>There's an enormous difference between lacking intelligence and lacking knowledge Those who seek out information before forming opinions are what we call "informed". I always use the word "idiot" to refer to those who persist in a position that is not supported by the facts and persist (often forcefully) in their ignorance of the facts, even going so far as to deliberately avoid any information which may taint their preset world-views. Making a statement which is clearly false to justify using an inconsequential matter as part of your judgement of others is a pattern of behavior that strongly correlates with this attitude. Personally - I think "grammar nazi" should be added to philosophy classes as one of the most common fallacies of our time. It's a variant on the ad hominem attack. Whether a person spelled the words in his argument correctly does NOT in any way relate to whether his argument is correct or not.
>While you have valid points, in my mind the OP is for the most part correct. I tried visiting the following sites to get an impression of each:
You're example is machine translations of the same source text ?!?!?!? Do you seriously believe that original write-ups of the same event in a Spanish and English newspaper would look that similar ? The point is that superficial resemblance of punctuation in text is completely insignificant here. It just means that those languages use the same basic symbols to represent punctuation. What those symbols actually MEAN and the rules for how to use them differ radically, but it's quite impossible to recognize that in a language you cannot read. In Afrikaans for example the " symbol is OFTEN placed on TOP of vowels, when this is done, it indicates a historic contraction where the missing letters are never pronounced. From the Dutch "vogel" - we dropped the g, it's neither written nor said. But "voel" would be pronounced like "fool" in Afrikaans (meaning "to feel"), bird is written "voël" (foo-ull). No such convention exists in English or any other Latin language and even in Germanic's it's rare (though the same symbol is frequently used in German for a similar but not identical use - and the German usage ALSO occurs in Afrikaans - it inserts a syllable where one wouldn't have existed otherwise - basically the Afrikaans usage is a derivative, we use it to retain the syllable that got lost when the word was contracted) on the other hand, the type of contractions English use all the time (one use of apostrophes in English) doesn't exist at all in Germanic languages. That's without even the fact that there are a multitude of extra punctuation symbols that are unique to some languages - and they solve the same problems with the Latin Alphabet in different ways. German, English, Polish and Afrikaans all contain numerous sounds that have no letter representation in the Latin Alphabet. English ignores the problem - they simply let each letter have several different sounds depending on what word you use it in (compare the T in "the" with the T in "cat"). German and Polish solves it by adding extra letters - but importantly not the same ones. The German ß and Polish for example (both are basically the same sound that in English is written with the two-letter "sh" combination).. Polish is particularly confusing in the Latin alphabet because it's not the native alphabet of the language, it's really supposed to use the Cyrillic alphabet - so it has another compensation on top, the same one as Afrikaans. Stick a bunch of dots and stripes over letters which act as symbols and change pronunciation according to certain rules. So E, , and ê are all completely different (but related) sounds.
Yes they look similar if you don't try to read... but that's a complete superficial thing. Same symbols - completely different uses and even more radically different rules about how those uses are applied. Try to actually LEARN at least one foreign language before forming opinions about it. The US and Britain are basically the only
>Capitalization and punctuation don't vary that much across languages
WTF ?!?!?! Seriously dude... WTF ?!?!??!
Let's just look at the small sampling of languages I can read (to a lesser or greater extent). And keep in mind three of these are all languages that share a COMMON Origin (Ancient West Germanic) and one is essentially a dialect of the another split of a mere 300 years ago. That makes this a pretty skewed sample. Choose any two languages randomly and the differences will get MUCH bigger.
German: All nouns are capitalized. English: Capitals are used only for the names of Deities, Persons and the first word of a sentence. Afrikaans: Similar to English... oh unless the sentence starts with the non-specific article... then the SECOND word starts with a capital. Dutch: Same as English (the Afrikaans exception does not exist in Dutch). Portuguese: Fucked if I know... after several years, I STILL don't understand all of it.
How about the Apostrophe: Dutch: Apostrophe is used to indicate missing letters. German: Same as Dutch. Afrikaans: Apostrophe indicates missing letters - but it's only allowed to be used for this when those letters are deliberately left out for an EXCEPTIONAL reason (such as accenting a quote or poetic freedom) and in the spelling of the Afrikaans word 'n (yes the word is an apostrophe and an small n but pronounced "uh" - derived from the Dutch word for "one"). Portuguese: There is no apostrophe as we think of it, thoug the ' symbols is used in the spelling of some words. English: Used to indicate missing letters in (specifically in contractions) and to indicate possession. Moreover the rules on how it does both the above get very convoluted (especially where the uses overlap, as in a posessive contraction) and leads to continuous confusion among English speakers about the fact that it's, its and its' are three completely different words with exactly the same pronunciation (apparently we can easily tell them apart from context when LISTENING but when reading we have to create a stupid cosmetic difference to see which is which).
Now those are small differences between languages of relatively common origins... if I start telling you how it works in African languages (I speak two) you simply wouldn't BELIEVE me, it has the following in common with the above: Sweet blue fuck all. That's despite the fact that no African language has a written language of their own and adopted a modified version of the English alphabet and punctuation to be able to write -they still had to change almost every rule just to make sense because their entire gramatical structure is radically different. It gets even more bizarre when you consider languages that have a history of writing, but radically different origins from English, such as the Slavic and Asian languages. In English a word with no vowels is unpronouncable. In Russian... that's about 3/4 of the dictionary. In Polish, it's more like 4/5...
See... I'm actually a non-native English speaker, who has a degree in English literature. I can read Shakespeare with ease and joy, and both speak and write English quite a bit better than most Britons (let alone Americans) and I had Linguistics as a second major. And if there is one thing you learn very quickly when you study multiple languages on a professional level - it's that languages are as radically different as the cultures that produce them, reflect those cultures and become an extension of those cultures. What you say smacks back to the so-called romantic theory of linguistics. Which was a very Platonic theory that believed there is some perfect language we're all born with, and all human languages are imperfect attempts to implement it. The romantic theory is interesting in that it was the very first theory to ever exist in Linguistics... but it's also not actually been considered to have any basis in fact or reality for over 200 years now... hell even the Russian Orthodox theory of Linguistics have at least SOME provable reality to it and THAT came from 1916. Current linguistic theory as it applies to your statement can be summarized as follows: you're an idiot.
There's another side to it as well. With the 10mp you can crop a third of the picture out and still have more left over than the 6mp even took. This is something art photographers do all the time. Cropping is often crucial for getting the composition you want and getting rid of details that don't add anything to the focus of the picture. The more data you HAVE the more you can do with it. This is also why art photographers take pictures in RAW mode rather than jpeg. What's lost with jpeg's lossy compression is data we can USE to make the picture better with later. Photoshopping pix to change what they look like is not all that impressive to me, but adjusting the light levels so somebody's gorgeous blue eyes can come out a bit better... that's art.
I said I felt CULTURALLY at home in San Francisco - I felt I could fit in with the "judge not" approach to other people. I recently read about half of conservapedia because I wanted to understand what people there think. What I found sadly, only reinforced my views. The majority of the American conservatives are members of the religious right who believe in legislating morality. I notice you didn't respond to any of the points I raised about that - you limited yourself only to economic issues, and then only because those issues are the only ones on which some conservative politics sometimes make sense (conservative could also mean to be sparing and 'conserve' resources - not a bad approach mostly). I did however say that I have never met a poor conservative - granted, I was speaking about South Africa in that case. You'll never meet a black person in this country who is not economically liberal unless they also part of the small group of wealthy black people. Our country has an odd mixture of views. Wealthy whites are in general morally and economically in line with your conservatives. Poor whites tend to rely on church-charity rather than state and not really think about it beyond that, morally their the most conservative of all. Wealthy black people (the ones in charge at the moment) tend to be morally liberal - at least on paper, and certainly boosted by the fact that our constitution was written from that viewpoint - and economically conservative. Poor black people (the vast majority) tend to be morally conservative (though not the same morality as yours) and economically liberal - because economic liberal policies are the only thing letting them survive marginally better than they did under apartheid.
Here the most likely cause of unrest in the streets is when those poor blacks protest because the government isn't living up to the service delivery obligations it has. When the money set aside for liberal "care-for-each-other" causes don't GET where it's meant to be. They would never consider removing the POSSIBILITY of that money getting there.
While it's true that the republican party was founded to end slavery, the Lincoln republican view and the one of today have essentially nothing in common. There's a reason why black people in America vote predominantly democrat- the republicans instituted separatism in your country, it was the democrats that MLK and Rosa Parks found a voice in - the republicans shunned them. Don't you find it surprising that the old slave-states are now the red states ? The people whom the republican party declared WAR on, are now almost all republicans, what's more likely ? That a few million people changed their minds ? Or that two political parties changed their policies ?
"I might not respond to this thread further, because there's no rational arguing with someone who argues against high gas prices when it's a result of the Republican and for high gas prices when it's a result of the Democrat" I didn't do that- I never considered WHO was doing it, but WHY and HOW they did it. Bush did it to enrich himself and his cronies, he did it by killing millions of innocent children, dumping you in an unwinnable war and making life a great deal harder for everyone else on the planet. Obama is doing it as part of a plan to solve the underlying problem of using oil in the first place, to replace it with BETTER answers - and coincidentally, give the human race a chance to save ourselves from our own stupidity.
I don't like his higher gas prices anymore than Bush's - but I agree with his motives and I didn't agree with Bush's motives. There is nothing irrational about that.
