Actually, down here in GA, you can shoot a trespasser soon as you "feel threatened". It's a recent law (2006), and one of the few good things GA has done of late...
Wtf is a creek. I meant creak, but "creak" looks like it's spelled wrong...
FYI: A Google search reveals that Apple ranks at the top or near the top in most recent Consumer Reports surveys on technical support, product reliability, and customer satisfaction. Interpret that how you will.
I don't know what's happening in Denmark, and I can't really say I keep up with the hoopla on the internet. Apple's not perfect, but I've found their product quality to be way better than most of the alternatives. From a quality/reliability standpoint alone Apple the only big-brand PC I'd buy, and Apple and Lenovo are the only big-brand laptops I'd buy. I used to buy Dell, back in the mid-late 1990s when they made quality stuff, but that Dell is long dead. In the realm of consumer gear, I've yet to see anything good as an iPod, though I've certainly looked.
I just got an iPhone, and from a purely materials-quality standpoint, the thing is a home-run. Heavy, tight, rigid; not a squeak, creek, or cheap-feeling part anywhere on the case. It really reminds me of the difference between Japanese cars and American ones. You sit in a Honda, and you see quality everywhere. Good-feeling plastic, precise tolerences, tight fits. You sit in a Chevy, you see cheap mismatched plastic and big gaps in the dash resulting from imprecise tolerances. You push on parts and they give, flexing and creeking. Incidentally, I won't buy an American car either:-/
If you bricked your iPhone and you didn't do anything that violated the warranty, they'll probably replace it for free. I bricked my iPod doing a software updated incorrectly, and they replaced it no questions asked. When the random shutdown thing happened with the macbooks, you could just bring in the machine to an apple store, and they'd fix it within a day or two (much better than the 1-week turnaround I had for my dell laptop's repairs).
I used to hate Apple, but over the last several years, I've found myself buying more and more Apple gear. Somehow, I've gone through a PowerMac, two MacBooks, several iPods (including ones I bought for my family), and now an iPhone. Apple stuff looks nice, works simply, takes surprising amounts of abuse, and what little support I've needed in the Apple Stores was delivered very efficiently. You don't have to be a fanboy to appreciate that.
The US K-12 system blows. The US university system is pretty much the best in the world. This leads to lots of foreign students taking advantage of the quality of American higher education. Entertainingly enough, it also leads to lots of professors having to undo the brain-damage the K-12 system inflicted on students.
Tiger was quite a bit faster than Panther. They sped up Quartz 2D, for example, by a large amount. Leopard will probably be faster still. It's getting native 64-bit support, more finely-grained locking is being implemented in the kernel, etc.
The issue you miss is that the groupings I gave are based on _self_ identification. I'm not projecting anything, I'm taking groups on their word for which people they claim to represent. Obviously the groups themselves are projecting, for their benefit, to make their numbers seem larger than they are, but that is really a separate issue.
The neo-cons with designs on the middle east, on the other hand, do not not self-identify with white people. Heck, a lot of them aren't white people (there are a good number of jews and middle-eastern expats in there). They identify with "Americans", or "Conservatives", or "Patriots", or other more specific groups. So no, I don't think your point is applicable to this _particular_ case.
As for projecting the beliefs of subsets to the group as a whole, it's regrettable, but in my experience it's not all that misleading. The thing is that membership in a group affects behavior. I know several Asian-Americans who are bad at math, but most of the ones I know are very good at it. More to the point, in almost any major science/engineering school in the country, you'll see Asian-Americans vastly over-represented relative to their numbers in the overall population.
As for black people, try living in downtown/midtown Atlanta for a few years and tell me about the "stereotypes" of black people. A definite majority of the young black men running around here wearing the uniform of the inner-city rap culture. That doesn't make them criminals, of course, but it's a tacit support for a deleterious social element, and is at best in bad taste. I'd liken it to a young muslim running around in an Ayatollah t-shirt...
Not really. I think a "fuck white people" group would be perfectly appropriate for other reasons, but the folks who want to muck things up further in the Middle East do not self-identify with white people in the way the other groups self-identify with blacks, muslims, and jews, respectively. Perhaps "Fuck Neo-Conservatives" would be more apropos.
This is sort of thing is absolutely the point of having free speech. Of course, since FaceBook is a private entity, they do not have no legal obligation to be a forum for free speech, but it would be great if they were.
