for the same period. The US has the highest cancer survival rates in the world, and by a pretty large margin. That has to be worth something in your metrics of "better". I do not go to the doctor for social justice, I go to the doctor to get medical problems, say cancer and cardiovascular disease, fixed. The US is tops for fixing medical problems even if the system surrounding that medicine is a wreck.
Discard all the policy issues and ask yourself one simple question: what country will give me the best average statistical odds of having my condition cured/fixed? The US looks very, very good by that metric, and the reason people go to the doctor is to get cures. The medical system may be a wreck, but that is a semi-separate issue and I would be reluctant to throw away stellar medical outcomes as the price for cleaning up a broken system.
One of the more interesting statistical anomalies is that if it was not for the extremely high death rates due to accidents (e.g. vehicular) and homicides, Americans would have the longest lifespans in the industrialized world instead of average ones (better medical outcomes offset high non-disease death rates). As is amusingly observed in health outcome statistics, the only demographic group that lives longer than Japanese women are Japanese women that live in the US. It is a relevant observation in this discussion, many people here are far too eager to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
If you really think most people, conservative or otherwise, actually hate people who are poor, you've been completely brainwashed.
It's the liberal equivilent of calling everyone who disagrees with you unpatriotic.
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The 0.5% figure already includes* the cost of malpractice insurance: as you noted, the actual malpractice damages are even less. Besides, as I already pointed out, Texas has practically eliminated malpractice suits with their bogus tort laws, and yet their costs are climbing faster than anyone's. I'm just speculating, but I wonder if the Texas tort law hasn't created a perverse incentive. Namely, the doctors that are moving there to take advantage of the malpractice situation are the ones more concerned about money than patients; i.e., the type of doctor driving the cost of care up. At the same time, a doctor could accidentally cut off your genitals in Texas, for which you could get at most $250k. (Yes, this just happened to someone, though luckily not in Texas.)
* Anderson, Gerard F., Peter S. Hussey, Bianca K. Frogner, and Hugh R. Waters. "Health Spending In The United States And The Rest Of The Industrialized World." Health Aff 24, no. 4 (July 1, 2005): 903-914.
You are comparing a single data point...
USA has great cancer research facilities, like National Cancer Institute. Which sponsors trials of about two-thirds of all approved drugs. Oh, and it is funded by the government, not private industry.
I posted something similar to this below, but to put it mildly, your assertion that malpractice litigation/insurance and "defensive medicine" are driving up costs simply isn't supported by the data. All the best estimates for the actual litigation and insurance put it at about 0.5% of our total costs.* As for defensive medicine, while that is undoubtedly more difficult to quantify, 22 states have some form of malpractice cap, so we can see how well medical costs and quality correlate to those caps. Unfortunately, while the numbers of doctors in those state varies in a statistically significant way, neither the quality nor the costs do. In fact, Texas spends more money than any other state, despite their ridiculously strict $250k caps. (You could literally be wrongly castrated by a doctor in Texas and get no more than $250k.) Even worse, their costs are going up faster than any other state.
* Anderson, Gerard F., Peter S. Hussey, Bianca K. Frogner, and Hugh R. Waters. "Health Spending In The United States And The Rest Of The Industrialized World." Health Aff 24, no. 4 (July 1, 2005): 903-914.
Rather than looking at a single disease statistic I think it is more instructive to look at overall average life expectancy. I let the numbers do the talking.
The infant mortality statistics are skewed for various reasons. They have to do with what we report as a "live birth" vs. what other nations report.
For example, in Canada, a premature baby that is delivered, and then dies, that weighs less than a half a kilogram is not counted against the live birth count.
There is also the matter of timing. In Hong Kong and Japan, a baby that dies in the first 24 hours of life is not counted against the live births. They consider it a miscarriage. In France, Belgium, and many other European countries, babies born before 26 weeks of gestation, and then die, are not counted as deaths.
In Switzerland, a baby that perishes that is also less than 30 cm in length is not counted.
Needless to say (for the illustration of my point), the U.S. does count these as live births, and the deaths in such cases count toward the relatively higher infant mortality rate. In the types of cases above, the chances of infant survival are sketchy at best. Thus, the disparity in infant mortality rates.
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