The sad irony is that there ARE no real liberals in US politics, democratic and republican policies are almost identical economically. Remember that the worst budget shortfall and the single-largest expansion of government power in your countries history was both done under the Bush administration. Bush was only conservative in his rhetoric, never in his actions. In his actions - he was a
There are 40 million people in this country, and 40 million points of view. Most of them are extremely conservative - middle-American's would feel right at home here. There's a reason I choose to live in Cape Town - it's the most liberal city in the country. I like to describe it as South Africa's little San Francisco. And in all your country, S.F. was the only place I felt... welcomed. The only place where I didn't see anybody being looked down upon, scorned or mistreated. Cape Town bills itself as the "pink capital" of Africa - for it's gay-friendly culture. I'm straight but frankly who somebody else chooses to fuck is absolutely NONE of my concern - provided everyone involved is a consenting adult- it's not the governments concern EITHER.
I've seen where conservative viewpoints lead. Appartheid South Africa was as conservative as they come. One group's morality passing as law. Millions of people suffering to support the wealth of a few. Everything is a trade-off, Obama tries to prevent global warming from becoming a disaster and reduce your dependence on a rare commodity that you need to buy from some of the most volatile places on earth... you complain about the cost. The fact is - Obama said all along, the answer isn't bio-fuel or oil-replacements, it's ENERGY replacement, these are intermediary steps to try and GET there. More expensive food is a problem... is it really a bigger problem than half the world flooded ? Because we ARE headed to that, it's a scientific consensus - and I tend to trust scientists over people with a stake in business models built on refuting it.
I could almost live with people who were conservatives economically and liberals socially. I don't agree with them - but at least... I don't think they are actively doing harm to other people. I like the fact that in my country - overturning the ban on gay marriage took just one case in the constitutional court. That case never EVER asked what a "founding father" would have thought - because the "call to tradition" is a FALACY - it's NEVER a good argument. It asked one thing "are we treating gays differently" - and found the answer to be yes. Since our constitution specifically prohibits ANY discrimination (by government or private citizens/companies) based on *anything* (and gives a list of examples SPECIFICALLY including sexual orientation) the court had the power to TELL the government to change the law - which they then did.
Here we have an equality court, specifically empowered to deal with cases of discrimination - and punish those guilty of it.
The funny thing is - I'm NOT a liberal, I'm not a conservative either. My views are my own and they are situational and specific. On each issue I hold a view - sometimes that view is liberal, sometimes that view is socialist, sometimes it's libertarian. The only group with whom I cannot find ANY common ground, on ANY issue, EVER - is conservatives. I was not an adult when apartheid ended. I never got most of the propaganda, I was 9 years old when Nelson Mandela was pardoned. All I remember of my childhood under apartheid I find APPALLING. The government dictated that nobody may marry outside their race and sex-outside-marriage was illegal but the law could ONLY be enforced if the person was of a different race... well I married outside my race. Just 20 years earlier, my marriage would have been illegal.
I live surrounded by the poverty that conservative politics created, and I watch the beneficiaries of the wealth of it shrug of the suffering and sooth their consciences when they throw a small coin in the collection bag at their churches.
Conservatives scare me - because they are so afraid of change - and they should be because I have NEVER met a poor conservative. The conservatives here and in your country are consistently middle-class or higher, they want to preserve the unfairness of the system because it's unfair in THEIR favor. Well... I was born to be one of the lucky ones. I was born white, destined for wealth and success - ju
I specifically left sicko as the LAST item on my list... moreover it's quite clear you haven't actually SEEN it. The thing is - Sicko isn't ABOUT people without medical insurance. It's about the terrible state of healthcare for the people who DO have insurance - and STILL find that lifesaving treatments get denied.
You also ignored the entire rest of my post... which had some valid points.
Here's what American's don't understand. You don't just elect a president of the united states. You elect the De Facto most powerful man on the planet. When Bush invaded Iraq, fuel prices in South Africa more than trippled in three months. This had an immediate knock-on effect to other industries (all of which need shipment). Prices of basic foodstuffs more doubled in those first free months. The reserve bank, in a desperate bid to try and stop us from going into hyperinflation quadrupled interest rates - so bond payments went up - in my case by nearly 60% per month. The wealthfare of everyone in my country was massively harmed by the decision of a politician we don't get to vote for, who doesn't listen to our voices - who couldn't care less that we exist.
People in China, Canada and Europe don't really care who you elect, their nations are powerful enough that they can and will require of their politicians to make policies that America may not like. The rest of us HAS to care, because our politicians will never, ever risk pissing off the US. That's about 4 billion people whose lives are in your hands every time you go vote. America's position in the world means that your choices determine our destinies. We vote for our leaders, but we don't get to vote for the man who tells our leaders what to do, who can tank our economies at a whim... you do. So every decent person in America takes upon himself with every election- responsibility not just for himself, his family and his country - but for the effect his decision that day will have on 4 BILLION people ! You are our voice, our only little say in what kind of world we live in - comes from trying to reason with you. No wonder when you reelected that bastard our biggest newspaper carried the story under the headline "A dark day for the entire world". That's the day we started fearing and despising your nation. The day we realize that though you are responsible for the lives of most of the world, you just don't care at all - most of you aren't even aware that we exist.
So American's have a bad rap - as a whole, your nation EARNED that rap. When you elected Bush the first time -we didn't mind, most of us reckoned he couldn't be that much worse than the usual... but that second time... we lost almost all faith in America.
Then you elected Obama. A man who spoke of a foreign policy built on compassion, and recognition of the responsibility that comes with America's power. Until that moment, none of us could believe it would happen - and when it did, we cheered you. We praised you. We said "they learned, maybe they can learn to care about what their choices mean for the rest of us". We said "they have earned a second chance"... well I read the news, and the US has basically spent every day since then trying it's best to show the world that Obama's election was nothing but a fluke... the average American still couldn't find Cape Town on a map... and still couldn't care less about us. If people starve because you choose the wrong leaders, and fill your congress and senate with idiots who will make even the good leader you managed to choose effectively incapable of doing a single good thing- even for YOURSELVES... you will still believe that this is the American way.
For the record, I'm using the plural you above, to speak about America in general, not about Sally Forth in particular. My discussion with you has led me to believe you are person who thinks a bit about things and genuinely considers things. I dissagree with your conclusions but at least I'll grant that you seem to ask questions and you've certainly forced me to think really hard
So perhaps your view is a bit too local... Because the rest of the world sees your medical system when we watch movies like John Q or hear Cutner tell Taub "when you have millions of people thousands of dollars in debt because of medical expenses, it's only a matter of time before one of them does something inexcusable" and books like "The Rainmaker". The reality is - that in large parts of the US - that's exactly how it works. The doctors want to do a procedure - they call your insurance company to find out if it's pre-approved. If it's not pre-approved, they have to submit a claim and motivation - and if the insurance company turns it down (which they routinely do for all claims over a certain amount, some have been claimed at as low as 5000 dollars) then the procedure doesn't HAPPEN.
Now up there I just cited the fiction that gives us this view of the US as a system where doctors hands are tied and they have to watch their patients die because of greedy insurance companies. I always take Michael Moore with a (small but not non-existent) piece of salt, but Sicko tells the same story...
In fact, up until this discussion with you - I have never heard a different story, from anybody, ever.
You say you live in a Rural part of the US. Rural communities tend to be small and very caring of one another, that's not a US thing, it's a global thing - the same is found in rural South Africa. But the vast majority of American's (and people all over the world) don't live in rural areas, they live in big urban cities. I've lived in my appartment (which I own) for three years now - I know the name of one of my 50-something neighbours and I've had two conversations with her - ever. That's the (sad) reality of citylife. Most people don't HAVE the kind of communities you describe to rely on. If doctors acted like you suggest - even in a city like Cape Town, the doctor would be bankrupt because people wouldn't be able to pay and nobody but their relatives would help and they aren't likely to be able to help that much either.
Either way - I have never favored fully socialized healthcare, I even agree with you that everything does have a price and Doctors put in massive time and money to become doctors and deserve to be rewarded for it. What I do favor is universal health care. That means - anybody, and everybody can get any life-saving treatment - always.
It's a big enough burden on hospitals just to keep the E.R. doors open so they can treat accident victims and people with heart attacks. There is no way they can do something that takes months of preparation and costs more than 200 thousand US dollars (like say bone-marrow transplants) unless they can be sure of getting paid - the hospital that donates that to one patient is doing a massive disservice to all the others.
I would prefer to see a system here where the richest of the rich and go to the same hospitals as the poorest of the poor - by seeing our state hospitals improve so nobody needs private ones anymore, and the doctors are BETTER paid than the private doctors now. I want to see my nation grow to where we have near zero unemployment, and we all pay taxes - if we can do this with the taxes of only one fifth of the people... imagine what we could do if we had 80% of us paying into that fund ?
But honestly - I couldn't care less HOW the healthcare system works, I don't care what ideology drives it. I care about results. I want to live in a country where every aids-orphan is guaranteed his anti-retrovirals. I want to live in a country where every sick old lady is guaranteed her pain meds - even in this day where many of them haven't seen their children in decades and live on a pittance of a pension. Where a leukemia patient can worry ONLY about finding a donor, not about finding money to pay for care.
I would really love to live in a world where cities are as caring and community orientated as rural towns are... but that is probably never going to happen. So we have to find other ways to care for the weakest
I'm not in Europe, though I have traveled there extensively, I have also traveled extensively in both North and South America and have visited several countries in Africa where I live. Specifically I live in South Africa, and though we are by far the wealthiest nation on the continent we are still a poor country with a 45% unemployment rate and only 20% of the population earning a taxable income.
