Right, and how many of those able-bodied, working Americans are trapped in a poverty gap because, even if they earn something like $30,000 per year or more, they cannot afford the spiralling cost and mounting debt that builds up in the event that they get even a little bit sick, even with insurance.
American's are *expected* to care for their own healthcare, and pay for it. Doesn't mean that they all can, able-bodied, working or not.
Oh, I meant to mention that I have also lived in the US for some time, as well as the UK. I have first hand experience of the US healthcare system as well. I just used the movie as a quick example that everyone is likely to have seen (or could easily check).
In some hospitals yes. Or they'll do the minimum necessary to stop you dying, avoid expensive tests etc, then turf you out. It's a long way away from the reception and chain of care you receive in a national healthcare system, for example, if you need to see a specialist, or need a MRI, or have to have immediate surgery in an OR etc.
It's not really the emergency medicine I am concerned about in the US system, it is the entire culture relating to anything non-emergency - like coming down with cancer, or developing any other treatable disease, or having a baby, or so on - the system is not designed with the patient in mind, it is entirely set up to generate huge profits for the insurance and pharmaceutical companies. They don;t give a shit about your health, as long as you pay the fees.
You'll laugh at me, but it's the inhaler medicine being used by the fire fighter who fucked her lungs up at grund zero after 9/11 who is now a forgotten member of society, struggling to pay her medical bills after her insurance company fucked her over. Micheal Moore took her to Cuba where she purchased as much as she could get for $5 a pop.
Perhaps a little of the "zomg it's Micheal Moore, you cannot trust him, Fox told us he was the antichrist!" but there it is.
Your categorisations of the quality of doctors in the Canadian and UK health service is so grossly incorrect, I'm not even sure where to begin. Tell me, in your extensive experience of the UK health system (and let me just stop you here, I have had *extensive* experience in the UK health system), how have you determined that "all the best doctors have gone to the US"? I'm curious, since your experiences seem to differ so much from mine.
Also, your thinly-veiled racism that eastern-European, African and Pakistani doctors are "third world" and lesser-educated than their UK and US equivalents is very telling. Let me guess, you're an 18-35 year old white boy, with wealthy parents, living in a strongly republican suburb of a US city.
The bottom line is, universal healthcare, funded through government, should absolutely be the right of all mankind. Otherwise, you are creating a society where the rich control the poor, and you create second class citizens. America is a long way behind with healthcare and seriously needs to address it.
The UK system is nowhere near perfect, but it is leagues ahead of the USA.
You're posting anon, so I'm not going to hunt down any references - there's oodles of documentation out there on the internet.
The only thing that has made me reply is the section where you say:
Most legal residents do have access. Then again, illegals without insurance can still go to the emergency room for emergencies whether real or just a cough.
(emphasis yours).
Do you seriously believe that only illegal immigrants to the US have such a poor standard of care in the US system? What magical world do you live in? Or if you're smoking, what the hell is it and can I have some?
There are thousands of hard working, born and bred 100% -to-the-core-born-in-the-USA-for-14-generations families that a struggling desperately with the abhorrent open festering wound that is the American healthcare system. This has nothing to do with illegal immigrants and everything to do with providing care for your citizens, and America fails, and fails hard on that front. So very badly.
If you think anything else, then you are totally blind to the problem that faces an enormous swathe of the US population (who have jobs, families, homes and American passports going back a hundred years).
I have been to the "ER" or A&E as we call it, in severe pain before, and the triage nurse assessed me and sent me through, no muss, no fuss. This is one of the UK's busiest A&Es too. The nature of emergency medicine though is no different in the US or the UK - the fact that it's emergency medicine means there are no appointments or bookings, the place is as full as it gets, depending on the number of people that show up. The only reason the lines are shorter in US ER's is that, aside from the life threatening injuries (car wrecks, stab wound etc), poor people do not go to the ER when they get badly hurt (but not badly enough to be fatal) because the cannot afford it, so the wait is shorter for you, who can afford it.
You can't talk about waiting times in an emergency department, by its very nature there is no set queue.