That said, I'm kind of curious to see how far this tolerance goes. I think a FaceBook group attacking overly conservative Islamic culture is a perfectly valid and topical political point. Can I have a FaceBook group called "F**k Negros", to attack the inner-city black youth culture that fills the city I live in with violence? Can I have a "F**k GWB" group to attack the dumbass president who is screwing things up in the Middle East? Can I have a "F**k the Jews" group attacking the whiny Jews who scream "anti-semitism!" in order to stifle legitimate debate? If so, I have a lot more respect for FaceBook than I used to...
If you're losing track of these things, your functions are too damn big. As Linus said, except in rare cases, functions should fit on a single page. If you always have the definition site of a variable in view, it's easy to remember the type and scope without having to encode it into the function name.
I did interpret it. I said it is inconclusive and next to useless.
Hey if you want to believe that the earth is flat, then by all means be my guest.
It has every bit to do with the WHO's ranking, since these statistics are included in the WHO's ranking criteria. So, really, that was a red herring, right?
C = A + B. In a post about A, stuff about B is not relevant, even though both factor into C. Understand?
Atlanta's problem with drug and mental health service has absolutely nothing to do with the US health care system. That's an underlying social problem. It's a cause rather than an effect.
I'm not saying it is. I'm holding it up as an example of the fact that charity doesn't work, and that ignoring social problems has costs on every individual.
Atlanta is a city replete with money. Nobody can be bothered to spend some of it to help all the poor people in the inner city. Meanwhile, all the problems caused by those poor people push people out into the suburbs, which has enormous hidden costs in the form of wasted time, wasted energy, wasted land, etc.
Again, you pay for social problems one way or another. The only question is: how.
It's not just a matter of equity, it's a matter of coverage. If the problem is "illness", how much of the problem you solve is sure as hell part of the quality of the solution. Again, by your reasoning, a system that provided perfect healthcare to one person would be a very high-quality system.
Look, I'm not going to use your stupid definition of "quality" here. People who work in public health have established definitions of quality. I've read the metrics the US government uses to evaluate the healthcare systems of developing nations. "Coverage" is sure as hell part of that grade. We should not use a lower standard for our own people than we do for the developing world!
What happens when government pays healthcare cost for those who can't afford it? One, it takes money out of taxpayers pockets. Two, healthcare providers don't get as much from government as they would from private insurance. This means providers will raise prices for everyone else.
FACT: Americans spend substantially more per-capita on healthcare than Europeans.
One can argue about the reasons why our private health insurance system has failed to provide efficiency, but it's hard to ague that it is indeed efficient. Modern economics recognizes many situations in which the free market fails to provide a good solution, perhaps healthcare is one of them.
Ah, why is the US the most advanced? Because the government doesn't control as much of the market as other countries do. It allows more businesses, organizations, and people to do more research without constantly getting in the way.
First, the US government pours about $100bn a year into R&D expenditures, more than a third of the total R&D expenditures in the country. Major industries (aerospace, military technology) in which the US is the world leader are funded partly or largely by the government, directly and indirectly. This is not including all the money poured by states and the federal government into academia. Our universities are still the best in the world, and also a major source of our innovation.
Second, I'm not arguing that in general lesser government intervention is a good thing. I'm arguing that limited government involvement is neither a necessary nor a sufficient criterion for a good solution.
I may be wrong but I sense an unwavering belief socialized medicine will fix everything. My beliefs on this aren't solid so if there is a better system I'm all ears, however I have yet to be offered anything that will improve the situation. Do yo have one?
This is not a deep, unwavering belief. I have, in general, a libertarian bent. But ultimately I'm a pragmatist. I'm convinced the present system isn't very good (and have spoken to people who work in public health who agree with me), and I can see that the Europeans have a proven, working solution. The engineer in me says: "why not just copy the solution we know to work?"
The WHO can come up with all the data they want, but that doesn't give them the power to defy the principles of statistic, define logic, etc.
I presented you raw data. I'm asking you to interpret it sensibly, not depend on the WHO, and certainly not a bunch of talking heads on the radio or TV.
Even a lay-man can tell the people in the US are not genetically identical to those in Europe, and that they live in completely different environments and with different lifestyles.