Nonetheless - we are able to provide free medical care to all for at least any and all life-saving treatments - even if it means that I as part of that 20% pay about 37% of my income in taxes (the richest pay around 45%). I have often heard people here complain about the high taxes but I have never heard them suggest that the academic free hospitals should close - they would rather see us cut defense spending and spend on healthcare and education. We don't argue about taking care of society, and the sheer size of that burden means that there is no conceivable way to do that with pure charity. We have to be able to rely on the government to centrally collect funds and distribute services where they are needed.
It's also true that nobody in that 20% of taxpaying citizens ever use the free hospitals (unless you are stupid enough not to have medical insurance). So we're funding a service we never use. For us, the reason is thus: to survive the private hospitals have to offer a higher quality service. The difference isn't in care, but in comfort. At a state hospital the qeues are long, and the halls are packed. At a private hospital, you arrive to an appointment and find a bed in an empty room with a television. Since we all get mandatory medical insurance as part of our employment contracts - we'd be stupid not to use it.
And our insurance companies are among the most profitable businesses in our country - despite the fact that their plans are subject to government oversight (to ensure nothing lifesaving is left out of even the CHEAPEST plan), despite the fact that they can't EVER turn ANYBODY away. It's even fairly affordable - because the bulk-deals-with-employers setup means reduced rates, and the part I pay reduces my taxable income - a win.
So basically - that crap of "pre-existing condition - no insurance" and having to check for each procedure whether your insurance company will pay or not that you have there... that is just corporate greed. One thing I see in Obama's current plan I applaud is at least to tell them they can't deny based on pre-existing conditions.
The interesting thing is - having the premiums basically capped, and the quality of cover monitored so they can't skip forced our insurance companies to get creative to make money. How do they make a profit ? Reduce how often people claim - and since there is no legal way to reduce whether people claim for valid cases... you have to make them healthier. So I get my yearly checkup for free including all the basic health-checks, HIV testing etc - why because the earlier they pick up a potential risk factor like high cholesterol and advise me on how to deal with it, the lower the risk that they'll be funding a heart transplant. Catch high blood sugar and they may just save themselves a future diabetes case and paying for a lifetime's worth of insulin shots. They give gym discounts and even arrange discounted vacations (to reduce stress - that being the number one disease causing factor in their customer-base) and give reduced premiums to non-smokers. Anything they can do to motivate people to live healthier and get early preventative treatment ultimately saves them money. So they make an effort to encourage early treatment because it's usually cheaper for them.
I actually think our system works - and our economy is growing, the wealthier we get... the better it's going to work for everybody.
I think we just think fundamentally differently - and for the record - I'm only a socialist in some very special cases. I think clinging to any philosophy in all matters is shortsighted and idiotic. There is no "one-true-way" and EVERYTHING society faces should be individually addressed.
Very few countries actually HAVE socialized medecine, what most countries have is what is called "multipayer universal healthcare" (that's the term on concervapedia - a site intent on discrediting it). That means you get private AND public healthcare - the public healthcare generally is slower and less luxurious - but it's free. The private care is fast and efficient and usually paid by you (indirectly through insurance). In my own country medical insurance companies are not allowed to exclude ANYBODY - under any conditions - not EVER. If you can pay the premiums, they HAVE to accept you. Plans HAVE to be standardized and government approved. If an item is on the approved-list, they can NEVER refuse payment. Most plans also include a savings account which is used to pay for all other medical expenses (until it's depleted anyway). Our MSA's aren't the same as yours though. They get filled up at the beginning of the year, to a set amount depending on the plan you're on. And then your premiums go into filling it up, your left-overs are carried to next year - and your premiums are automatically tax-deducted as they go off your income BEFORE you are taxed.
So I pay my premiums, I have massive list of covered things - including essentially all non-elective surgery and chronic medications. Special treatment plans for high-cost diseases like HIV for example are also there. The understanding is that the medical aid is EXPECTED to use the money that they make from healthy people's premiums and don't NEED to spend on their claims - to pay for the care of those less fortunate.
This is hardly socialism but it is a tightly regulated market - and for those who can't afford it, don't have jobs etc. there are free government run clinics and hospitals everywhere, usually run by public universities so the staff are excellent (all South African doctors do their internships at these hospitals as the universities where their medical schools are run them) - and a staff complement greatly boosted by a significant portion of doctors kindly donated to us a few years ago by Mister Castro.
It's not a perfect system - it has it's flaws (there have been problems with mis-administration at some government hospitals, doctors not receiving their salaries and not legally being allowed to quit while interning, when we first got the doctors from Cuba, nobody thought to make sure they send Doctors who didn't speak ONLY Spanish - which nobody here speaks) - but for the most part, it works really well.
Yes, I'd love to see my taxes reduced, but not at the cost of seeing people whose average earnings is about 5USD per week (a significant part of our population -about 30% or so) not be able to go to a doctor if they get sick. Especially in the country with the highest HIV infection rate on the planet.
It's true Americans tend to give more to charity than Europeans... on the other hand, Europeans spend more in taxes that are mostly used for charitable causes - and the poverty level in Europe is significantly lower than in the US. More-over those that are poor are generally far better off than their US counterparts... I don't think the reason for the discrepency is because Americans are a more charitable nation (frankly - I've been to the US and your culture is essentially the most self-centered, mediocre culture I saw anywhere in the world - not all Americans are like that, but enough to make it the defining attributes of the culture) - I think it's because quite simply - Europeans don't NEED to give as much to charity, there are just that much less to give TOO.
So - as I said before - the right way to handle a specific societal need varies. Best way to provide food is still to sell it on an open market, as long as you don't
Yep I guess all those news stories about the person who needs a life-saving operation and gets turned down by the insurance company on a flimsy excuse because the operation costs half-a-million and they know they just have to stall long enough for him to die and the bill goes away are *all* made up right ?
Kina hard to make up dead bodies though.
Standard practise in American medical insurance companies is to deny ANY claim over 100K - regardless of merit. Standard practise of American hospitals are to refuse to perform any operation costing that much unless you have proof you can pay it or your insurance company has approved it. When people are taking out second bonds on houses to pay for an operation - people who HAVE medical insurance- the system is corrupt.
The reality is that what you say is only true if "you're going to die today" - the problem is the person with 6 months of suffering to go, who could get another 20 years except that his bone marrow transplant is repeatedly refused and each refusal is a lie. The problem is that medical insurance companies are ALLOWED to turn away people on the grounds of pre-existing conditions, or refuse to pay for conditions that previously existed...
But you're still ignoring the single biggest problem with the whole system. The people who need the most expensive medical care, the most often - are by definition the people LEAST capable of paying for it. The poor, infants, the chronically ill and the elderly - the people who are NOT earning a salary and can't earn one. You can only pay 25 dollars a month for so long if you DON'T HAVE AN INCOME. Not to mention - pharmacies typically won't give you your medication on those kinds of terms.
A humane medical system MUST let those who are healthy and earning subsidize those who aren't -because there simply ISN'T another way. American greed has got you believing that poor kids dying from curable diseaeses because the cure is expensive is better than paying a hundred dollars a month extra in tax - just because your own medical costs are nowhere near that... until you are also 75 years old, with plenty of organs starting to fail and suffering because you can't even afford your own pain medications and the insurance company just stopped paying a long, long time ago... That's the reality - you are among those who don't NEED extensive medical services right now, your age-group and health-status puts you there. You aren't fighting for changes because you see so little benefit for yourself - and that is murderous greed in my book. Every society since the dawn of time has understood that those who can HAS to help those who can't, medical systems is one modern case where we can MEASURE how civilized a nation is - by seeing to what extent those who can are willing to subsidize the treatment of those who can't - if only out of the enlightened self interest of knowing that you could BE one of those who can't tomorrow, not to mention common human decency.
Oh right, because the systems are not perfect, that means there is no way they can be better than yours. You HAVE 25$ a months, and you've not needed a bone-marrow transplant or similiar life-saving but horribly expensive medical procedure. The people who do can tell you - your $25/month is probably going down the drain, because insurance companies routinely find excuses not to pay for those procedures. Yep, you will get TREATED... if you happen to be extremely lucky and rich. When hospitals are allowed to turn anybody away, EVER, that's already murder.
I wasn't pushing for Obama's current bill. I'm not an American and I don't know the details - but I specifically put "socialized medicine" in quotes (as I mentioned in another post) because it's not MY choice of word - it's what republicans call it. The current bill I agree is probably worse than what there used to be - big pharma and their republican buddies made quite sure that Obama couldn't actually change anything USEFUL. The original reform bill he proposed - now THAT would have been a good thing. The sad thing is... when this disaster blows up in your faces, you'll be blaming the president who proposed healthcare reform - and not the companies and pocket-politicians who took away all the good parts and left you with even less.
Overtesting is a relative term - in this case relative to the way your medical system works. That last useless test could end up positive, could save a life - even if it was only put in there to pad the bill. If testing was free - the doctor couldn't gain by doing more than the symptoms actually supported, and could only lose by doing less than he ought to (that WOULD be clear-cut malpractice then)
The free market concept works because it lets us use trade to create incentives for effort. But some things are far too valuable to trade. This is why we ban things like human traficking and slavery - we think human life is too precious to be sold. Technically that's a market restriction - but in this case, a good one. I think that your version of a medical market has proven to be no different though - it makes human life a matter for trade, and that means only the wealthy can afford to have it - while human life is supposed to be a right. A right so strongly enshrined in our conscious that we won't even allow people to choose to give it up (suicide is illegal in most places) unless they are doing so to save other lives (heroism is lauded in every culture). The thing I don't get is that for the most part - the people in the US most opposed to health-care reform in the US are the very same people most opposed to euthanasia. A terminally ill patient can't choose to end his own suffering - but a poor person doesn't get the right to survive a curable illness ? That's the worst case of cognitive dissonance I've seen in a while - and US conservative's have turned deliberate dissonance into an artform.