The majority of drugs are available (in the UK health system anyway) and it tends to be the case that you need to look elsewhere if, after discovering that it's not usually available on the NHS and they won't make an exception for you, you have to look elsewhere.
The range of drugs and treatments is just as wide as the US, bar some of the more esoteric or bleeding edge drugs, but these are being brought into the fold as quickly as they can pass approval (assuming that they do work).
If you think "my country" is Canada, you're looking at the wrong Royal colony.
I'm not against capitalism, not at all. I am a strong proponent of it, even. But the "you're anti -capitalist!" or "you're communist!" seems to be the usual replies you have to field if you even attempt to mention nationalised health care.
The UK is a capitalist country, yet has universal healthcare. Funny, that.
You are agreeing to my point, yet arguing against me? Is that why you're posting anon?
My point is that trojans are a threat to all operating systems, and stem from the issues of trusting the source (literally in the case of OSS if you don't audit it line by line) of the executable or code that you're running.
It's not bankrupt. It costs *a lot* of money to run (it's one of the most expensive programs run by the government) but it's far from bankrupt.
It is recovering from 20 years of neglect under the tory government, and even after the long term with Labour in charge, it is still not where it needs to be. It is suffering hugely, and is slow to change since it is a massive entity.
There are severe budget concerns with it, but it is being dragged into the modern age (sometimes unsuccessfully and wastefully - check out some of the expensive disasters trying to modernise the NHS's IT systems), but it is getting there.
It's not perfect, but it is much better than the alternative.
Yes, I've no doubt that the true cost of the medicine is not $5, but its not $100+ either. The price of drugs in the US is entirely set by the drug companies, since they have all the systems in place to ensure people pay whatever they set as the price. (Just look at Medicare Part 4, or whatever that recent legislation is, and the way it relates to what prices are paid for drugs [they are fixed, and are twice as much as they need to be]).
These are the stories that people need to see. The old adage that anecdotes are not data just can't really apply here. There are thousands of families in exactly your position across America who are crippled by the healthcare system, but that doesn't matter - even if there's only the one family, it's too many and you really have to look at changing it.
America is the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world, and yet, it is the same country that puts altered, injured and confused patients into cabs and gives the driver $15 to drop them off on the street outside homeless shelters wearing nothing but a hospital gown because they have no insurance and no family to pay the bill.
And the gap between medicaid, the so-called solution for those who can't afford insurance, and the level of income you need to be able to afford insurance creates an *enormous* poverty gap like an open sore on the face of the most powerful, richest nation on Earth.
The US has the ability to create a national healthcare system, it just needs the will to do it, and has to be prepared to piss off a lot of people who like things the way they are because they get very rich on the backs of people who need to pay for medical care.
A society is judged not by the way it treats the well off, but by the way it treats the less well off, and in health care issues, the US is *way* down there in the toilet.
Don;t get me wrong, I love the USA. I just hate what they've done with medicine.
Or my grandfather, who also died on a waiting list. I did not say that the system was perfect, merely that the popular belief that you have to wait for years to even see a doctor about a sprained wrist are just wholly untrue.
Whoa, are you really basing the price of Windows Vista in Cuba with the price in the US, because the Cuban copy is pirated. If that's the crux of that argument, then the cost of Windows in the US is also $5.
The "we need drugs to cost so much" is Big Phama bullshit, as a convenient cover for the eye gougingly high prices that they can get away with because of the way the US system is structured. It has nothing to do with the real cost of drug development.
My point on taxes was that, aside from a couple of high-profile expensive taxes in the UK, my tax burden is similar to that of a US person (note, that the offsets in medical insurance costs for a US person balance out with our high gas taxes, and that we all pay sales tax, but ours is higher than most US state sales taxes).
My total tax burden is around 30% of my income, just like yours. Yet I have free healthcare included in that. If you do too (ie, you took that into account as a necessary expense) then who is better off? In my personal opinion, it is me, because I really dislike the US system, since it was set up for the benefit of rich people who run insurance companies and not for the guy like you making $30,000 who has to live with it.