That's your argument? Genetics? Our years of life lost to injury are nearly twice as high as the UK's because of genetics? And given that Americans are descended from Europeans, where the hell is the genetic disadvantage playing in? Are the inferior genetics of black people dragging the average down (are they more likely to get injured?) How come the Japanese with their asian genes have better stats than us too?
You're desperately clutching at the short straws of rationalization here...
None
Right, none. So your long rant about equity was what, a red herring, right?
Because the homeless people in Atlanta don't have access to government welfare benefits?
No, because Atlanta has really shitty drug and mental health services. Yeah, you can say "well, fuck the addicts and the mentally ill", but I still gotta deal with them every day on the way to work. You can avoid all of that by moving to the suburbs, but now you're paying out the nose for the luxury of wasting a couple of hours each day commuting through congested traffic, and having to get in a car and spend $3 of gas just to run to the store and get milk.
Talk about hidden costs! You pay for social problems, one way or another. You can do it smartly, or you can be dumb about it...
Statistics on equity has nothing to do with the quality of a healthcare system
Yes, it does. The "completeness" of a solution is a metric universally used to judge the quality of a solution. Certainly, when USAID evaluates healthcare programs they do in other countries, "coverage" is an important metric the programs are graded on. Otherwise, healthcare quality would be a trivially easy problem --- just provide really good care for one guy. There, done!
On this report, they have the US dominating in really the most important category (and the only important characteristic in quality), which is effective care.
No, it's not. There is a reason there are three other categories under "quality".
This kind of bullshit rationalization really pisses me off. It's a perversion of the whole idea behind capitalism. Capitalism is based on the principle that free-market systems tend to lead to objectively good solutions. What we have now is a bunch of people who think an objectively bad solution is good because it is a free-market one. The redefinition of "good" that accompanies such rationalization is stunning...
The fact that the WHO decided those criteria are indicators of good health care does not make it any more objective.
The WHO has a hell of a lot more expertise behind its indicators than the pundits who are criticizing their ratings. You can either trust an organization that works with doctors and public health experts, or you can trust the tripe spewed by know-nothings working in a think-tank somewhere, your choice.
Statistics on mortality rates are next to worthless when comparing highly industrialized nations (eg, US, UK, Australia, etc).
In your expert opinion? Even a lay-man can tell "number of people dying divided by number of people" is a pretty good indicator of overall health...
Statistics on equity has nothing to do with the quality of a healthcare system
Congratulations, you just spouted off a bunch of nonsense without backing it up.
As for Canada: so what if some Canadians who can afford it come to the US for treatment? The US is the most technologically advanced nation in the country --- is it surprising that you can get some stuff here (if you have the _money_) that you can't get in Canada?
The question isn't how the system handles the rich guy with brain cancer who needs American technology to save his life. He can get top-flight care wherever he is. The question is how the system handles the hundred other people who have mundane things like work-related injuries or childhood illnesses. And our system just falls down there.
Perhaps you should look at the estimated costs for America to do this, instead of comparing to another, smaller country.
It's a per-capita cost. It would cost us more in a pure dollar amount, but at the same time, we have way more people to pay for it. As somebody else said, if the UK can afford it, we sure as hell can. Our per-capita income is about 40% higher than theirs --- we'll even feel the cost much less than they do.
Your health premiums are not based on your salary, its the same for everyone.
I know, I was expressing the cost as a percentage to make it more easily comparable to a tax rate. And your health premium does depend on your general level of income, in the sense that somebody working at a law firm is going to have a much better health plan than somebody working at a supermarket.
First of all, there is no objective statistic [realclearpolitics.com] that indicates that the US is behind on medical care. All of the "statistics" are based on certain very subjective assumptions that automatically penalize capitalist systems.
Look, I'm not going to trade bullshit partisan links with you. The WHO knows what they're doing. They deal with this shit "on the ground". I know people who work closely with them, and I trust their opinion a _whole_ lot more than those of some pundits on the internet. The US sucks on _objective_, unarguable measurements. The WHO has a giant database of core health indicators for countries around the world. Highlight the United States, and the UK on the first list, then click the "Mortality" checkbox to the right-side of the second list. Compare the core health statistics.
The US wins a few against the UK (deaths due to TB, deaths due to HIV, mortality rate for cancer, years of life lost to diseases), but we lose most of the big ones. Our overall and healthy life expectancy is lower. Our probability of dying between 15-60 is much higher, for both males and females. Our probability of dying under age 5 is higher. Our infant mortality, neonatal mortality, and maternal mortality are all higher (our infant mortality is actually close to last among developed nations). Our injury statistics are much worse.