I think you're wrong about government doing EVERYTHING badly - that's just too much of an overgeneralisation - and frankly there are things that are better done by them than by private industry - your own history shows some examples of things that you chose to take OUT of private industry and into government control because it was a disaster when privatized. If my house catches fire - I do NOT want the fireman to ask for my fire insurance card before they put out the blaze, I'm sure my neighbors would appreciate that too - since the fire is likely to spread to their houses if not stopped. You had private fire-fighting companies in the past... it was a disaster, that's why these days your fire departments are state run. As far as I can see - hospitals and firefighters are in exactly the same class of service here. Everything that made private firefighting a bad idea is happening to medicine now.
I say it again... I LIVE in a country with a system you would call "Socialist" a country where 90% of the taxes are paid by only about 20% of the population. WE can afford to provide free medical care for the everybody - and frankly of the many things my massively overcharged taxes are spent on the medical care is the lowest burden, fortunes on weaponry (who the hell will South Africa ever go to war with ?) is a much bigger concern (Which is why the arms deal degenerated into a corruption scandal). Brazil can do it. France can do it, Britain can do it. Everybody in the world does it except you and nations so poor they rely on international aid just to feed people. Yeah - you are so much better off.
And apparently you missed the bit where I CLEARLY stated: "I didn't check the numbers" ? I was demonstrating that preventative care would lower the fatality rate and I made it very clear that the numbers I used were purely examples, I made no claim that they were factual - in fact I specifically stated they weren't. As my previous post shows though - if you wanted to compare real numbers (which are utterly irelevent to the point of my post - I was writing about HEALTHCARE not the fatality rates of influenza) - they are still far higher than you seem to think - certainly high enough to validate my use of influenza as an example. I didn't bother to check exact numbers because they are completely irelevent to my point. What matters is only that influenza can have serious complications, and can be fatal and that preventative care can greatly reduce the risk of both - the exact amounts by which is something that you look at when you plan a healthcare budget, not when you decide if you need one.
The long version (that applies to every year): It's true, it just doesn't make the news because the people who die from influenza are almost exclusively in one of the following categories: 1) Those with impaired immune systems (influenza is the number 2 killer of HIV sufferers after TB) 2) The elderly 3) Infants
Basically when an old person gets the flu and it leads to a heart-attack, we don't really think of it as a flu death but since it was the flu that caused the heart attack in the first place - that's the true cause. Flu is known to damage the heart, when the heart is already weak - it is often fatal.
Note I said ALMOST exclusively - healthy 25 year olds also die from flu sometimes, especially if they don't take proper rest-care while sick or don't control the fever.
Every now and then we get a strain of influenza that is somewhat harder for our immune systems to tackle and the death rates in all three categories go much higher, while the rates among healthy adults climb to a more noticeable level and we get giant media freak-outs about the pandemic that is about to wipe us out. Usually it's given some name like "bird flu" or "swine flu" - remember those ? And then, much more rarely we get a particularly resistant strain that actually DOES lead to a massive world wide pandemic - like the one I linked above. Now go to your room and let the grown-ups talk.
The actual truth, as usual, is a bit more complex than the bit we all remember and quote.
Where a correlation occurs there are four distinct possible reasons: Let say a correlation that during the time when X is known to have increased, Y showed a corelatory increase. then 1) It is possible that this is because X caused Y - e.g. the causation that way isn't implied - yes it's a possible implication. 2) It is possible that X in fact caused Y (e.g. the causation is in fact in the opposite direction of what the quoter of the stat is trying to say). 3) It is possible that X and Y were both caused by an unknown third factor Z. 4) It is possible that X and Y were caused by completely different factors and their correlation is purely coincidental.
The mere existence of a correlation does not imply any of these four possibilities more strongly than the other - they are equally likely unless additional data is presented to corroborate one.
The example from my philosophy textbook (which I'm shamelessly citing here) was this: Between the period 1955 to 1965 the number of schools in the US where sex-ed was given increased by 75%, during the same period the amount of teenage pregnancies increased by nearly 80% (Both compared to the decade before that). Conclusion - giving sex-ed led to more teenage pregnancies.
This citation is classic example of the correlation/causation mistake in that it assumes option 1. In this case option 2 actually seems quite likely - if teenage pregnancies were going up, that would put pressure on schools to give sex-ed to try and reverse this trend. But what if we consider more available data. Specifically that the pill came on the market in 1953 sparking the sexual revolution. If we consider that the pill let to a more relaxed attitude among teenagers about sex, but that this attitude probably spread a lot faster than actual usage of the pill then it explains the increase in teen pregnancies which combined with the known presence of this attitude would put pressure on the schools to give sex ed. So then it suggests that in fact we have options 2,3 and 4 happening in a commonly reinforcing manner. The only conclusion that isn't supported by the data at all is option one. With each bit of additional data added, including comparison with other times where there was a sharp increase in teenage pregnancy (like the early years of the current decade under the Bush administration) we find that the likelihood of X actually causing Y in this example gets smaller and smaller and in fact becomes statistically insignificantly small.
But that doesn't mean option 1 is never the right answer. Sometimes a correlation really is due to causation. You just cannot assume it without further evidence.
And the counterpoints... 1) Right now America's biggest problem isn't doctors testing too much - it's too LITTLE testing. Americans don't do any preventative medicine choosing to go to the doctor only when the damage done is already severe. Guess what - early detection and preventative care is not only better for saving lives, it generally costs a lot less to provide.
The old adage goes that "early detection of cancer means before there are serious symptoms" - how do you equate that with a system where people are afraid to go to a doctor until the symptoms are severe ?
More importantly - I didn't say medicine should always be provided by the government, there are some possible valid concerns there though it's clear to me that your "medicine market" system comes down to saying "the right to life is on the lawbooks but only for rich people". I put "socialized medicine" in quotes on purpose - specifically to point out that I am using the term as it's use by America concervatives - to mean "any medicine not supplied with the intention of maximizing corporate profits.
The point is - I think the vast majority of Americans would get better and more frequent medical care even with the kind of government run single-payer form of universal healthcare found in countries like cuba.
My own country uses multipayer universal healthcare e.g. there are both private medical facilities and public ones. Medical insurance companies (who generally take bulk contracts with employers offering you better rates) that pay for private care, while public is free-for-all. The catch here is that we're a very poor country - so public means long waits and overworked staff. Despite that, a few years ago I got in a motorcycle crash when I was uninsured, went to a public hospital and got excellent care and thus survived without any lasting injuries.
Brazil is just a little richer than my native South Africa, I used to be a very regular traveler there. They too have multipayer system like we do, but they have a somewhat richer country. On one of my trips I got sick, simple virus infection. Here - I would save my precious medical-savings-account (insurance part only kicks in if you're hospitalized) and just heal up at home. There I was instantly dragged to a clinic by my hosts. True I had to wait about two hours to be helped (if I went to a private one with an appointment I could skip that, but I'd literally be paying for the convenience - the care is identical). Once I got to a doctor though, I was fully examined. I was then prescribed a course of immune-boosting vitamins, given 3 hours of pure oxygen (another immune booster) and a series of shots to prevent secondary infections... basically 5 hours of care (suddenly waiting 2 hours isn't so bad by comparison). Whereas normally a flu virus knocks me out for up to two weeks, I was back on my feet in 3 days.
For 86 out of 100 patients - this care won't save their lives, just get them back to work a bit quicker (hmmm isn't that GOOD for the economy ?) but now what about that 14% of people in whom influenza is fatal ? This kind of treatment probably drops the fatality rate in that country to 7% or lower (I haven't checked the numbers - but it's obvious that massive preventative care in patients having a disease with a low fatality rate would lower it).
And do you know what I paid for all those shots, the oxygen treatment, the doctor's time and the huge bottle of pills they gave me ? Squat. No bill. Not even one penny. It's free - even to a foreign tourist. The form I was given to fill in had a place for my name and age, the rest of it was valid questions on my medical history. Nobody cared about my billing address.
If Brazil can afford to give high quality medical care to it's citizens for free - America has no excuse.
Do you realize that America is the ONLY industrialized nation on the PLANET with no guaranteed free healthcare option available to all citizens ? There isn't even ONE other industrialized country where poor people HAVE t
What makes you think that ? Their not replacing the windscreen in any way - they are using laser projectors to paint images ONTO the windscreen - the actual windscreen is still what it always was -a piece of (hopefully shatterprufe) glass.
>or the ability to roll your tongue. Only somebody who has never learned how much a perfectly execute tongueroll kiss can improve your chances of getting laid (not to mention improving oral skills) could possibly think that it does not have an evolutionary advantage... but then again, what did I expect from slashdot ?:P
Slashdot Mirror
Grrr... slashdot's i18n support is rather broken.. half my example symbols got dropped from the post... guess I should have previewed :S
>There's an enormous difference between lacking intelligence and lacking knowledge
Those who seek out information before forming opinions are what we call "informed". I always use the word "idiot" to refer to those who persist in a position that is not supported by the facts and persist (often forcefully) in their ignorance of the facts, even going so far as to deliberately avoid any information which may taint their preset world-views.