That "we need the money to research new drugs" line has always been bullshit peddled by the drug companies. I do not buy it for a second. There is no reason for cheap, generic, easy to manufacture drugs cost as much as they do in the US.
And that the US is somehow "shouldering the burden of drug research on its own, for the good of us all" is terribly arrogant. It is nowhere close to accurate.
But knowing the way US insurance companies work, are you *certain* that all your expenses are covered?
That fight night in the intensive care unit, when you phone the insurance company to authorise it and they don;t stamp the paperwork until next day, so they pay for all but 1 day, or they just flat out refuse to pay because the hospital you're in is fine for OB/GYN care on insurance, but their intensive care unit is not one of their "approved" centres and you either have to pay up or move your ill child across town to one that they deem appropriate.
Don't kid yourself that the health insurance is for your benefit. They are out to squeeze you for everything they can get, and pay out as little as possible.
I hope that your baby is born healthy and you have no problems. So does your insurance company, but for a totally different reason.
Sometimes having a baby is not planned. Especially if you're a couple burdened by the religious right yelling at you every 5 seconds about the evils of birth control.
So what's the solution? They don't have sex?
What if their BC fails and they don;t want to terminate the baby? What then? Get a job that pays more than $20,000 per year?
The world is not as simple as the talking heads on Faux News make it out to be.
And what happens if there are complications? What happens if you need to stay extra days in the hospital?
In the UK, it's all no issue at all.
Hell, in France they'll send a health visitor around once a week who will do your laundry and help look after your child to help lighten the load for the new family.
It's not that we think the NHS is "free" - we are well aware that we pay for it. It's just that we all pay, all of the time, in tiny bites, to ensure that everyone can have the best care.
The American family that *can't* afford that $5,000 for a baby without borrowing it is not so fortunate as you. Or, to put it in terms of "why have a baby you can't afford?" let's assume you were talking about breaking your leg, or having a benign tumour removed that would cost you $5000 at the hospital.
The poor family who cannot afford that have to go without (or are now dealing with a large debt).
There are no diseases that the UK's "health plan" does not cover.
There are some drugs that are difficult to get on the NHS, and some that are only available in the "postcode lottery" for some of the more experimental drugs (where some counties will prescribe a drug, and some won't).
There are no diseases that the NHS won't treat you for, with the exception of some very expensive and/or experimental treatments - which I'm sure a US healthcare plan won't cover either.
Either way, even in the UK, if you want to get private healthcare, you are free to do so. Good luck finding private insurance that will cover you for the expensive/experimental drugs you need that the NHS can't provide though.
Oh, and I guess all those people who are unemployed are just "lazy bums who are leeching my tax dollars and not working", and "all fat people are just eating too much" or "all lung cancer sufferers are smokers and don't deserve any of my help to get better" or "anyone with liver disease is an alkie".
There is no doubt that obesity and smoking are major burdens on the UK health system, but everyone pays their NI, everyone is treated. The NHS run campaigns to educate people on how to eat and live healthily, but there are no rules.
I thought the US was all about "the government can't tell me what to do".
You're advocating forcing people to eat and live a certain way else they'll be denied there supposedly "universal" care. Short of making eating junk food illegal, I just don;t see how that would fly.
Americans have got to wake up and realise that the world does not always revolve around the individual. When something like national healthcare is mentioned, you cannot think of it in terms of "how will this affect me? Me me me. My money! My money will help pay for poor people to get healthcare! That's unfair! I pay my way and so should they!", without thinking about the big picture that if *everyone* is helping, then those that really can't help much (the unemployed, the extremely poor, the homeless) get help, while the better off also benefit. Try telling someone in the UK (no matter how much money they make) that your prescription can cost upwards of $100 for some meds. *All* prescriptions on the NHS cost a fixed sum, and it's £6.something.
Six quid. For any number of pills, for any medication.
I'm not sure where all that medical insurance money is going in the US, but if your drugs can cost more than $100 per month, it's not into pills.
The "long waiting lines" in the UK and Canadian health care systems are a myth perpetuated by US propaganda from certain special interest groups who desperately hope that the US system stays as it is.