This is just the UK, by the way, which ranked 18th in the WHO rankings, compared to our 37th. It is also a country whose per-capita GDP is about 30% lower than ours, and whose per-capita expenditures on health care are far lower than ours.
Look, these are the kinds of statistics that matter to people who work in public health. It's the sort of numbers we use to decide which 3rd-world nation to give foreign aid to. It's fairly unpoliticized, and as close as you're going to get to objectivity in this particular debate. And these statistics show that we're quite a ways behind a much less wealthy country, and we spend more money to achieve that state of affairs...
That said, it is certainly the case that the US health care system could use some fixing, but the solution is to take the government out of it, not add more government. We could drastically reduce health care costs by limiting frivolous lawsuits and government red tape. That way, more people could have health care and it would be better to boot.
And will there be fairies and unicorns and magical bunnies too?
Letting the government run it (and taxing everyone to death to fund it) is not the solution.
Why? A government-run system is working quite adequately for the UK, why couldn't it work for us? As for taxes --- it's not like people in the UK are paying 60% of their income in taxes. Up to about $70,000, their income tax rate is actually a bit lower than ours, and their top rate of 40% isn't much higher than our top rate of 35%. This doesn't include VAT, but then again, the US statistics also don't include state taxes and sales taxes, or the cost of health insurance. The latter is substantial --- if you're making ~$100k, and your employer provides a health plan, they're paying about 10% of your salary in premiums. You might not see this cost directly, but it's a tax on you as much as if the government had taken it right out of your paycheck.
I can't imagine what would happen if suddenly there were no costs associated with being obese.
What version of the USA do you live on where Churches don't get cushy tax breaks, for, well, being Churches? What version of the USA do you live in where Churches don't get funding for "faith based services"?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, down here in GA, you can shoot a trespasser soon as you "feel threatened". It's a recent law (2006), and one of the few good things GA has done of late...
Wtf is a creek. I meant creak, but "creak" looks like it's spelled wrong...
FYI: A Google search reveals that Apple ranks at the top or near the top in most recent Consumer Reports surveys on technical support, product reliability, and customer satisfaction. Interpret that how you will.
I don't know what's happening in Denmark, and I can't really say I keep up with the hoopla on the internet. Apple's not perfect, but I've found their product quality to be way better than most of the alternatives. From a quality/reliability standpoint alone Apple the only big-brand PC I'd buy, and Apple and Lenovo are the only big-brand laptops I'd buy. I used to buy Dell, back in the mid-late 1990s when they made quality stuff, but that Dell is long dead. In the realm of consumer gear, I've yet to see anything good as an iPod, though I've certainly looked.
:-/
I just got an iPhone, and from a purely materials-quality standpoint, the thing is a home-run. Heavy, tight, rigid; not a squeak, creek, or cheap-feeling part anywhere on the case. It really reminds me of the difference between Japanese cars and American ones. You sit in a Honda, and you see quality everywhere. Good-feeling plastic, precise tolerences, tight fits. You sit in a Chevy, you see cheap mismatched plastic and big gaps in the dash resulting from imprecise tolerances. You push on parts and they give, flexing and creeking. Incidentally, I won't buy an American car either
If you bricked your iPhone and you didn't do anything that violated the warranty, they'll probably replace it for free. I bricked my iPod doing a software updated incorrectly, and they replaced it no questions asked. When the random shutdown thing happened with the macbooks, you could just bring in the machine to an apple store, and they'd fix it within a day or two (much better than the 1-week turnaround I had for my dell laptop's repairs).
I used to hate Apple, but over the last several years, I've found myself buying more and more Apple gear. Somehow, I've gone through a PowerMac, two MacBooks, several iPods (including ones I bought for my family), and now an iPhone. Apple stuff looks nice, works simply, takes surprising amounts of abuse, and what little support I've needed in the Apple Stores was delivered very efficiently. You don't have to be a fanboy to appreciate that.
Teachers, not professors ;)
The US K-12 system blows. The US university system is pretty much the best in the world. This leads to lots of foreign students taking advantage of the quality of American higher education. Entertainingly enough, it also leads to lots of professors having to undo the brain-damage the K-12 system inflicted on students.
