Ron Paul Hype

[Khet]

Originally Posted by PhilB

Okay, so the bottom line is that you have no idea how economics works, how socialism doesn't work, and what freedom means. Go learn some stuff, and I'll talk to you in about ten years.

PhilB

Oh yeah, how could I forget, 22 year olds don't know anything. Age has little to do with anything. Seeing more years doesn't make you wiser if you never take time to think out other ideas. Stubbornness and apathy does seem increase with age though.

I used to be a hardcore libertarian myself until I spent a bit more time in the military and other jobs. My attitude was survival of the fittest, fuck everyone else. Then my empathy and logic caught up with me. I realized what happens when business is not restricted ethically and what the effects are to the peons doing all the work. The only idea that has never changed is wanting the ability to do anything in the pursuit of happiness so long as it doesn't interfere with anyone else's ability to do the same. Pure capitalism prevents this, therefore I am against it.

Before I hear anything else about my misconceptions of freedom, I will say this: HAPPINESS > FREEDOM. Do you need a lot of freedom to be happy? Yes. Do you need libertarian-style freedom to be happy? No, see the former paragraph. I guess I was throwing around the word freedom a little too much for you conservatives. I will stop to prevent further confusion.

Answer the following questions for me please. If you do so satisfactorily on the first two, I will change my political stance. I still won't vote for Ron Paul though. What sort of humanist would I be if voted for a superstitious old man?

1) Why would universal health care not work? Be specific. Because it takes away a few businesses' freedom is not an acceptable answer.

2)Why should businesses be able to pay a wage under $7.50/hr? This can be done without jacking up prices or raising overhead so those are not acceptable answers, just cold-hearted. It's basically a free market right? People can just buy from the company that kept prices the same by redistributing wages.

3)How can one be a staunch protector of the constitution and then say you're fine with religion and state mixing(go read the wiki for all the gory details)? It sounds like a biased interpretation of the constitution to me. His religious conviction by itself is enough to make me steer clear. What makes you think he won't turn a blind eye to garbage like blue laws?

[PhilB]

Originally Posted by Khet

Oh yeah, how could I forget, 22 year olds don't know anything. Age has little to do with anything. Seeing more years doesn't make you wiser if you never take time to think out other ideas. Stubbornness and apathy does seem increase with age though.

Experience has a great deal to do with wisdom. Experience comes with age. Yes, some people can and do manage to remain ignorant for decades. But most manage to learn a few things as they go.

Originally Posted by Khet

I used to be a hardcore libertarian myself until I spent a bit more time in the military and other jobs. My attitude was survival of the fittest, fuck everyone else. Then my empathy and logic caught up with me. I realized what happens when business is not restricted ethically and what the effects are to the peons doing all the work. The only idea that has never changed is wanting the ability to do anything in the pursuit of happiness so long as it doesn't interfere with anyone else's ability to do the same. Pure capitalism prevents this, therefore I am against it.

Before I hear anything else about my misconceptions of freedom, I will say this: HAPPINESS > FREEDOM. Do you need a lot of freedom to be happy? Yes. Do you need libertarian-style freedom to be happy? No, see the former paragraph. I guess I was throwing around the word freedom a little too much for you conservatives. I will stop to prevent further confusion.

OK, here's part of the problem. You didn't understand libertarianism either. Neither libertarianism nor capitalism is "survival of the fittest, fuck everyone else". Libertarianism is compassionate at heart; we want *everyone* to have liberty and opportunity. Capitalism involves innovation, and competition to best serve the customer, to the mutual benefit of all parties.

Originally Posted by Khet

Answer the following questions for me please. If you do so satisfactorily on the first two, I will change my political stance. I still won't vote for Ron Paul though. What sort of humanist would I be if voted for a superstitious old man?

1) Why would universal health care not work? Be specific. Because it takes away a few businesses' freedom is not an acceptable answer.

2)Why should businesses be able to pay a wage under $7.50/hr? This can be done without jacking up prices or raising overhead so those are not acceptable answers, just cold-hearted. It's basically a free market right? People can just buy from the company that kept prices the same by redistributing wages.

3)How can one be a staunch protector of the constitution and then say you're fine with religion and state mixing(go read the wiki for all the gory details)? It sounds like a biased interpretation of the constitution to me. His religious conviction by itself is enough to make me steer clear. What makes you think he won't turn a blind eye to garbage like blue laws?

1) Universal health care doesn't work for the same reasons that any other socialist program doesn't work. The consumer of the service is not the payer for the service, and therefore has no incentive in the system to use the service thoughtfully. The provider of the service is not paid by the consumer, and therefore has no incentive in the system to provide satisfactory service. The direct payer for the service is the government, but the money source is not connected to that, and so the payer has no incentive in the system to be efficient, or to care about the consumer or the provider. I'll post a couple of assessments of the Canadian system after this post for more detailed info.

2) First, how can a business pay more out without raising prices or overhead? Where do you think money comes from? If you are proposing that they do so by taking it out of the pay of more skilled and valuable people, they will lose their more skilled and valuable people, which is not the best strategy for succeeding in anything. Second, the biggest problem with minimum wage is that it most harms those whose skills are the lowest. The higher the minimum wage, the harder it is for an entry level worker (or especially one who is trying to start out after bankruptcy, prison, rehab, homelessness, etc.) to convince someone that his work will be worth the money. Minimum wage laws directly increase unemployment in the most vulnerable sector of the workforce. Minimum wages are not magic, money without effects. If they worked, why couldn't we just set the minimum wage to $100/hr, and make *everyone* rich! Hopefully even you can see the absurdity of that.