Sure, in a system that's not perfect you are going to see some waits, and it's not going to be quite as "lick your ass service" as a private healthcare clinic in the US (but really, how many Americans actually have access to that service).
The national insurance that I pay is a tiny amount compared to my salary, and my taxes are not that much higher than the US (except VAT/Sales tax [15%], gasoline [70%] and alcohol/cigarettes [40% ish]), but we have ways to offset those costs.
There's no way I pay 50% in taxes, compared to my income.
The US insurance companies may try to play the "omg, free healthcare means crippling taxes for all citizens, even if you don;t get sick! Then you're paying for your friends and neighbours when they get sick and you're healthy! How unfair is that! It's totally like communism! Buy our healthcare and $400 prescriptions!"
When a medicine taken by a patient costs $100 per month, and costs $5 in Cuba, you know there's someone paying off a loan on a 100 foot yacht, and it;s not the person taking the medicine.
That it's somehow wrong that if everyone chips in a small amount (even if they never go to the doctor) that's somehow worse than landing a family with the choice of "pay for daddy's lifesaving surgery and have a $50,000 debt" or "wait and see if daddy gets better on his own".
There are some things that are totally worth paying for, and nationalised health care is totally one of them.
Now any large system there are problems with it, and the UK's system is still recovering from 20 years of neglect by the Tory government, and yet I still wouldn't trade it for the US system.
Not even if I was wealthy enough to afford the "good" insurance, that actually pays your bills when you go to the doctor.
For the record, I own an iPhone, and I use the app store. It doesn't mean I have to agree with the way Apple is doing things, but for now, it's not bad enough that I would choose not to use the iPhone.
Would i love it to be open? Sure. Does it really matter to me at the moment, given the way I use it? Not enough to stop me getting one.
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Right, and how many of those able-bodied, working Americans are trapped in a poverty gap because, even if they earn something like $30,000 per year or more, they cannot afford the spiralling cost and mounting debt that builds up in the event that they get even a little bit sick, even with insurance.
American's are *expected* to care for their own healthcare, and pay for it. Doesn't mean that they all can, able-bodied, working or not.
Oh, I meant to mention that I have also lived in the US for some time, as well as the UK. I have first hand experience of the US healthcare system as well. I just used the movie as a quick example that everyone is likely to have seen (or could easily check).
Well, it's made by the same company, comes out of the same factory. It even comes in the same box.
Plus, when you use it, your chances of getting a virus go *down*.
In some hospitals yes. Or they'll do the minimum necessary to stop you dying, avoid expensive tests etc, then turf you out. It's a long way away from the reception and chain of care you receive in a national healthcare system, for example, if you need to see a specialist, or need a MRI, or have to have immediate surgery in an OR etc.
It's not really the emergency medicine I am concerned about in the US system, it is the entire culture relating to anything non-emergency - like coming down with cancer, or developing any other treatable disease, or having a baby, or so on - the system is not designed with the patient in mind, it is entirely set up to generate huge profits for the insurance and pharmaceutical companies. They don;t give a shit about your health, as long as you pay the fees.
You'll laugh at me, but it's the inhaler medicine being used by the fire fighter who fucked her lungs up at grund zero after 9/11 who is now a forgotten member of society, struggling to pay her medical bills after her insurance company fucked her over. Micheal Moore took her to Cuba where she purchased as much as she could get for $5 a pop.
Perhaps a little of the "zomg it's Micheal Moore, you cannot trust him, Fox told us he was the antichrist!" but there it is.
Your categorisations of the quality of doctors in the Canadian and UK health service is so grossly incorrect, I'm not even sure where to begin. Tell me, in your extensive experience of the UK health system (and let me just stop you here, I have had *extensive* experience in the UK health system), how have you determined that "all the best doctors have gone to the US"? I'm curious, since your experiences seem to differ so much from mine.
Also, your thinly-veiled racism that eastern-European, African and Pakistani doctors are "third world" and lesser-educated than their UK and US equivalents is very telling. Let me guess, you're an 18-35 year old white boy, with wealthy parents, living in a strongly republican suburb of a US city.