Tiger was quite a bit faster than Panther. They sped up Quartz 2D, for example, by a large amount. Leopard will probably be faster still. It's getting native 64-bit support, more finely-grained locking is being implemented in the kernel, etc.
Better APIs and tools allow developers to make better applications. That's something that users definitely notice.
The issue you miss is that the groupings I gave are based on _self_ identification. I'm not projecting anything, I'm taking groups on their word for which people they claim to represent. Obviously the groups themselves are projecting, for their benefit, to make their numbers seem larger than they are, but that is really a separate issue.
The neo-cons with designs on the middle east, on the other hand, do not not self-identify with white people. Heck, a lot of them aren't white people (there are a good number of jews and middle-eastern expats in there). They identify with "Americans", or "Conservatives", or "Patriots", or other more specific groups. So no, I don't think your point is applicable to this _particular_ case.
As for projecting the beliefs of subsets to the group as a whole, it's regrettable, but in my experience it's not all that misleading. The thing is that membership in a group affects behavior. I know several Asian-Americans who are bad at math, but most of the ones I know are very good at it. More to the point, in almost any major science/engineering school in the country, you'll see Asian-Americans vastly over-represented relative to their numbers in the overall population.
As for black people, try living in downtown/midtown Atlanta for a few years and tell me about the "stereotypes" of black people. A definite majority of the young black men running around here wearing the uniform of the inner-city rap culture. That doesn't make them criminals, of course, but it's a tacit support for a deleterious social element, and is at best in bad taste. I'd liken it to a young muslim running around in an Ayatollah t-shirt...
Not really. I think a "fuck white people" group would be perfectly appropriate for other reasons, but the folks who want to muck things up further in the Middle East do not self-identify with white people in the way the other groups self-identify with blacks, muslims, and jews, respectively. Perhaps "Fuck Neo-Conservatives" would be more apropos.
This is sort of thing is absolutely the point of having free speech. Of course, since FaceBook is a private entity, they do not have no legal obligation to be a forum for free speech, but it would be great if they were.
That said, I'm kind of curious to see how far this tolerance goes. I think a FaceBook group attacking overly conservative Islamic culture is a perfectly valid and topical political point. Can I have a FaceBook group called "F**k Negros", to attack the inner-city black youth culture that fills the city I live in with violence? Can I have a "F**k GWB" group to attack the dumbass president who is screwing things up in the Middle East? Can I have a "F**k the Jews" group attacking the whiny Jews who scream "anti-semitism!" in order to stifle legitimate debate? If so, I have a lot more respect for FaceBook than I used to...
If you're losing track of these things, your functions are too damn big. As Linus said, except in rare cases, functions should fit on a single page. If you always have the definition site of a variable in view, it's easy to remember the type and scope without having to encode it into the function name.
I did interpret it. I said it is inconclusive and next to useless.
Hey if you want to believe that the earth is flat, then by all means be my guest.
It has every bit to do with the WHO's ranking, since these statistics are included in the WHO's ranking criteria. So, really, that was a red herring, right?
C = A + B. In a post about A, stuff about B is not relevant, even though both factor into C. Understand?
Atlanta's problem with drug and mental health service has absolutely nothing to do with the US health care system. That's an underlying social problem. It's a cause rather than an effect.
I'm not saying it is. I'm holding it up as an example of the fact that charity doesn't work, and that ignoring social problems has costs on every individual.
Atlanta is a city replete with money. Nobody can be bothered to spend some of it to help all the poor people in the inner city. Meanwhile, all the problems caused by those poor people push people out into the suburbs, which has enormous hidden costs in the form of wasted time, wasted energy, wasted land, etc.
Again, you pay for social problems one way or another. The only question is: how.
Why is "safe" care important?
Are you high?
And no, equity has nothing to do with quality.
It's not just a matter of equity, it's a matter of coverage. If the problem is "illness", how much of the problem you solve is sure as hell part of the quality of the solution. Again, by your reasoning, a system that provided perfect healthcare to one person would be a very high-quality system.
Look, I'm not going to use your stupid definition of "quality" here. People who work in public health have established definitions of quality. I've read the metrics the US government uses to evaluate the healthcare systems of developing nations. "Coverage" is sure as hell part of that grade. We should not use a lower standard for our own people than we do for the developing world!