3) Ron Paul's religiousness makes me nervous as well. As an atheist myself, I'd LOVE to see a humanist libertarian candidate. But (a) Ron Paul really does have a fine record of voting on the basis of a reasonable interpretation fo the Constitution, certainly FAR better than any other member of Congress in living memory. And (b) If forced, I'd rather see a religious libertarian than a humanist socialist in office. As I've tried to say a number of times, Ron isn't perfect, and I disagree with him strongly on several issues. But he's still about three times as good as any other major party candidate, and has a much better chance of making a difference than any minor party candidate. So I'm happy to help get him as far as he can go, including the White House if by some miracle he can get there.

PhilB

[PhilB]

Here's a first assessment and comparison.
PhilB
==========
Subject: Death by government

When real market prices are unavailable to balance supply and demand in the health care sector -- when prices are set by government decree, or distorted by government funding -- the consequence can be death.

It's easy to miss this truth if we only focus on anecdotal personal testimony. Talk to people from Canada and the U.K. and you're likely to hear glowing praise for their national health services. Alas, there are fundamental problems with this kind of testimony . . .

> People living under national health services have little or nothing to compare them to.
> Small medical problems, easily fixed, are far more common than those that are life threatening -- thus, most personal testimony tells us little about how well major procedures are handled.
> Patients that survive major medical problems in such systems tend to assume the system works.
> While those who die because of the system's failure are unavailable to testify.
> This is the familiar economic problem of the "seen and the unseen" -- the successes are seen, walking among us, while the failures lie buried, unseen and silent.

Michael Moore, in his film "Sicko," makes dramatic use of horrifying anecdotes of failure in the American system. We say, "Good for him!" We too reject America's current system, precisely because it is already half-way to the type of system Moore advocates. We applaud him for exposing the failures of America's half-socialized system, but . . .

We must criticize him for not telling the whole story. If you watch another movie, "Dead Meat," you'll hear equally horrifying anecdotes about the fully socialized Canadian system, which is the kind of system Moore wants for America. Though Moore favors the French socialist system, future messages will show that there is really no fundamental difference between France and Canada. For now we just want to compare movie-anecdote to move-anecdote, and "Dead Meat" is about Canada . . .

A Canadian woman waited TWO YEARS for "free" cancer surgery, only to have her appointments canceled, twice. Death came before her surgery did.
A Calgary woman was in excruciating pain from worn-out knee cartilage. She had to wait 16 months for her "free" surgery. It took so long that she became addicted to "free" Oxycontin. The result? More time on another long list, waiting for "free" drug rehab.

Another man needed urgent neck surgery. His "free" doctor told him there was a TWO-YEAR WAIT for a FREE INITIAL CONSULTATION!
Moore doesn't really cover the anecdotal horrors of the various socialist systems, even though there are plenty of such stories available.

But if both sides in a controversy can each produce horrifying anecdotes, then what have we really learned? How can we choose between the competing stories to arrive at an optimal policy? We would submit that anecdotes can tell us little more than this . . .

> The American system of half-socialized medicine has big problems
> Foreign systems of fully-socialized medicine also have big problems

But what the anecdotes can't tell us is how the half-socialized American system compares to the fully socialized foreign systems, or how either approach would compare to a totally free market system.

What we need instead of anecdotes is statistical information that can give us a well-rounded picture. Statistics may lack the emotional impact to get your blood pumping, but they could provide the crucial evidence you need to KEEP your blood pumping. We're talking about statistics likes these . . .

British colon cancer patients had to wait so long for medical attention that 20 percent of the cases considered curable at the time of diagnosis, were incurable by the time of treatment. (Source: Anthony Browne, London Observer, December 16, 2001)

71 patients in Ontario, Canada died while waiting for bypass surgery, and another 121 had to wait so long there was no longer any point in operating. (Richard F. Davis, Canadian Medical Association Journal 160, no. 10, May 18, 1999)

In Britain, on an annual basis, waiting lists cause a denial of treatment to 9,000 people for renal dialysis, 15,000 for cancer chemotherapy, and 17,000 for coronary artery surgery. (Source: Henry J. Aaron and William B. Schwartz, "The Painful Prescription: Rationing Hospital Care," the Brookings Institution, 1984).

This is death by waiting list. Death by rationing. Death by government.

But how does the U.S. system of half-socialized medicine compare? The available statistics are so abundant, and so in favor of America's half-messed-up system that it's hard to pick what to show in this short message, but for just a taste of the available data, consider these comparisons of where we have been in comparison to Britain and Canada, and where we still are . . .

Back in 1978 the U.S. rate for pacemaker implants was more than four times higher than that of Britain, and 20 times that of Canada, plus the U.S. has three times more CAT scanners available per capita than Canada, and six times more than Britain. (Source: Mary-Ann Rozbicki, "Rationing British Health Care: The Cost/Benefit Approach,) Executive Seminar in National and International Affairs (U.S. Department of State, April 1978)

But have things changed over the years? Are government systems responsive to their deficiencies? The answer is no.

Today, Britain still has only half as many CT and MRI scanners per capita as the U.S., and the disparity with Canada is similar, not only with regard to scanners but numerous other treatments and diagnostic tools. Things really haven't changed much over the years -- national health services continue to lag behind in almost every category. (I've provide more detail and sources below my signature.)
Or how about this . . .

In 2001, how many patients had to wait more than 4 months for surgery? The answer is . . .