The bottom line is, universal healthcare, funded through government, should absolutely be the right of all mankind. Otherwise, you are creating a society where the rich control the poor, and you create second class citizens. America is a long way behind with healthcare and seriously needs to address it.
The UK system is nowhere near perfect, but it is leagues ahead of the USA.
The only thing that has made me reply is the section where you say:
Most legal residents do have access. Then again, illegals without insurance can still go to the emergency room for emergencies whether real or just a cough.
(emphasis yours).
Do you seriously believe that only illegal immigrants to the US have such a poor standard of care in the US system? What magical world do you live in? Or if you're smoking, what the hell is it and can I have some?
There are thousands of hard working, born and bred 100% -to-the-core-born-in-the-USA-for-14-generations families that a struggling desperately with the abhorrent open festering wound that is the American healthcare system. This has nothing to do with illegal immigrants and everything to do with providing care for your citizens, and America fails, and fails hard on that front. So very badly.
If you think anything else, then you are totally blind to the problem that faces an enormous swathe of the US population (who have jobs, families, homes and American passports going back a hundred years).
I have been to the "ER" or A&E as we call it, in severe pain before, and the triage nurse assessed me and sent me through, no muss, no fuss. This is one of the UK's busiest A&Es too. The nature of emergency medicine though is no different in the US or the UK - the fact that it's emergency medicine means there are no appointments or bookings, the place is as full as it gets, depending on the number of people that show up. The only reason the lines are shorter in US ER's is that, aside from the life threatening injuries (car wrecks, stab wound etc), poor people do not go to the ER when they get badly hurt (but not badly enough to be fatal) because the cannot afford it, so the wait is shorter for you, who can afford it.
You can't talk about waiting times in an emergency department, by its very nature there is no set queue.
The majority of drugs are available (in the UK health system anyway) and it tends to be the case that you need to look elsewhere if, after discovering that it's not usually available on the NHS and they won't make an exception for you, you have to look elsewhere.
The range of drugs and treatments is just as wide as the US, bar some of the more esoteric or bleeding edge drugs, but these are being brought into the fold as quickly as they can pass approval (assuming that they do work).
If you think "my country" is Canada, you're looking at the wrong Royal colony.
I'm not against capitalism, not at all. I am a strong proponent of it, even. But the "you're anti -capitalist!" or "you're communist!" seems to be the usual replies you have to field if you even attempt to mention nationalised health care.
The UK is a capitalist country, yet has universal healthcare. Funny, that.
You are agreeing to my point, yet arguing against me? Is that why you're posting anon?
My point is that trojans are a threat to all operating systems, and stem from the issues of trusting the source (literally in the case of OSS if you don't audit it line by line) of the executable or code that you're running.
It's not bankrupt. It costs *a lot* of money to run (it's one of the most expensive programs run by the government) but it's far from bankrupt.
It is recovering from 20 years of neglect under the tory government, and even after the long term with Labour in charge, it is still not where it needs to be. It is suffering hugely, and is slow to change since it is a massive entity.
There are severe budget concerns with it, but it is being dragged into the modern age (sometimes unsuccessfully and wastefully - check out some of the expensive disasters trying to modernise the NHS's IT systems), but it is getting there.
It's not perfect, but it is much better than the alternative.
Yes, I've no doubt that the true cost of the medicine is not $5, but its not $100+ either. The price of drugs in the US is entirely set by the drug companies, since they have all the systems in place to ensure people pay whatever they set as the price. (Just look at Medicare Part 4, or whatever that recent legislation is, and the way it relates to what prices are paid for drugs [they are fixed, and are twice as much as they need to be]).
These are the stories that people need to see. The old adage that anecdotes are not data just can't really apply here. There are thousands of families in exactly your position across America who are crippled by the healthcare system, but that doesn't matter - even if there's only the one family, it's too many and you really have to look at changing it.