What happens when government pays healthcare cost for those who can't afford it? One, it takes money out of taxpayers pockets. Two, healthcare providers don't get as much from government as they would from private insurance. This means providers will raise prices for everyone else.
FACT: Americans spend substantially more per-capita on healthcare than Europeans.
One can argue about the reasons why our private health insurance system has failed to provide efficiency, but it's hard to ague that it is indeed efficient. Modern economics recognizes many situations in which the free market fails to provide a good solution, perhaps healthcare is one of them.
Ah, why is the US the most advanced? Because the government doesn't control as much of the market as other countries do. It allows more businesses, organizations, and people to do more research without constantly getting in the way.
First, the US government pours about $100bn a year into R&D expenditures, more than a third of the total R&D expenditures in the country. Major industries (aerospace, military technology) in which the US is the world leader are funded partly or largely by the government, directly and indirectly. This is not including all the money poured by states and the federal government into academia. Our universities are still the best in the world, and also a major source of our innovation.
Second, I'm not arguing that in general lesser government intervention is a good thing. I'm arguing that limited government involvement is neither a necessary nor a sufficient criterion for a good solution.
I may be wrong but I sense an unwavering belief socialized medicine will fix everything. My beliefs on this aren't solid so if there is a better system I'm all ears, however I have yet to be offered anything that will improve the situation. Do yo have one?
This is not a deep, unwavering belief. I have, in general, a libertarian bent. But ultimately I'm a pragmatist. I'm convinced the present system isn't very good (and have spoken to people who work in public health who agree with me), and I can see that the Europeans have a proven, working solution. The engineer in me says: "why not just copy the solution we know to work?"
The WHO can come up with all the data they want, but that doesn't give them the power to defy the principles of statistic, define logic, etc.
I presented you raw data. I'm asking you to interpret it sensibly, not depend on the WHO, and certainly not a bunch of talking heads on the radio or TV.
Even a lay-man can tell the people in the US are not genetically identical to those in Europe, and that they live in completely different environments and with different lifestyles.
That's your argument? Genetics? Our years of life lost to injury are nearly twice as high as the UK's because of genetics? And given that Americans are descended from Europeans, where the hell is the genetic disadvantage playing in? Are the inferior genetics of black people dragging the average down (are they more likely to get injured?) How come the Japanese with their asian genes have better stats than us too?
You're desperately clutching at the short straws of rationalization here...
None
Right, none. So your long rant about equity was what, a red herring, right?
Because the homeless people in Atlanta don't have access to government welfare benefits?
No, because Atlanta has really shitty drug and mental health services. Yeah, you can say "well, fuck the addicts and the mentally ill", but I still gotta deal with them every day on the way to work. You can avoid all of that by moving to the suburbs, but now you're paying out the nose for the luxury of wasting a couple of hours each day commuting through congested traffic, and having to get in a car and spend $3 of gas just to run to the store and get milk.
Talk about hidden costs! You pay for social problems, one way or another. You can do it smartly, or you can be dumb about it...
This pissed me off to write two responses.
Statistics on equity has nothing to do with the quality of a healthcare system
Yes, it does. The "completeness" of a solution is a metric universally used to judge the quality of a solution. Certainly, when USAID evaluates healthcare programs they do in other countries, "coverage" is an important metric the programs are graded on. Otherwise, healthcare quality would be a trivially easy problem --- just provide really good care for one guy. There, done!
On this report, they have the US dominating in really the most important category (and the only important characteristic in quality), which is effective care.
No, it's not. There is a reason there are three other categories under "quality".
This kind of bullshit rationalization really pisses me off. It's a perversion of the whole idea behind capitalism. Capitalism is based on the principle that free-market systems tend to lead to objectively good solutions. What we have now is a bunch of people who think an objectively bad solution is good because it is a free-market one. The redefinition of "good" that accompanies such rationalization is stunning...
The fact that the WHO decided those criteria are indicators of good health care does not make it any more objective.
The WHO has a hell of a lot more expertise behind its indicators than the pundits who are criticizing their ratings. You can either trust an organization that works with doctors and public health experts, or you can trust the tripe spewed by know-nothings working in a think-tank somewhere, your choice.
Statistics on mortality rates are next to worthless when comparing highly industrialized nations (eg, US, UK, Australia, etc).