36% in Britain's fully socialized system
27% in Canada's fully socialized system
26% in New Zealand's fully socialized system
23% in Australia's fully socialized system
And . . . drum roll . . . only 5% in America's half-socialized system
(Source: "Comparison of Health Care System Views and Experiences in Five Nations," Commonwealth Fund Issue Brief, May, 2002)

What a difference just half as much socialism can make.

If the statistics show the fully socialized systems to be so much worse than America's half-socialized system, isn't it at least worth considering that we might solve many of America's remaining health care problems by going even more in the direction of the free market?

These are just a few snap-shots of what the statistical studies show, in comparison to mere anecdotes. There are many more such studies, tending strongly toward the same conclusion . . .

"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. TANSTAFL!"

TANSTAFL is a pithy way of saying that if you don't pay a real free market price for health care, supply will fall short of demand, and so you will pay in another way . . . with waiting lists that could kill you.

Plus, you'll also pay BIG TAXES for your supposedly FREE system, on top of the potentially deadly waiting lists, and you'll lose the power of free market competition to keep prices down (all of these things are already big problems in America).

But the prospect of what we face in America is even worse than the harm countries like Britain and Canada have done to themselves with socialized medicine. Our country, if the trend continues, is much more likely to adopt a fascist, rather than socialist model of state health care.

This will involve a lot of corporate welfare, monopoly partnerships between corporations and the state, with prices and terms of treatment set in consultation with corporate lobbyists. Or, in a word, fascism.

Please, please, please, let us not do this. Because once it happens it will be nearly impossible to reverse.

What should we do instead? It's a big subject, and we will get to it, but the right place to start is where the physicians start, "First, do no harm." Even if you think some kind of increased government involvement is needed in American health care, do not let it come at the federal level.

Please send a message to Congress opposing any further funding of personal health care expenses at the federal level. Please cut and paste some of the above statistics (or those below) into your personal comments to Congress. If you've already sent a message on this issue, using the statistics justifies sending another one.

And please, please, please, help us spread the word about the above facts, stories, and arguments, to counter the current drumbeat for federally funded health care. Please forward this message to other people. And if you received this message because someone forwarded it to you, please do the same and forward it to someone else. Spread the word!

Thank you for your time and attention. Thank you to those of you who are DC Downsizers. And if possible, please make a contribution to further our work.

Perry Willis
Communications Director
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.

PS: Our thanks to the Cato Institute and the Independent Institute for accumulating the studies used in this message.

Additional stats and sources . . .

Britain has only half the number of CT scanners as the U.S. Source: Anderson, Reinhardt, Hussey, and Petrosyan, "It's the Prices Stupid," pages 89-105
Britain also has half as many MRI scanners per capita as the U.S. Source: "National Service Framework for Health," UK Department of Health, London, 2000
For an extensive list of Canadian deficiencies in treatments and diagnostic tools see "Canada's System Lacks Many Bells and Whistles," by Tom Arnold, National Post, November 17, 2001
Also, see the Canadian Medical Association Journal 165, no. 4, August 21, 2001, 421-25

[PhilB]

Here's another. Both of these talk a good deal about who suffers under socialized medicine, beyond "a few businesses' freedom".

PhilB
==========
The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care
David Gratzer

Socialized medicine has meant rationed care and lack of innovation. Small wonder Canadians are looking to the market.

Mountain-bike enthusiast Suzanne Aucoin had to fight more than her Stage IV colon cancer. Her doctor suggested Erbitux—a proven cancer drug that targets cancer cells exclusively, unlike conventional chemotherapies that more crudely kill all fast-growing cells in the body—and Aucoin went to a clinic to begin treatment. But if Erbitux offered hope, Aucoin’s insurance didn’t: she received one inscrutable form letter after another, rejecting her claim for reimbursement. Yet another example of the callous hand of managed care, depriving someone of needed medical help, right? Guess again. Erbitux is standard treatment, covered by insurance companies—in the United States. Aucoin lives in Ontario, Canada.

When Aucoin appealed to an official ombudsman, the Ontario government claimed that her treatment was unproven and that she had gone to an unaccredited clinic. But the FDA in the U.S. had approved Erbitux, and her clinic was a cancer center affiliated with a prominent Catholic hospital in Buffalo. This January, the ombudsman ruled in Aucoin’s favor, awarding her the cost of treatment. She represents a dramatic new trend in Canadian health-care advocacy: finding the treatment you need in another country, and then fighting Canadian bureaucrats (and often suing) to get them to pick up the tab.

But if Canadians are looking to the United States for the care they need, Americans, ironically, are increasingly looking north for a viable health-care model. There’s no question that American health care, a mixture of private insurance and public programs, is a mess. Over the last five years, health-insurance premiums have more than doubled, leaving firms like General Motors on the brink of bankruptcy. Expensive health care has also hit workers in the pocketbook: it’s one of the reasons that median family income fell between 2000 and 2005 (despite a rise in overall labor costs). Health spending has surged past 16 percent of GDP. The number of uninsured Americans has risen, and even the insured seem dissatisfied. So it’s not surprising that some Americans think that solving the nation’s health-care woes may require adopting a Canadian-style single-payer system, in which the government finances and provides the care. Canadians, the seductive single-payer tune goes, not only spend less on health care; their health outcomes are better, too—life expectancy is longer, infant mortality lower.

Thus, Paul Krugman in the New York Times: “Does this mean that the American way is wrong, and that we should switch to a Canadian-style single-payer system? Well, yes.” Politicians like Hillary Clinton are on board; Michael Moore’s new documentary Sicko celebrates the virtues of Canada’s socialized health care; the National Coalition on Health Care, which includes big businesses like AT&T, recently endorsed a scheme to centralize major health decisions to a government committee; and big unions are questioning the tenets of employer-sponsored health insurance. Some are tempted. Not me.