America is the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world, and yet, it is the same country that puts altered, injured and confused patients into cabs and gives the driver $15 to drop them off on the street outside homeless shelters wearing nothing but a hospital gown because they have no insurance and no family to pay the bill.
And the gap between medicaid, the so-called solution for those who can't afford insurance, and the level of income you need to be able to afford insurance creates an *enormous* poverty gap like an open sore on the face of the most powerful, richest nation on Earth.
The US has the ability to create a national healthcare system, it just needs the will to do it, and has to be prepared to piss off a lot of people who like things the way they are because they get very rich on the backs of people who need to pay for medical care.
A society is judged not by the way it treats the well off, but by the way it treats the less well off, and in health care issues, the US is *way* down there in the toilet.
Don;t get me wrong, I love the USA. I just hate what they've done with medicine.
Or my grandfather, who also died on a waiting list. I did not say that the system was perfect, merely that the popular belief that you have to wait for years to even see a doctor about a sprained wrist are just wholly untrue.
Whoa, are you really basing the price of Windows Vista in Cuba with the price in the US, because the Cuban copy is pirated. If that's the crux of that argument, then the cost of Windows in the US is also $5.
The "we need drugs to cost so much" is Big Phama bullshit, as a convenient cover for the eye gougingly high prices that they can get away with because of the way the US system is structured. It has nothing to do with the real cost of drug development.
My point on taxes was that, aside from a couple of high-profile expensive taxes in the UK, my tax burden is similar to that of a US person (note, that the offsets in medical insurance costs for a US person balance out with our high gas taxes, and that we all pay sales tax, but ours is higher than most US state sales taxes).
My total tax burden is around 30% of my income, just like yours. Yet I have free healthcare included in that. If you do too (ie, you took that into account as a necessary expense) then who is better off? In my personal opinion, it is me, because I really dislike the US system, since it was set up for the benefit of rich people who run insurance companies and not for the guy like you making $30,000 who has to live with it.
That "we need the money to research new drugs" line has always been bullshit peddled by the drug companies. I do not buy it for a second. There is no reason for cheap, generic, easy to manufacture drugs cost as much as they do in the US.
And that the US is somehow "shouldering the burden of drug research on its own, for the good of us all" is terribly arrogant. It is nowhere close to accurate.
Now that's a much more punchy way to post what I wrote earlier.
Mod parent up.
But knowing the way US insurance companies work, are you *certain* that all your expenses are covered?
That fight night in the intensive care unit, when you phone the insurance company to authorise it and they don;t stamp the paperwork until next day, so they pay for all but 1 day, or they just flat out refuse to pay because the hospital you're in is fine for OB/GYN care on insurance, but their intensive care unit is not one of their "approved" centres and you either have to pay up or move your ill child across town to one that they deem appropriate.
Don't kid yourself that the health insurance is for your benefit. They are out to squeeze you for everything they can get, and pay out as little as possible.
I hope that your baby is born healthy and you have no problems. So does your insurance company, but for a totally different reason.
And there rings the sound of a two-tier society.
Second class citizens who should not be breeding!
Sometimes having a baby is not planned. Especially if you're a couple burdened by the religious right yelling at you every 5 seconds about the evils of birth control.
So what's the solution? They don't have sex?
What if their BC fails and they don;t want to terminate the baby? What then? Get a job that pays more than $20,000 per year?
The world is not as simple as the talking heads on Faux News make it out to be.
Medicare and Medicaid! Oh my! That will solve all of their problems!
You cannot seriously consider those programmes to be anywhere close to the effectiveness of a national health system.
And what happens if there are complications? What happens if you need to stay extra days in the hospital?
In the UK, it's all no issue at all.
Hell, in France they'll send a health visitor around once a week who will do your laundry and help look after your child to help lighten the load for the new family.
It's not that we think the NHS is "free" - we are well aware that we pay for it. It's just that we all pay, all of the time, in tiny bites, to ensure that everyone can have the best care.
The American family that *can't* afford that $5,000 for a baby without borrowing it is not so fortunate as you. Or, to put it in terms of "why have a baby you can't afford?" let's assume you were talking about breaking your leg, or having a benign tumour removed that would cost you $5000 at the hospital.