In your expert opinion? Even a lay-man can tell "number of people dying divided by number of people" is a pretty good indicator of overall health...
Statistics on equity has nothing to do with the quality of a healthcare system
What equity statistics did I present?
Well, I bet the Neanderthals looked out for their injured through charity rather than government force, but I'll let your bad analogy slide anyhow.
Yes, charity works wonderfully. Tell that to all the damn homeless people roaming over Atlanta.
Congratulations, you just spouted off a bunch of nonsense without backing it up.
As for Canada: so what if some Canadians who can afford it come to the US for treatment? The US is the most technologically advanced nation in the country --- is it surprising that you can get some stuff here (if you have the _money_) that you can't get in Canada?
The question isn't how the system handles the rich guy with brain cancer who needs American technology to save his life. He can get top-flight care wherever he is. The question is how the system handles the hundred other people who have mundane things like work-related injuries or childhood illnesses. And our system just falls down there.
Perhaps you should look at the estimated costs for America to do this, instead of comparing to another, smaller country.
It's a per-capita cost. It would cost us more in a pure dollar amount, but at the same time, we have way more people to pay for it. As somebody else said, if the UK can afford it, we sure as hell can. Our per-capita income is about 40% higher than theirs --- we'll even feel the cost much less than they do.
Your health premiums are not based on your salary, its the same for everyone.
I know, I was expressing the cost as a percentage to make it more easily comparable to a tax rate. And your health premium does depend on your general level of income, in the sense that somebody working at a law firm is going to have a much better health plan than somebody working at a supermarket.
First of all, there is no objective statistic [realclearpolitics.com] that indicates that the US is behind on medical care. All of the "statistics" are based on certain very subjective assumptions that automatically penalize capitalist systems.
Look, I'm not going to trade bullshit partisan links with you. The WHO knows what they're doing. They deal with this shit "on the ground". I know people who work closely with them, and I trust their opinion a _whole_ lot more than those of some pundits on the internet. The US sucks on _objective_, unarguable measurements. The WHO has a giant database of core health indicators for countries around the world. Highlight the United States, and the UK on the first list, then click the "Mortality" checkbox to the right-side of the second list. Compare the core health statistics.
The US wins a few against the UK (deaths due to TB, deaths due to HIV, mortality rate for cancer, years of life lost to diseases), but we lose most of the big ones. Our overall and healthy life expectancy is lower. Our probability of dying between 15-60 is much higher, for both males and females. Our probability of dying under age 5 is higher. Our infant mortality, neonatal mortality, and maternal mortality are all higher (our infant mortality is actually close to last among developed nations). Our injury statistics are much worse.
This is just the UK, by the way, which ranked 18th in the WHO rankings, compared to our 37th. It is also a country whose per-capita GDP is about 30% lower than ours, and whose per-capita expenditures on health care are far lower than ours.
Look, these are the kinds of statistics that matter to people who work in public health. It's the sort of numbers we use to decide which 3rd-world nation to give foreign aid to. It's fairly unpoliticized, and as close as you're going to get to objectivity in this particular debate. And these statistics show that we're quite a ways behind a much less wealthy country, and we spend more money to achieve that state of affairs...
That said, it is certainly the case that the US health care system could use some fixing, but the solution is to take the government out of it, not add more government. We could drastically reduce health care costs by limiting frivolous lawsuits and government red tape. That way, more people could have health care and it would be better to boot.
And will there be fairies and unicorns and magical bunnies too?
Letting the government run it (and taxing everyone to death to fund it) is not the solution.
Why? A government-run system is working quite adequately for the UK, why couldn't it work for us? As for taxes --- it's not like people in the UK are paying 60% of their income in taxes. Up to about $70,000, their income tax rate is actually a bit lower than ours, and their top rate of 40% isn't much higher than our top rate of 35%. This doesn't include VAT, but then again, the US statistics also don't include state taxes and sales taxes, or the cost of health insurance. The latter is substantial --- if you're making ~$100k, and your employer provides a health plan, they're paying about 10% of your salary in premiums. You might not see this cost directly, but it's a tax on you as much as if the government had taken it right out of your paycheck.
I can't imagine what would happen if suddenly there were no costs associated with being obese.
Because France is so full of fatties?
What version of the USA do you live on where Churches don't get cushy tax breaks, for, well, being Churches? What version of the USA do you live in where Churches don't get funding for "faith based services"?