Making a statement which is clearly false to justify using an inconsequential matter as part of your judgement of others is a pattern of behavior that strongly correlates with this attitude.
Personally - I think "grammar nazi" should be added to philosophy classes as one of the most common fallacies of our time. It's a variant on the ad hominem attack. Whether a person spelled the words in his argument correctly does NOT in any way relate to whether his argument is correct or not.
>While you have valid points, in my mind the OP is for the most part correct. I tried visiting the following sites to get an impression of each:
You're example is machine translations of the same source text ?!?!?!? Do you seriously believe that original write-ups of the same event in a Spanish and English newspaper would look that similar ? The point is that superficial resemblance of punctuation in text is completely insignificant here. It just means that those languages use the same basic symbols to represent punctuation. What those symbols actually MEAN and the rules for how to use them differ radically, but it's quite impossible to recognize that in a language you cannot read.
In Afrikaans for example the " symbol is OFTEN placed on TOP of vowels, when this is done, it indicates a historic contraction where the missing letters are never pronounced. From the Dutch "vogel" - we dropped the g, it's neither written nor said. But "voel" would be pronounced like "fool" in Afrikaans (meaning "to feel"), bird is written "voël" (foo-ull).
No such convention exists in English or any other Latin language and even in Germanic's it's rare (though the same symbol is frequently used in German for a similar but not identical use - and the German usage ALSO occurs in Afrikaans - it inserts a syllable where one wouldn't have existed otherwise - basically the Afrikaans usage is a derivative, we use it to retain the syllable that got lost when the word was contracted) on the other hand, the type of contractions English use all the time (one use of apostrophes in English) doesn't exist at all in Germanic languages.
That's without even the fact that there are a multitude of extra punctuation symbols that are unique to some languages - and they solve the same problems with the Latin Alphabet in different ways.
German, English, Polish and Afrikaans all contain numerous sounds that have no letter representation in the Latin Alphabet.
English ignores the problem - they simply let each letter have several different sounds depending on what word you use it in (compare the T in "the" with the T in "cat").
German and Polish solves it by adding extra letters - but importantly not the same ones. The German ß and Polish for example (both are basically the same sound that in English is written with the two-letter "sh" combination)..
Polish is particularly confusing in the Latin alphabet because it's not the native alphabet of the language, it's really supposed to use the Cyrillic alphabet - so it has another compensation on top, the same one as Afrikaans. Stick a bunch of dots and stripes over letters which act as symbols and change pronunciation according to certain rules. So E, , and ê are all completely different (but related) sounds.
Yes they look similar if you don't try to read... but that's a complete superficial thing. Same symbols - completely different uses and even more radically different rules about how those uses are applied.
Try to actually LEARN at least one foreign language before forming opinions about it. The US and Britain are basically the only
>Capitalization and punctuation don't vary that much across languages
WTF ?!?!?! Seriously dude... WTF ?!?!??!
Let's just look at the small sampling of languages I can read (to a lesser or greater extent). And keep in mind three of these are all languages that share a COMMON Origin (Ancient West Germanic) and one is essentially a dialect of the another split of a mere 300 years ago. That makes this a pretty skewed sample. Choose any two languages randomly and the differences will get MUCH bigger.
German: All nouns are capitalized.
English: Capitals are used only for the names of Deities, Persons and the first word of a sentence.
Afrikaans: Similar to English... oh unless the sentence starts with the non-specific article... then the SECOND word starts with a capital.
Dutch: Same as English (the Afrikaans exception does not exist in Dutch).
Portuguese: Fucked if I know... after several years, I STILL don't understand all of it.
How about the Apostrophe:
Dutch: Apostrophe is used to indicate missing letters.
German: Same as Dutch.
Afrikaans: Apostrophe indicates missing letters - but it's only allowed to be used for this when those letters are deliberately left out for an EXCEPTIONAL reason (such as accenting a quote or poetic freedom) and in the spelling of the Afrikaans word 'n (yes the word is an apostrophe and an small n but pronounced "uh" - derived from the Dutch word for "one").
Portuguese: There is no apostrophe as we think of it, thoug the ' symbols is used in the spelling of some words.
English: Used to indicate missing letters in (specifically in contractions) and to indicate possession. Moreover the rules on how it does both the above get very convoluted (especially where the uses overlap, as in a posessive contraction) and leads to continuous confusion among English speakers about the fact that it's, its and its' are three completely different words with exactly the same pronunciation (apparently we can easily tell them apart from context when LISTENING but when reading we have to create a stupid cosmetic difference to see which is which).
Now those are small differences between languages of relatively common origins... if I start telling you how it works in African languages (I speak two) you simply wouldn't BELIEVE me, it has the following in common with the above: Sweet blue fuck all.
That's despite the fact that no African language has a written language of their own and adopted a modified version of the English alphabet and punctuation to be able to write -they still had to change almost every rule just to make sense because their entire gramatical structure is radically different.
It gets even more bizarre when you consider languages that have a history of writing, but radically different origins from English, such as the Slavic and Asian languages.
In English a word with no vowels is unpronouncable. In Russian... that's about 3/4 of the dictionary. In Polish, it's more like 4/5...
See... I'm actually a non-native English speaker, who has a degree in English literature. I can read Shakespeare with ease and joy, and both speak and write English quite a bit better than most Britons (let alone Americans) and I had Linguistics as a second major.
And if there is one thing you learn very quickly when you study multiple languages on a professional level - it's that languages are as radically different as the cultures that produce them, reflect those cultures and become an extension of those cultures.
What you say smacks back to the so-called romantic theory of linguistics. Which was a very Platonic theory that believed there is some perfect language we're all born with, and all human languages are imperfect attempts to implement it.
The romantic theory is interesting in that it was the very first theory to ever exist in Linguistics... but it's also not actually been considered to have any basis in fact or reality for over 200 years now... hell even the Russian Orthodox theory of Linguistics have at least SOME provable reality to it and THAT came from 1916.
Current linguistic theory as it applies to your statement can be summarized as follows: you're an idiot.
ROFL - yeah, exactly.
Sexy female voice in the cockpit: "Now come to a heading of 329."
Pilot: "Wait... WTF ? Who put that mountain there ?...."
There's another side to it as well.
With the 10mp you can crop a third of the picture out and still have more left over than the 6mp even took. This is something art photographers do all the time. Cropping is often crucial for getting the composition you want and getting rid of details that don't add anything to the focus of the picture. The more data you HAVE the more you can do with it.
This is also why art photographers take pictures in RAW mode rather than jpeg. What's lost with jpeg's lossy compression is data we can USE to make the picture better with later. Photoshopping pix to change what they look like is not all that impressive to me, but adjusting the light levels so somebody's gorgeous blue eyes can come out a bit better... that's art.
I said I felt CULTURALLY at home in San Francisco - I felt I could fit in with the "judge not" approach to other people.
I recently read about half of conservapedia because I wanted to understand what people there think. What I found sadly, only reinforced my views. The majority of the American conservatives are members of the religious right who believe in legislating morality.
I notice you didn't respond to any of the points I raised about that - you limited yourself only to economic issues, and then only because those issues are the only ones on which some conservative politics sometimes make sense (conservative could also mean to be sparing and 'conserve' resources - not a bad approach mostly).
I did however say that I have never met a poor conservative - granted, I was speaking about South Africa in that case. You'll never meet a black person in this country who is not economically liberal unless they also part of the small group of wealthy black people. Our country has an odd mixture of views. Wealthy whites are in general morally and economically in line with your conservatives. Poor whites tend to rely on church-charity rather than state and not really think about it beyond that, morally their the most conservative of all. Wealthy black people (the ones in charge at the moment) tend to be morally liberal - at least on paper, and certainly boosted by the fact that our constitution was written from that viewpoint - and economically conservative. Poor black people (the vast majority) tend to be morally conservative (though not the same morality as yours) and economically liberal - because economic liberal policies are the only thing letting them survive marginally better than they did under apartheid.
Here the most likely cause of unrest in the streets is when those poor blacks protest because the government isn't living up to the service delivery obligations it has. When the money set aside for liberal "care-for-each-other" causes don't GET where it's meant to be. They would never consider removing the POSSIBILITY of that money getting there.
While it's true that the republican party was founded to end slavery, the Lincoln republican view and the one of today have essentially nothing in common. There's a reason why black people in America vote predominantly democrat- the republicans instituted separatism in your country, it was the democrats that MLK and Rosa Parks found a voice in - the republicans shunned them. Don't you find it surprising that the old slave-states are now the red states ? The people whom the republican party declared WAR on, are now almost all republicans, what's more likely ? That a few million people changed their minds ? Or that two political parties changed their policies ?
"I might not respond to this thread further, because there's no rational arguing with someone who argues against high gas prices when it's a result of the Republican and for high gas prices when it's a result of the Democrat"
I didn't do that- I never considered WHO was doing it, but WHY and HOW they did it. Bush did it to enrich himself and his cronies, he did it by killing millions of innocent children, dumping you in an unwinnable war and making life a great deal harder for everyone else on the planet. Obama is doing it as part of a plan to solve the underlying problem of using oil in the first place, to replace it with BETTER answers - and coincidentally, give the human race a chance to save ourselves from our own stupidity.
I don't like his higher gas prices anymore than Bush's - but I agree with his motives and I didn't agree with Bush's motives. There is nothing irrational about that.