I was once a believer in socialized medicine. I don’t want to overstate my case: growing up in Canada, I didn’t spend much time contemplating the nuances of health economics. I wanted to get into medical school—my mind brimmed with statistics on MCAT scores and admissions rates, not health spending. But as a Canadian, I had soaked up three things from my environment: a love of ice hockey; an ability to convert Celsius into Fahrenheit in my head; and the belief that government-run health care was truly compassionate. What I knew about American health care was unappealing: high expenses and lots of uninsured people. When HillaryCare shook Washington, I remember thinking that the Clintonistas were right.

My health-care prejudices crumbled not in the classroom but on the way to one. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute. Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care. I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic—with a three-year wait list; or the woman needing a sleep study to diagnose what seemed like sleep apnea, who faced a two-year delay; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks.

I decided to write about what I saw. By day, I attended classes and visited patients; at night, I worked on a book. Unfortunately, statistics on Canadian health care’s weaknesses were hard to come by, and even finding people willing to criticize the system was difficult, such was the emotional support that it then enjoyed. One family friend, diagnosed with cancer, was told to wait for potentially lifesaving chemotherapy. I called to see if I could write about his plight. Worried about repercussions, he asked me to change his name. A bit later, he asked if I could change his sex in the story, and maybe his town. Finally, he asked if I could change the illness, too.

My book’s thesis was simple: to contain rising costs, government-run health-care systems invariably restrict the health-care supply. Thus, at a time when Canada’s population was aging and needed more care, not less, cost-crunching bureaucrats had reduced the size of medical school classes, shuttered hospitals, and capped physician fees, resulting in hundreds of thousands of patients waiting for needed treatment—patients who suffered and, in some cases, died from the delays. The only solution, I concluded, was to move away from government command-and-control structures and toward a more market-oriented system. To capture Canadian health care’s growing crisis, I called my book Code Blue, the term used when a patient’s heart stops and hospital staff must leap into action to save him. Though I had a hard time finding a Canadian publisher, the book eventually came out in 1999 from a small imprint; it struck a nerve, going through five printings.

Nor were the problems I identified unique to Canada—they characterized all government-run health-care systems. Consider the recent British controversy over a cancer patient who tried to get an appointment with a specialist, only to have it canceled—48 times. More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care, with 200,000 in line for longer than six months. A while back, I toured a public hospital in Washington, D.C., with Tim Evans, a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe. The hospital was dark and dingy, but Evans observed that it was cleaner than anything in his native England. In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave—when many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity—15,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren’t available. And so on.

But single-payer systems—confronting dirty hospitals, long waiting lists, and substandard treatment—are starting to crack. Today my book wouldn’t seem so provocative to Canadians, whose views on public health care are much less rosy than they were even a few years ago. Canadian newspapers are now filled with stories of people frustrated by long delays for care:

vow broken on cancer wait times: most hospitals across canada fail to meet ottawa’s four-week guideline for radiation
patients wait as p.e.t. scans used in animal experiments
back patients waiting years for treatment: study
the doctor is . . . out

As if a taboo had lifted, government statistics on the health-care system’s problems are suddenly available. In fact, government researchers have provided the best data on the doctor shortage, noting, for example, that more than 1.5 million Ontarians (or 12 percent of that province’s population) can’t find family physicians. Health officials in one Nova Scotia community actually resorted to a lottery to determine who’d get a doctor’s appointment.

Dr. Jacques Chaoulli is at the center of this changing health-care scene. Standing at about five and a half feet and soft-spoken, he doesn’t seem imposing. But this accidental revolutionary has turned Canadian health care on its head. In the 1990s, recognizing the growing crisis of socialized care, Chaoulli organized a private Quebec practice—patients called him, he made house calls, and then he directly billed his patients. The local health board cried foul and began fining him. The legal status of private practice in Canada remained murky, but billing patients, rather than the government, was certainly illegal, and so was private insurance.

Chaoulli gave up his private practice but not the fight for private medicine. Trying to draw attention to Canada’s need for an alternative to government care, he began a hunger strike but quit after a month, famished but not famous. He wrote a couple of books on the topic, which sold dismally. He then came up with the idea of challenging the government in court. Because the lawyers whom he consulted dismissed the idea, he decided to make the legal case himself and enrolled in law school. He flunked out after a term. Undeterred, he found a sponsor for his legal fight (his father-in-law, who lives in Japan) and a patient to represent. Chaoulli went to court and lost. He appealed and lost again. He appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. And there—amazingly—he won.

Chaoulli was representing George Zeliotis, an elderly Montrealer forced to wait almost a year for a hip replacement. Zeliotis was in agony and taking high doses of opiates. Chaoulli maintained that the patient should have the right to pay for private health insurance and get treatment sooner. He based his argument on the Canadian equivalent of the Bill of Rights, as well as on the equivalent Quebec charter. The court hedged on the national question, but a majority agreed that Quebec’s charter did implicitly recognize such a right.

It’s hard to overstate the shock of the ruling. It caught the government completely off guard—officials had considered Chaoulli’s case so weak that they hadn’t bothered to prepare briefing notes for the prime minister in the event of his victory. The ruling wasn’t just shocking, moreover; it was potentially monumental, opening the way to more private medicine in Quebec. Though the prohibition against private insurance holds in the rest of the country for now, at least two people outside Quebec, armed with Chaoulli’s case as precedent, are taking their demand for private insurance to court.