The poor family who cannot afford that have to go without (or are now dealing with a large debt).
There are no diseases that the UK's "health plan" does not cover.
There are some drugs that are difficult to get on the NHS, and some that are only available in the "postcode lottery" for some of the more experimental drugs (where some counties will prescribe a drug, and some won't).
There are no diseases that the NHS won't treat you for, with the exception of some very expensive and/or experimental treatments - which I'm sure a US healthcare plan won't cover either.
Either way, even in the UK, if you want to get private healthcare, you are free to do so. Good luck finding private insurance that will cover you for the expensive/experimental drugs you need that the NHS can't provide though.
Oh, and I guess all those people who are unemployed are just "lazy bums who are leeching my tax dollars and not working", and "all fat people are just eating too much" or "all lung cancer sufferers are smokers and don't deserve any of my help to get better" or "anyone with liver disease is an alkie".
There is no doubt that obesity and smoking are major burdens on the UK health system, but everyone pays their NI, everyone is treated. The NHS run campaigns to educate people on how to eat and live healthily, but there are no rules.
I thought the US was all about "the government can't tell me what to do".
You're advocating forcing people to eat and live a certain way else they'll be denied there supposedly "universal" care. Short of making eating junk food illegal, I just don;t see how that would fly.
Americans have got to wake up and realise that the world does not always revolve around the individual. When something like national healthcare is mentioned, you cannot think of it in terms of "how will this affect me? Me me me. My money! My money will help pay for poor people to get healthcare! That's unfair! I pay my way and so should they!", without thinking about the big picture that if *everyone* is helping, then those that really can't help much (the unemployed, the extremely poor, the homeless) get help, while the better off also benefit. Try telling someone in the UK (no matter how much money they make) that your prescription can cost upwards of $100 for some meds. *All* prescriptions on the NHS cost a fixed sum, and it's £6.something.
Six quid. For any number of pills, for any medication.
I'm not sure where all that medical insurance money is going in the US, but if your drugs can cost more than $100 per month, it's not into pills.
The "long waiting lines" in the UK and Canadian health care systems are a myth perpetuated by US propaganda from certain special interest groups who desperately hope that the US system stays as it is.
Sure, in a system that's not perfect you are going to see some waits, and it's not going to be quite as "lick your ass service" as a private healthcare clinic in the US (but really, how many Americans actually have access to that service).
The national insurance that I pay is a tiny amount compared to my salary, and my taxes are not that much higher than the US (except VAT/Sales tax [15%], gasoline [70%] and alcohol/cigarettes [40% ish]), but we have ways to offset those costs.
There's no way I pay 50% in taxes, compared to my income.
The US insurance companies may try to play the "omg, free healthcare means crippling taxes for all citizens, even if you don;t get sick! Then you're paying for your friends and neighbours when they get sick and you're healthy! How unfair is that! It's totally like communism! Buy our healthcare and $400 prescriptions!"
When a medicine taken by a patient costs $100 per month, and costs $5 in Cuba, you know there's someone paying off a loan on a 100 foot yacht, and it;s not the person taking the medicine.
And how is that a bad thing?
That it's somehow wrong that if everyone chips in a small amount (even if they never go to the doctor) that's somehow worse than landing a family with the choice of "pay for daddy's lifesaving surgery and have a $50,000 debt" or "wait and see if daddy gets better on his own".
There are some things that are totally worth paying for, and nationalised health care is totally one of them.
Now any large system there are problems with it, and the UK's system is still recovering from 20 years of neglect by the Tory government, and yet I still wouldn't trade it for the US system.
Not even if I was wealthy enough to afford the "good" insurance, that actually pays your bills when you go to the doctor.
That was exactly my point, thanks.
For the record, I own an iPhone, and I use the app store. It doesn't mean I have to agree with the way Apple is doing things, but for now, it's not bad enough that I would choose not to use the iPhone.
Would i love it to be open? Sure. Does it really matter to me at the moment, given the way I use it? Not enough to stop me getting one.