The sad irony is that there ARE no real liberals in US politics, democratic and republican policies are almost identical economically. Remember that the worst budget shortfall and the single-largest expansion of government power in your countries history was both done under the Bush administration. Bush was only conservative in his rhetoric, never in his actions. In his actions - he was a
There are 40 million people in this country, and 40 million points of view. Most of them are extremely conservative - middle-American's would feel right at home here. There's a reason I choose to live in Cape Town - it's the most liberal city in the country. I like to describe it as South Africa's little San Francisco. ... welcomed. The only place where I didn't see anybody being looked down upon, scorned or mistreated. Cape Town bills itself as the "pink capital" of Africa - for it's gay-friendly culture. I'm straight but frankly who somebody else chooses to fuck is absolutely NONE of my concern - provided everyone involved is a consenting adult- it's not the governments concern EITHER.
And in all your country, S.F. was the only place I felt
I've seen where conservative viewpoints lead. Appartheid South Africa was as conservative as they come. One group's morality passing as law. Millions of people suffering to support the wealth of a few. Everything is a trade-off, Obama tries to prevent global warming from becoming a disaster and reduce your dependence on a rare commodity that you need to buy from some of the most volatile places on earth... you complain about the cost. The fact is - Obama said all along, the answer isn't bio-fuel or oil-replacements, it's ENERGY replacement, these are intermediary steps to try and GET there.
More expensive food is a problem... is it really a bigger problem than half the world flooded ? Because we ARE headed to that, it's a scientific consensus - and I tend to trust scientists over people with a stake in business models built on refuting it.
I could almost live with people who were conservatives economically and liberals socially. I don't agree with them - but at least... I don't think they are actively doing harm to other people. I like the fact that in my country - overturning the ban on gay marriage took just one case in the constitutional court. That case never EVER asked what a "founding father" would have thought - because the "call to tradition" is a FALACY - it's NEVER a good argument. It asked one thing "are we treating gays differently" - and found the answer to be yes. Since our constitution specifically prohibits ANY discrimination (by government or private citizens/companies) based on *anything* (and gives a list of examples SPECIFICALLY including sexual orientation) the court had the power to TELL the government to change the law - which they then did.
Here we have an equality court, specifically empowered to deal with cases of discrimination - and punish those guilty of it.
The funny thing is - I'm NOT a liberal, I'm not a conservative either. My views are my own and they are situational and specific. On each issue I hold a view - sometimes that view is liberal, sometimes that view is socialist, sometimes it's libertarian. The only group with whom I cannot find ANY common ground, on ANY issue, EVER - is conservatives.
I was not an adult when apartheid ended. I never got most of the propaganda, I was 9 years old when Nelson Mandela was pardoned. All I remember of my childhood under apartheid I find APPALLING. The government dictated that nobody may marry outside their race and sex-outside-marriage was illegal but the law could ONLY be enforced if the person was of a different race... well I married outside my race. Just 20 years earlier, my marriage would have been illegal.
I live surrounded by the poverty that conservative politics created, and I watch the beneficiaries of the wealth of it shrug of the suffering and sooth their consciences when they throw a small coin in the collection bag at their churches.
Conservatives scare me - because they are so afraid of change - and they should be because I have NEVER met a poor conservative. The conservatives here and in your country are consistently middle-class or higher, they want to preserve the unfairness of the system because it's unfair in THEIR favor. Well... I was born to be one of the lucky ones. I was born white, destined for wealth and success - ju
I specifically left sicko as the LAST item on my list... moreover it's quite clear you haven't actually SEEN it. The thing is - Sicko isn't ABOUT people without medical insurance. It's about the terrible state of healthcare for the people who DO have insurance - and STILL find that lifesaving treatments get denied.
You also ignored the entire rest of my post... which had some valid points.
Here's what American's don't understand. You don't just elect a president of the united states. You elect the De Facto most powerful man on the planet. When Bush invaded Iraq, fuel prices in South Africa more than trippled in three months. This had an immediate knock-on effect to other industries (all of which need shipment). Prices of basic foodstuffs more doubled in those first free months. The reserve bank, in a desperate bid to try and stop us from going into hyperinflation quadrupled interest rates - so bond payments went up - in my case by nearly 60% per month.
The wealthfare of everyone in my country was massively harmed by the decision of a politician we don't get to vote for, who doesn't listen to our voices - who couldn't care less that we exist.
People in China, Canada and Europe don't really care who you elect, their nations are powerful enough that they can and will require of their politicians to make policies that America may not like. The rest of us HAS to care, because our politicians will never, ever risk pissing off the US. That's about 4 billion people whose lives are in your hands every time you go vote.
America's position in the world means that your choices determine our destinies. We vote for our leaders, but we don't get to vote for the man who tells our leaders what to do, who can tank our economies at a whim... you do. So every decent person in America takes upon himself with every election- responsibility not just for himself, his family and his country - but for the effect his decision that day will have on 4 BILLION people !
You are our voice, our only little say in what kind of world we live in - comes from trying to reason with you.
No wonder when you reelected that bastard our biggest newspaper carried the story under the headline "A dark day for the entire world". That's the day we started fearing and despising your nation. The day we realize that though you are responsible for the lives of most of the world, you just don't care at all - most of you aren't even aware that we exist.
So American's have a bad rap - as a whole, your nation EARNED that rap. When you elected Bush the first time -we didn't mind, most of us reckoned he couldn't be that much worse than the usual... but that second time... we lost almost all faith in America.
Then you elected Obama. A man who spoke of a foreign policy built on compassion, and recognition of the responsibility that comes with America's power. Until that moment, none of us could believe it would happen - and when it did, we cheered you. We praised you. We said "they learned, maybe they can learn to care about what their choices mean for the rest of us". We said "they have earned a second chance"... well I read the news, and the US has basically spent every day since then trying it's best to show the world that Obama's election was nothing but a fluke... the average American still couldn't find Cape Town on a map... and still couldn't care less about us. If people starve because you choose the wrong leaders, and fill your congress and senate with idiots who will make even the good leader you managed to choose effectively incapable of doing a single good thing- even for YOURSELVES... you will still believe that this is the American way.
For the record, I'm using the plural you above, to speak about America in general, not about Sally Forth in particular. My discussion with you has led me to believe you are person who thinks a bit about things and genuinely considers things. I dissagree with your conclusions but at least I'll grant that you seem to ask questions and you've certainly forced me to think really hard
So perhaps your view is a bit too local...
Because the rest of the world sees your medical system when we watch movies like John Q or hear Cutner tell Taub "when you have millions of people thousands of dollars in debt because of medical expenses, it's only a matter of time before one of them does something inexcusable" and books like "The Rainmaker".
The reality is - that in large parts of the US - that's exactly how it works. The doctors want to do a procedure - they call your insurance company to find out if it's pre-approved. If it's not pre-approved, they have to submit a claim and motivation - and if the insurance company turns it down (which they routinely do for all claims over a certain amount, some have been claimed at as low as 5000 dollars) then the procedure doesn't HAPPEN.
Now up there I just cited the fiction that gives us this view of the US as a system where doctors hands are tied and they have to watch their patients die because of greedy insurance companies.
I always take Michael Moore with a (small but not non-existent) piece of salt, but Sicko tells the same story...
In fact, up until this discussion with you - I have never heard a different story, from anybody, ever.
You say you live in a Rural part of the US. Rural communities tend to be small and very caring of one another, that's not a US thing, it's a global thing - the same is found in rural South Africa.
But the vast majority of American's (and people all over the world) don't live in rural areas, they live in big urban cities. I've lived in my appartment (which I own) for three years now - I know the name of one of my 50-something neighbours and I've had two conversations with her - ever.
That's the (sad) reality of citylife. Most people don't HAVE the kind of communities you describe to rely on. If doctors acted like you suggest - even in a city like Cape Town, the doctor would be bankrupt because people wouldn't be able to pay and nobody but their relatives would help and they aren't likely to be able to help that much either.
Either way - I have never favored fully socialized healthcare, I even agree with you that everything does have a price and Doctors put in massive time and money to become doctors and deserve to be rewarded for it.
What I do favor is universal health care. That means - anybody, and everybody can get any life-saving treatment - always.
It's a big enough burden on hospitals just to keep the E.R. doors open so they can treat accident victims and people with heart attacks. There is no way they can do something that takes months of preparation and costs more than 200 thousand US dollars (like say bone-marrow transplants) unless they can be sure of getting paid - the hospital that donates that to one patient is doing a massive disservice to all the others.
I would prefer to see a system here where the richest of the rich and go to the same hospitals as the poorest of the poor - by seeing our state hospitals improve so nobody needs private ones anymore, and the doctors are BETTER paid than the private doctors now. I want to see my nation grow to where we have near zero unemployment, and we all pay taxes - if we can do this with the taxes of only one fifth of the people... imagine what we could do if we had 80% of us paying into that fund ?
But honestly - I couldn't care less HOW the healthcare system works, I don't care what ideology drives it. I care about results.
I want to live in a country where every aids-orphan is guaranteed his anti-retrovirals. I want to live in a country where every sick old lady is guaranteed her pain meds - even in this day where many of them haven't seen their children in decades and live on a pittance of a pension. Where a leukemia patient can worry ONLY about finding a donor, not about finding money to pay for care.
I would really love to live in a world where cities are as caring and community orientated as rural towns are... but that is probably never going to happen. So we have to find other ways to care for the weakest
I'm not in Europe, though I have traveled there extensively, I have also traveled extensively in both North and South America and have visited several countries in Africa where I live.