Rick Baker helps people, and sometimes even saves lives. He describes a man who had a seizure and received a diagnosis of epilepsy. Dissatisfied with the opinion—he had no family history of epilepsy, but he did have constant headaches and nausea, which aren’t usually seen in the disorder—the man requested an MRI. The government told him that the wait would be four and a half months. So he went to Baker, who arranged to have the MRI done within 24 hours—and who, after the test discovered a brain tumor, arranged surgery within a few weeks.

Baker isn’t a neurosurgeon or even a doctor. He’s a medical broker, one member of a private sector that is rushing in to address the inadequacies of Canada’s government care. Canadians pay him to set up surgical procedures, diagnostic tests, and specialist consultations, privately and quickly. “I don’t have a medical background. I just have some common sense,” he explains. “I don’t need to be a doctor for what I do. I’m just expediting care.”

He tells me stories of other people whom his British Columbia–based company, Timely Medical Alternatives, has helped—people like the elderly woman who needed vascular surgery for a major artery in her abdomen and was promised prompt care by one of the most senior bureaucrats in the government, who never called back. “Her doctor told her she’s going to die,” Baker remembers. So Timely got her surgery in a couple of days, in Washington State. Then there was the eight-year-old badly in need of a procedure to help correct her deafness. After watching her surgery get bumped three times, her parents called Timely. She’s now back at school, her hearing partly restored. “The father said, ‘Mr. Baker, my wife and I are in agreement that your star shines the brightest in our heaven,’ ” Baker recalls. “I told that story to a government official. He shrugged. He couldn’t fucking care less.”

Not everyone has kind words for Baker. A woman from a union-sponsored health coalition, writing in a local paper, denounced him for “profiting from people’s misery.” When I bring up the comment, he snaps: “I’m profiting from relieving misery.” Some of the services that Baker brokers almost certainly contravene Canadian law, but governments are loath to stop him. “What I am doing could be construed as civil disobedience,” he says. “There comes a time when people need to lead the government.”

Baker isn’t alone: other private-sector health options are blossoming across Canada, and the government is increasingly turning a blind eye to them, too, despite their often uncertain legal status. Private clinics are opening at a rate of about one a week. Companies like MedCan now offer “corporate medicals” that include an array of diagnostic tests and a referral to Johns Hopkins, if necessary. Insurance firms sell critical-illness insurance, giving policyholders a lump-sum payment in the event of a major diagnosis; since such policyholders could, in theory, spend the money on anything they wanted, medical or not, the system doesn’t count as health insurance and is therefore legal. Testifying to the changing nature of Canadian health care, Baker observes that securing prompt care used to mean a trip south. These days, he says, he’s able to get 80 percent of his clients care in Canada, via the private sector.

Another sign of transformation: Canadian doctors, long silent on the health-care system’s problems, are starting to speak up. Last August, they voted Brian Day president of their national association. A former socialist who counts Fidel Castro as a personal acquaintance, Day has nevertheless become perhaps the most vocal critic of Canadian public health care, having opened his own private surgery center as a remedy for long waiting lists and then challenged the government to shut him down. “This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week,” he fumed to the New York Times, “and in which humans can wait two to three years.”

And now even Canadian governments are looking to the private sector to shrink the waiting lists. Day’s clinic, for instance, handles workers’-compensation cases for employees of both public and private corporations. In British Columbia, private clinics perform roughly 80 percent of government-funded diagnostic testing. In Ontario, where fealty to socialized medicine has always been strong, the government recently hired a private firm to staff a rural hospital’s emergency room.

This privatizing trend is reaching Europe, too. Britain’s government-run health care dates back to the 1940s. Yet the Labour Party—which originally created the National Health Service and used to bristle at the suggestion of private medicine, dismissing it as “Americanization”—now openly favors privatization. Sir William Wells, a senior British health official, recently said: “The big trouble with a state monopoly is that it builds in massive inefficiencies and inward-looking culture.” Last year, the private sector provided about 5 percent of Britain’s nonemergency procedures; Labour aims to triple that percentage by 2008. The Labour government also works to voucherize certain surgeries, offering patients a choice of four providers, at least one private. And in a recent move, the government will contract out some primary care services, perhaps to American firms such as UnitedHealth Group and Kaiser Permanente.

Sweden’s government, after the completion of the latest round of privatizations, will be contracting out some 80 percent of Stockholm’s primary care and 40 percent of its total health services, including one of the city’s largest hospitals. Since the fall of Communism, Slovakia has looked to liberalize its state-run system, introducing co-payments and privatizations. And modest market reforms have begun in Germany: increasing co-pays, enhancing insurance competition, and turning state enterprises over to the private sector (within a decade, only a minority of German hospitals will remain under state control). It’s important to note that change in these countries is slow and gradual—market reforms remain controversial. But if the United States was once the exception for viewing a vibrant private sector in health care as essential, it is so no longer.

Yet even as Stockholm and Saskatoon are percolating with the ideas of Adam Smith, a growing number of prominent Americans are arguing that socialized health care still provides better results for less money. “Americans tend to believe that we have the best health care system in the world,” writes Krugman in the New York Times. “But it isn’t true. We spend far more per person on health care . . . yet rank near the bottom among industrial countries in indicators from life expectancy to infant mortality.”

One often hears variations on Krugman’s argument—that America lags behind other countries in crude health outcomes. But such outcomes reflect a mosaic of factors, such as diet, lifestyle, drug use, and cultural values. It pains me as a doctor to say this, but health care is just one factor in health. Americans live 75.3 years on average, fewer than Canadians (77.3) or the French (76.6) or the citizens of any Western European nation save Portugal. Health care influences life expectancy, of course. But a life can end because of a murder, a fall, or a car accident. Such factors aren’t academic—homicide rates in the United States are much higher than in other countries (eight times higher than in France, for instance). In The Business of Health, Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider factor out intentional and unintentional injuries from life-expectancy statistics and find that Americans who don’t die in car crashes or homicides outlive people in any other Western country.