Specifically I live in South Africa, and though we are by far the wealthiest nation on the continent we are still a poor country with a 45% unemployment rate and only 20% of the population earning a taxable income.
Nonetheless - we are able to provide free medical care to all for at least any and all life-saving treatments - even if it means that I as part of that 20% pay about 37% of my income in taxes (the richest pay around 45%). I have often heard people here complain about the high taxes but I have never heard them suggest that the academic free hospitals should close - they would rather see us cut defense spending and spend on healthcare and education. We don't argue about taking care of society, and the sheer size of that burden means that there is no conceivable way to do that with pure charity.
We have to be able to rely on the government to centrally collect funds and distribute services where they are needed.
It's also true that nobody in that 20% of taxpaying citizens ever use the free hospitals (unless you are stupid enough not to have medical insurance). So we're funding a service we never use.
For us, the reason is thus: to survive the private hospitals have to offer a higher quality service. The difference isn't in care, but in comfort. At a state hospital the qeues are long, and the halls are packed. At a private hospital, you arrive to an appointment and find a bed in an empty room with a television.
Since we all get mandatory medical insurance as part of our employment contracts - we'd be stupid not to use it.
And our insurance companies are among the most profitable businesses in our country - despite the fact that their plans are subject to government oversight (to ensure nothing lifesaving is left out of even the CHEAPEST plan), despite the fact that they can't EVER turn ANYBODY away. It's even fairly affordable - because the bulk-deals-with-employers setup means reduced rates, and the part I pay reduces my taxable income - a win.
So basically - that crap of "pre-existing condition - no insurance" and having to check for each procedure whether your insurance company will pay or not that you have there... that is just corporate greed.
One thing I see in Obama's current plan I applaud is at least to tell them they can't deny based on pre-existing conditions.
The interesting thing is - having the premiums basically capped, and the quality of cover monitored so they can't skip forced our insurance companies to get creative to make money. How do they make a profit ? Reduce how often people claim - and since there is no legal way to reduce whether people claim for valid cases ... you have to make them healthier.
So I get my yearly checkup for free including all the basic health-checks, HIV testing etc - why because the earlier they pick up a potential risk factor like high cholesterol and advise me on how to deal with it, the lower the risk that they'll be funding a heart transplant. Catch high blood sugar and they may just save themselves a future diabetes case and paying for a lifetime's worth of insulin shots. They give gym discounts and even arrange discounted vacations (to reduce stress - that being the number one disease causing factor in their customer-base) and give reduced premiums to non-smokers.
Anything they can do to motivate people to live healthier and get early preventative treatment ultimately saves them money. So they make an effort to encourage early treatment because it's usually cheaper for them.
I actually think our system works - and our economy is growing, the wealthier we get... the better it's going to work for everybody.
I think we just think fundamentally differently - and for the record - I'm only a socialist in some very special cases. I think clinging to any philosophy in all matters is shortsighted and idiotic. There is no "one-true-way" and EVERYTHING society faces should be individually addressed.
Very few countries actually HAVE socialized medecine, what most countries have is what is called "multipayer universal healthcare" (that's the term on concervapedia - a site intent on discrediting it). That means you get private AND public healthcare - the public healthcare generally is slower and less luxurious - but it's free. The private care is fast and efficient and usually paid by you (indirectly through insurance).
In my own country medical insurance companies are not allowed to exclude ANYBODY - under any conditions - not EVER. If you can pay the premiums, they HAVE to accept you. Plans HAVE to be standardized and government approved. If an item is on the approved-list, they can NEVER refuse payment. Most plans also include a savings account which is used to pay for all other medical expenses (until it's depleted anyway).
Our MSA's aren't the same as yours though. They get filled up at the beginning of the year, to a set amount depending on the plan you're on. And then your premiums go into filling it up, your left-overs are carried to next year - and your premiums are automatically tax-deducted as they go off your income BEFORE you are taxed.
So I pay my premiums, I have massive list of covered things - including essentially all non-elective surgery and chronic medications. Special treatment plans for high-cost diseases like HIV for example are also there.
The understanding is that the medical aid is EXPECTED to use the money that they make from healthy people's premiums and don't NEED to spend on their claims - to pay for the care of those less fortunate.
This is hardly socialism but it is a tightly regulated market - and for those who can't afford it, don't have jobs etc. there are free government run clinics and hospitals everywhere, usually run by public universities so the staff are excellent (all South African doctors do their internships at these hospitals as the universities where their medical schools are run them) - and a staff complement greatly boosted by a significant portion of doctors kindly donated to us a few years ago by Mister Castro.
It's not a perfect system - it has it's flaws (there have been problems with mis-administration at some government hospitals, doctors not receiving their salaries and not legally being allowed to quit while interning, when we first got the doctors from Cuba, nobody thought to make sure they send Doctors who didn't speak ONLY Spanish - which nobody here speaks) - but for the most part, it works really well.
Yes, I'd love to see my taxes reduced, but not at the cost of seeing people whose average earnings is about 5USD per week (a significant part of our population -about 30% or so) not be able to go to a doctor if they get sick. Especially in the country with the highest HIV infection rate on the planet.
It's true Americans tend to give more to charity than Europeans... on the other hand, Europeans spend more in taxes that are mostly used for charitable causes - and the poverty level in Europe is significantly lower than in the US. More-over those that are poor are generally far better off than their US counterparts... I don't think the reason for the discrepency is because Americans are a more charitable nation (frankly - I've been to the US and your culture is essentially the most self-centered, mediocre culture I saw anywhere in the world - not all Americans are like that, but enough to make it the defining attributes of the culture) - I think it's because quite simply - Europeans don't NEED to give as much to charity, there are just that much less to give TOO.
So - as I said before - the right way to handle a specific societal need varies. Best way to provide food is still to sell it on an open market, as long as you don't
Yep I guess all those news stories about the person who needs a life-saving operation and gets turned down by the insurance company on a flimsy excuse because the operation costs half-a-million and they know they just have to stall long enough for him to die and the bill goes away are *all* made up right ?
Kina hard to make up dead bodies though.
Standard practise in American medical insurance companies is to deny ANY claim over 100K - regardless of merit. Standard practise of American hospitals are to refuse to perform any operation costing that much unless you have proof you can pay it or your insurance company has approved it.
When people are taking out second bonds on houses to pay for an operation - people who HAVE medical insurance- the system is corrupt.
The reality is that what you say is only true if "you're going to die today" - the problem is the person with 6 months of suffering to go, who could get another 20 years except that his bone marrow transplant is repeatedly refused and each refusal is a lie.
The problem is that medical insurance companies are ALLOWED to turn away people on the grounds of pre-existing conditions, or refuse to pay for conditions that previously existed...
But you're still ignoring the single biggest problem with the whole system. The people who need the most expensive medical care, the most often - are by definition the people LEAST capable of paying for it. The poor, infants, the chronically ill and the elderly - the people who are NOT earning a salary and can't earn one. You can only pay 25 dollars a month for so long if you DON'T HAVE AN INCOME. Not to mention - pharmacies typically won't give you your medication on those kinds of terms.
A humane medical system MUST let those who are healthy and earning subsidize those who aren't -because there simply ISN'T another way. American greed has got you believing that poor kids dying from curable diseaeses because the cure is expensive is better than paying a hundred dollars a month extra in tax - just because your own medical costs are nowhere near that... until you are also 75 years old, with plenty of organs starting to fail and suffering because you can't even afford your own pain medications and the insurance company just stopped paying a long, long time ago...
That's the reality - you are among those who don't NEED extensive medical services right now, your age-group and health-status puts you there. You aren't fighting for changes because you see so little benefit for yourself - and that is murderous greed in my book. Every society since the dawn of time has understood that those who can HAS to help those who can't, medical systems is one modern case where we can MEASURE how civilized a nation is - by seeing to what extent those who can are willing to subsidize the treatment of those who can't - if only out of the enlightened self interest of knowing that you could BE one of those who can't tomorrow, not to mention common human decency.
Oh right, because the systems are not perfect, that means there is no way they can be better than yours.
You HAVE 25$ a months, and you've not needed a bone-marrow transplant or similiar life-saving but horribly expensive medical procedure. The people who do can tell you - your $25/month is probably going down the drain, because insurance companies routinely find excuses not to pay for those procedures.
Yep, you will get TREATED... if you happen to be extremely lucky and rich. When hospitals are allowed to turn anybody away, EVER, that's already murder.
I wasn't pushing for Obama's current bill. I'm not an American and I don't know the details - but I specifically put "socialized medicine" in quotes (as I mentioned in another post) because it's not MY choice of word - it's what republicans call it.
The current bill I agree is probably worse than what there used to be - big pharma and their republican buddies made quite sure that Obama couldn't actually change anything USEFUL.
The original reform bill he proposed - now THAT would have been a good thing.
The sad thing is... when this disaster blows up in your faces, you'll be blaming the president who proposed healthcare reform - and not the companies and pocket-politicians who took away all the good parts and left you with even less.
Overtesting is a relative term - in this case relative to the way your medical system works. That last useless test could end up positive, could save a life - even if it was only put in there to pad the bill. If testing was free - the doctor couldn't gain by doing more than the symptoms actually supported, and could only lose by doing less than he ought to (that WOULD be clear-cut malpractice then)
The free market concept works because it lets us use trade to create incentives for effort. But some things are far too valuable to trade. This is why we ban things like human traficking and slavery - we think human life is too precious to be sold. Technically that's a market restriction - but in this case, a good one.