And if we measure a health-care system by how well it serves its sick citizens, American medicine excels. Five-year cancer survival rates bear this out. For leukemia, the American survival rate is almost 50 percent; the European rate is just 35 percent. Esophageal carcinoma: 12 percent in the United States, 6 percent in Europe. The survival rate for prostate cancer is 81.2 percent here, yet 61.7 percent in France and down to 44.3 percent in England—a striking variation.

Like many critics of American health care, though, Krugman argues that the costs are just too high: “In 2002 . . . the United States spent $5,267 on health care for each man, woman, and child.” Health-care spending in Canada and Britain, he notes, is a small fraction of that. Again, the picture isn’t quite as clear as he suggests; because the U.S. is so much wealthier than other countries, it isn’t unreasonable for it to spend more on health care. Take America’s high spending on research and development. M. D. Anderson in Texas, a prominent cancer center, spends more on research than Canada does.

That said, American health care is expensive. And Americans aren’t always getting a good deal. In the coming years, with health expenses spiraling up, it will be easy for some—like the zealous legislators in California—to give in to the temptation of socialized medicine. In Washington, there are plenty of old pieces of legislation that like-minded politicians could take off the shelf, dust off, and promote: expanding Medicare to Americans 55 and older, say, or covering all children in Medicaid.

But such initiatives would push the United States further down the path to a government-run system and make things much, much worse. True, government bureaucrats would be able to cut costs—but only by shrinking access to health care, as in Canada, and engendering a Canadian-style nightmare of overflowing emergency rooms and yearlong waits for treatment. America is right to seek a model for delivering good health care at good prices, but we should be looking not to Canada, but close to home—in the other four-fifths or so of our economy. From telecommunications to retail, deregulation and market competition have driven prices down and quality and productivity up. Health care is long overdue for the same prescription.

[Khet]

Originally Posted by PacoPepe

In a word, yes. Govn-mandated wages hurt business and drag down the economy. As a small business owner I can attest to this first-hand. I don't "need" any of what you mentioned. No waiter/waitress/bartender at any of the establishments I frequent makes minimum wage and that is partly due to the fact that I take care of the people who bring me food and beverages, and partly due to me not eating fast food.

huh? "done right" WTH???? The government under both parties has proven it cannot manage any such program effectively (e.g. Social Security). Have you flown anywhere lately? Are you one of those who "feel safer" because the government took over airport security?

There are NO ways to create "universal health care" outside of socialized medicine (read: those of us who pay a good chunk of our hard-earned money in taxes foot the bill by paying an even higher percentage of our hard-earned money)

So you wouldn't feel guilty if you were paying some of your employees less than $7.50/hr? Or maybe you would take care of your employees, but what about everyone else? Big business is impersonal. It's easier on the conscience if you never see or talk to your workers. Never mind the fact that APD is more common than you would think. Oh and I agree the thing about waiters and fast food was a bad example. I don't eat fast food either and my waiters are well compensated also, especially since I am one myself. There are min wage workers you rely on though. You can't shop without them.

I don't want government security taking over airports either. It's totally unnecessary. The US isn't a terrorist-laden war zone. If they didn't spend money on garbage like this then we wouldn't need a tax hike for universal health care. The only thing I see my tax money going to right now is roads, cops, and killing US servicemen and a bunch of Iraqis. I'm all about killing some Islamic fundies(terrorist or not) but geeze, there are better ways to go about massacring fundies.

Anyway, back on to the subject. The fed government can do things right so long as they aren't on a company's payroll(rules out the republicans :\) and even if they don't execute it perfectly, they would have to put in some effort to make it worse than what we have now. Proper allocation of resources and learning from other countries is easy and doable if an uncorrupted politician makes it. I've tried to dig up dirt on Obama, he's squeaky clean.

One more thing to think about. Poverty creates crime. Getting rid of welfare entirely and paying employees fairly has two advantages: those that refuse to work are unlikely to have any children that survive to continue the undesirable society and the rest won't be so poor and desperate. Unemployment compensation must be kept as it is though.

Edit: typos

[Khet]

Originally Posted by PhilB

1) Universal health care doesn't work for the same reasons that any other socialist program doesn't work. The consumer of the service is not the payer for the service, and therefore has no incentive in the system to use the service thoughtfully. The provider of the service is not paid by the consumer, and therefore has no incentive in the system to provide satisfactory service. The direct payer for the service is the government, but the money source is not connected to that, and so the payer has no incentive in the system to be efficient, or to care about the consumer or the provider. I'll post a couple of assessments of the Canadian system after this post for more detailed info.

2) First, how can a business pay more out without raising prices or overhead? Where do you think money comes from? If you are proposing that they do so by taking it out of the pay of more skilled and valuable people, they will lose their more skilled and valuable people, which is not the best strategy for succeeding in anything. Second, the biggest problem with minimum wage is that it most harms those whose skills are the lowest. The higher the minimum wage, the harder it is for an entry level worker (or especially one who is trying to start out after bankruptcy, prison, rehab, homelessness, etc.) to convince someone that his work will be worth the money. Minimum wage laws directly increase unemployment in the most vulnerable sector of the workforce. Minimum wages are not magic, money without effects. If they worked, why couldn't we just set the minimum wage to $100/hr, and make *everyone* rich! Hopefully even you can see the absurdity of that.

3) Ron Paul's religiousness makes me nervous as well. As an atheist myself, I'd LOVE to see a humanist libertarian candidate. But (a) Ron Paul really does have a fine record of voting on the basis of a reasonable interpretation fo the Constitution, certainly FAR better than any other member of Congress in living memory. And (b) If forced, I'd rather see a religious libertarian than a humanist socialist in office. As I've tried to say a number of times, Ron isn't perfect, and I disagree with him strongly on several issues. But he's still about three times as good as any other major party candidate, and has a much better chance of making a difference than any minor party candidate. So I'm happy to help get him as far as he can go, including the White House if by some miracle he can get there.

PhilB

1) Excellent answer. You have talked me out of universal health care but heavy control is still needed to make it affordable to everyone that wants it. Good compromise? I will read the articles you provided as well.

2) Anything above $8/hr is pushing it imo, for obvious reasons. If we only threw violent criminals in jail, ex-cons wouldn't be a factor. That would save us money to pay for my government oppression on the health care industry! And then some. I still hold my stance on minimum wage.

[PhilB]

Originally Posted by Khet

... The fed government can do things right so long as they aren't on a company's payroll ...

Amazing.

PhilB

[PhilB]

Originally Posted by Khet

1) Excellent answer. You have talked me out of universal health care but heavy control is still needed to make it affordable to everyone that wants it. Good compromise? I will read the articles you provided as well.

Nope, not a good compromise. "Heavy control" is why the system sucks now.

Originally Posted by Khet

2) Anything above $8/hr is pushing it imo, for obvious reasons. If we only threw violent criminals in jail, ex-cons wouldn't be a factor. That would save us money to pay for my government oppression on the health care industry! And then some. I still hold my stance on minimum wage.

OK, I'm fully behind jailing only violent criminals. But you completely left out the (a) recovering substance abusers, (b) bankrupt/homeless/others recovering from economic disaster, and (c) normal teenagers and other entry level workers I mentioned whose prospects are also reduced by minimum wage laws. And the impact of increased product costs on all low income people.

PhilB

[EEfz6]

Originally Posted by Khet

1) Why would universal health care not work? Be specific. Because it takes away a few businesses' freedom is not an acceptable answer.

The first and foremost reason is because the government can not do much of anything right, and I do not believe that there is anything they can do better than the private sector.

The other reason is money. Health care is expensive. The government can't afford it. But since they are in charge now, I guess they are going to control what is paid to the giving the care, and doing the research to come up with new treatments. The people that got to that point in life generally worked hard to get there because they were going to be financially rewarded very well. Take away that incentive, and why work your ass of to be a doctor, or researcher. There are only two scenarios for socialized health care, because nothing is free.

1. Make sure that those in the industry are paid less, so it is more affordable and doesn't bankrupt the government. The results are quality of service going down, and quality of innovation going down. Now everyone gets healthcare, it just isn't worth shit.

2. The prices stay at the same level, it is just paid by the government. But wait, where does the government get their money.......ME. I have health insurance, but now I am forced to pay for not only mine, but for those that did not have it before. Taxes have to be raised. This is a redistribution of wealth, which is always wrong.


But aside from that, what is the real reason that it should not happen? THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS NO CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY TO DO IT!

Originally Posted by Khet

2)Why should businesses be able to pay a wage under $7.50/hr? This can be done without jacking up prices or raising overhead so those are not acceptable answers, just cold-hearted. It's basically a free market right? People can just buy from the company that kept prices the same by redistributing wages.

Here is where you prove that you do not understand how economics work. People are paid according to what they are worth. I am an engineer, so I will use this as an example to see if you can wrap your brain around it.

Company A versus Company B

Both companies are electrical engineering firms who compete against eachother. Both design electronics. Both have well paid engineers, as well as assembly labor. There are a lot more assembly workers than engineers. The engineers make anywhere from 60k-110k per year, because the companies would be hard pressed to take anyone off the street and have them design the electronics that are produced here. The assembly labor makes $5 per hour because any idiot off the street can put the stuff together given the parts that the engineers design. Now a law is passed saying that the assembly workers must get paid 7.50 per hour. The companies take different approaches.

Company A decides that company B will likely just raise prices, so they develop a different strategy. They raise the pay of the assembly workers, but offset it by lowering the pay of the engineers. Their products now cost less than company B's, but then there is an unintended side effect. All of the good engineers see that they can make more money at company B, so they go there for jobs. What is the outcome?

The quality form company A falls off because they have lost their best design engineers, just so they could pay the unskilled, uneducated labor more and keep the same prices. Company B's quality remains the same because they still have good engineers designing the products. After all, they pay them more.

Now the consumer has two choices. Pay the same as you used to pay for any inferior product, or pay more for the same quality that you used to get for less. Now everyone, those who were helped by the raise as well as those who did not get a raise because of this minimum wage hike, must pay more for what they buy.

Originally Posted by Khet

3)How can one be a staunch protector of the constitution and then say you're fine with religion and state mixing(go read the wiki for all the gory details)? It sounds like a biased interpretation of the constitution to me. His religious conviction by itself is enough to make me steer clear. What makes you think he won't turn a blind eye to garbage like blue laws?

You can have all of the suspicions of him that you want. His voting record in congress speaks for itself.

[bush]

Originally Posted by Khet

Oh yeah, how could I forget, 22 year olds don't know anything. Age has little to do with anything. Seeing more years doesn't make you wiser if you never take time to think out other ideas. Stubbornness and apathy does seem increase with age though.

And to the same effect, so does intelligence and experience.