I think that your version of a medical market has proven to be no different though - it makes human life a matter for trade, and that means only the wealthy can afford to have it - while human life is supposed to be a right. A right so strongly enshrined in our conscious that we won't even allow people to choose to give it up (suicide is illegal in most places) unless they are doing so to save other lives (heroism is lauded in every culture).
The thing I don't get is that for the most part - the people in the US most opposed to health-care reform in the US are the very same people most opposed to euthanasia. A terminally ill patient can't choose to end his own suffering - but a poor person doesn't get the right to survive a curable illness ? That's the worst case of cognitive dissonance I've seen in a while - and US conservative's have turned deliberate dissonance into an artform.
I think you're wrong about government doing EVERYTHING badly - that's just too much of an overgeneralisation - and frankly there are things that are better done by them than by private industry - your own history shows some examples of things that you chose to take OUT of private industry and into government control because it was a disaster when privatized.
If my house catches fire - I do NOT want the fireman to ask for my fire insurance card before they put out the blaze, I'm sure my neighbors would appreciate that too - since the fire is likely to spread to their houses if not stopped. You had private fire-fighting companies in the past... it was a disaster, that's why these days your fire departments are state run. As far as I can see - hospitals and firefighters are in exactly the same class of service here. Everything that made private firefighting a bad idea is happening to medicine now.
I say it again... I LIVE in a country with a system you would call "Socialist" a country where 90% of the taxes are paid by only about 20% of the population.
WE can afford to provide free medical care for the everybody - and frankly of the many things my massively overcharged taxes are spent on the medical care is the lowest burden, fortunes on weaponry (who the hell will South Africa ever go to war with ?) is a much bigger concern (Which is why the arms deal degenerated into a corruption scandal).
Brazil can do it. France can do it, Britain can do it.
Everybody in the world does it except you and nations so poor they rely on international aid just to feed people. Yeah - you are so much better off.
And apparently you missed the bit where I CLEARLY stated: "I didn't check the numbers" ? I was demonstrating that preventative care would lower the fatality rate and I made it very clear that the numbers I used were purely examples, I made no claim that they were factual - in fact I specifically stated they weren't. As my previous post shows though - if you wanted to compare real numbers (which are utterly irelevent to the point of my post - I was writing about HEALTHCARE not the fatality rates of influenza) - they are still far higher than you seem to think - certainly high enough to validate my use of influenza as an example. I didn't bother to check exact numbers because they are completely irelevent to my point. What matters is only that influenza can have serious complications, and can be fatal and that preventative care can greatly reduce the risk of both - the exact amounts by which is something that you look at when you plan a healthcare budget, not when you decide if you need one.
Short answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_epidemic
The long version (that applies to every year):
It's true, it just doesn't make the news because the people who die from influenza are almost exclusively in one of the following categories:
1) Those with impaired immune systems (influenza is the number 2 killer of HIV sufferers after TB)
2) The elderly
3) Infants
Basically when an old person gets the flu and it leads to a heart-attack, we don't really think of it as a flu death but since it was the flu that caused the heart attack in the first place - that's the true cause. Flu is known to damage the heart, when the heart is already weak - it is often fatal.
Note I said ALMOST exclusively - healthy 25 year olds also die from flu sometimes, especially if they don't take proper rest-care while sick or don't control the fever.
Every now and then we get a strain of influenza that is somewhat harder for our immune systems to tackle and the death rates in all three categories go much higher, while the rates among healthy adults climb to a more noticeable level and we get giant media freak-outs about the pandemic that is about to wipe us out. Usually it's given some name like "bird flu" or "swine flu" - remember those ?
And then, much more rarely we get a particularly resistant strain that actually DOES lead to a massive world wide pandemic - like the one I linked above.
Now go to your room and let the grown-ups talk.
The actual truth, as usual, is a bit more complex than the bit we all remember and quote.
Where a correlation occurs there are four distinct possible reasons:
Let say a correlation that during the time when X is known to have increased, Y showed a corelatory increase. then
1) It is possible that this is because X caused Y - e.g. the causation that way isn't implied - yes it's a possible implication.
2) It is possible that X in fact caused Y (e.g. the causation is in fact in the opposite direction of what the quoter of the stat is trying to say).
3) It is possible that X and Y were both caused by an unknown third factor Z.
4) It is possible that X and Y were caused by completely different factors and their correlation is purely coincidental.
The mere existence of a correlation does not imply any of these four possibilities more strongly than the other - they are equally likely unless additional data is presented to corroborate one.
The example from my philosophy textbook (which I'm shamelessly citing here) was this:
Between the period 1955 to 1965 the number of schools in the US where sex-ed was given increased by 75%, during the same period the amount of teenage pregnancies increased by nearly 80% (Both compared to the decade before that). Conclusion - giving sex-ed led to more teenage pregnancies.
This citation is classic example of the correlation/causation mistake in that it assumes option 1.
In this case option 2 actually seems quite likely - if teenage pregnancies were going up, that would put pressure on schools to give sex-ed to try and reverse this trend.
But what if we consider more available data. Specifically that the pill came on the market in 1953 sparking the sexual revolution.
If we consider that the pill let to a more relaxed attitude among teenagers about sex, but that this attitude probably spread a lot faster than actual usage of the pill then it explains the increase in teen pregnancies which combined with the known presence of this attitude would put pressure on the schools to give sex ed.
So then it suggests that in fact we have options 2,3 and 4 happening in a commonly reinforcing manner. The only conclusion that isn't supported by the data at all is option one.
With each bit of additional data added, including comparison with other times where there was a sharp increase in teenage pregnancy (like the early years of the current decade under the Bush administration) we find that the likelihood of X actually causing Y in this example gets smaller and smaller and in fact becomes statistically insignificantly small.
But that doesn't mean option 1 is never the right answer. Sometimes a correlation really is due to causation. You just cannot assume it without further evidence.
And the counterpoints...
1) Right now America's biggest problem isn't doctors testing too much - it's too LITTLE testing. Americans don't do any preventative medicine choosing to go to the doctor only when the damage done is already severe.
Guess what - early detection and preventative care is not only better for saving lives, it generally costs a lot less to provide.
The old adage goes that "early detection of cancer means before there are serious symptoms" - how do you equate that with a system where people are afraid to go to a doctor until the symptoms are severe ?
More importantly - I didn't say medicine should always be provided by the government, there are some possible valid concerns there though it's clear to me that your "medicine market" system comes down to saying "the right to life is on the lawbooks but only for rich people". I put "socialized medicine" in quotes on purpose - specifically to point out that I am using the term as it's use by America concervatives - to mean "any medicine not supplied with the intention of maximizing corporate profits.
The point is - I think the vast majority of Americans would get better and more frequent medical care even with the kind of government run single-payer form of universal healthcare found in countries like cuba.
My own country uses multipayer universal healthcare e.g. there are both private medical facilities and public ones. Medical insurance companies (who generally take bulk contracts with employers offering you better rates) that pay for private care, while public is free-for-all.
The catch here is that we're a very poor country - so public means long waits and overworked staff. Despite that, a few years ago I got in a motorcycle crash when I was uninsured, went to a public hospital and got excellent care and thus survived without any lasting injuries.
Brazil is just a little richer than my native South Africa, I used to be a very regular traveler there. They too have multipayer system like we do, but they have a somewhat richer country. On one of my trips I got sick, simple virus infection. Here - I would save my precious medical-savings-account (insurance part only kicks in if you're hospitalized) and just heal up at home.
There I was instantly dragged to a clinic by my hosts. True I had to wait about two hours to be helped (if I went to a private one with an appointment I could skip that, but I'd literally be paying for the convenience - the care is identical).
Once I got to a doctor though, I was fully examined. I was then prescribed a course of immune-boosting vitamins, given 3 hours of pure oxygen (another immune booster) and a series of shots to prevent secondary infections... basically 5 hours of care (suddenly waiting 2 hours isn't so bad by comparison).
Whereas normally a flu virus knocks me out for up to two weeks, I was back on my feet in 3 days.
For 86 out of 100 patients - this care won't save their lives, just get them back to work a bit quicker (hmmm isn't that GOOD for the economy ?) but now what about that 14% of people in whom influenza is fatal ? This kind of treatment probably drops the fatality rate in that country to 7% or lower (I haven't checked the numbers - but it's obvious that massive preventative care in patients having a disease with a low fatality rate would lower it).
And do you know what I paid for all those shots, the oxygen treatment, the doctor's time and the huge bottle of pills they gave me ? Squat. No bill. Not even one penny. It's free - even to a foreign tourist. The form I was given to fill in had a place for my name and age, the rest of it was valid questions on my medical history. Nobody cared about my billing address.
If Brazil can afford to give high quality medical care to it's citizens for free - America has no excuse.
Do you realize that America is the ONLY industrialized nation on the PLANET with no guaranteed free healthcare option available to all citizens ? There isn't even ONE other industrialized country where poor people HAVE t
What makes you think that ?
Their not replacing the windscreen in any way - they are using laser projectors to paint images ONTO the windscreen - the actual windscreen is still what it always was -a piece of (hopefully shatterprufe) glass.
but does it run linux...
I want mine to run GTA ... and witness the havoc that ensues...
And yet you folks still seem to honestly believe the "socialized medicine" would leave you WORSE off than you are ?
*shakes head sadly*
>or the ability to roll your tongue. :P
Only somebody who has never learned how much a perfectly execute tongueroll kiss can improve your chances of getting laid (not to mention improving oral skills) could possibly think that it does not have an evolutionary advantage... but then again, what did I expect from slashdot ?