I used to be a hardcore libertarian myself until I spent a bit more time in the military and other jobs. My attitude was survival of the fittest, fuck everyone else. Then my empathy and logic caught up with me. I realized what happens when business is not restricted ethically and what the effects are to the peons doing all the work.

PhilB covered it - that's not at all a libertarian mindset, that's more anarchist than anything else. Part of your problem is that you're throwing around words that you don't know the meaning of.

The only idea that has never changed is wanting the ability to do anything in the pursuit of happiness so long as it doesn't interfere with anyone else's ability to do the same. Pure capitalism prevents this, therefore I am against it.

You still sound like a socialist.

Before I hear anything else about my misconceptions of freedom, I will say this: HAPPINESS > FREEDOM. Do you need a lot of freedom to be happy? Yes. Do you need libertarian-style freedom to be happy? No, see the former paragraph. I guess I was throwing around the word freedom a little too much for you conservatives. I will stop to prevent further confusion.

"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it." -Thomas Paine

Answer the following questions for me please. If you do so satisfactorily on the first two, I will change my political stance. I still won't vote for Ron Paul though. What sort of humanist would I be if voted for a superstitious old man?

Elaborate please.

1) Why would universal health care not work? Be specific. Because it takes away a few businesses' freedom is not an acceptable answer.

Social Security was supposed to be a federal safety net. Now, when someone finally does collect social security, it ends up being less than they'd make at a minimum wage job.

The TSA is currently a waste of government money, and it's been proven ineffective.

The DHS, despite swallowing a huge chunk of funding, has shown itself to be... crap.

There's very little government can do that the private sector cannot do better, cheaper, and faster. History has shown this.

2)Why should businesses be able to pay a wage under $7.50/hr? This can be done without jacking up prices or raising overhead so those are not acceptable answers, just cold-hearted. It's basically a free market right? People can just buy from the company that kept prices the same by redistributing wages.

Have you ever run a business or hired employees?

Most business operate with a narrow margin between expenses and profit. Saying wages can be raised without increasing prices or decreasing spending shows an incredible misunderstanding.

Joe's Restaurant has 10 waitresses, all of which make $3/hour (tips excluded). Raising their pay to $7.50 per hour more than doubles his payroll expenses. That is not an insignificant increase.

3)How can one be a staunch protector of the constitution and then say you're fine with religion and state mixing(go read the wiki for all the gory details)? It sounds like a biased interpretation of the constitution to me. His religious conviction by itself is enough to make me steer clear. What makes you think he won't turn a blind eye to garbage like blue laws?

Look at his voting record, Carol. Four congressional terms and he's never voted on anything unconstitutional or unbalanced (in terms of budget). Out of all the candidates, he has the most consistent and responsible record, IMO.

And I'm not sure where you're getting this religion and state mixing BS. I can't imagine someone with a constitutional voting record trying to integrate his Lutheran faith into our lives.

[Khet]

Originally Posted by bush

And to the same effect, so does intelligence and experience.



PhilB covered it - that's not at all a libertarian mindset, that's more anarchist than anything else. Part of your problem is that you're throwing around words that you don't know the meaning of.

You took my meaning differently than intended. I chose bad wording but I did and still do know what libertarianism is.

Oh and intelligence does not increase with age... it actually declines in the elderly. You clearly do not know the meaning of intelligence.

Originally Posted by bush

You still sound like a socialist.

Think what you will. This is a forum so you can't truly understand my way of thinking.

Originally Posted by bush

There's very little government can do that the private sector cannot do better, cheaper, and faster. History has shown this.

You're right about the very little part. That still leaves some that they can do though.

Originally Posted by bush

Have you ever run a business or hired employees?

Most business operate with a narrow margin between expenses and profit. Saying wages can be raised without increasing prices or decreasing spending shows an incredible misunderstanding.

Joe's Restaurant has 10 waitresses, all of which make $3/hour (tips excluded). Raising their pay to $7.50 per hour more than doubles his payroll expenses. That is not an insignificant increase.

Employees that receive tips aren't going to be getting $7.50/hr. That is just for everyone else and it won't reach that point until 2009. Minimum wage has not been increasing with inflation. Congress was just fixing this oversight. If everyone dealt with it years ago they can deal with it now.

Originally Posted by bush

And I'm not sure where you're getting this religion and state mixing BS. I can't imagine someone with a constitutional voting record trying to integrate his Lutheran faith into our lives.

So you are going to scold me for having some trust in my candidates but you think it's fine to trust Ron Paul on religion?

[Khet]

Originally Posted by EEfz6

I am an engineer, so I will use this as an example to see if you can wrap your brain around it.

No need to get cocky with me. I was a systems administrator. I left the computer science field to pursue something more fulfilling. Have some etiquette. Do you talk to people like this in person?

[bush]

Originally Posted by Khet

You took my meaning differently than intended. I chose bad wording but I did and still do know what libertarianism is.

Sorry, that's not the way it seems.

Oh and intelligence does not increase with age... it actually declines in the elderly. You clearly do not know the meaning of intelligence.

So a 25 year old is dumber than a 2 year old. Right. There's a point where function begins to decline, but this statement was stupid.

Think what you will. This is a forum so you can't truly understand my way of thinking.

You're advocating government-controlled economy, healthcare, and redistribution of wealth. These are socialist talking points. If I were to advocate the lynching of blacks, you'd call me a racist. Common deductive reasoning.

You're right about the very little part. That still leaves some that they can do though.

Excellent rebuttal. Sarcasm switch off.

The reason the US has the quality of healthcare it does is because of the private sector. The high costs means high revenue, which spurs research and development. Take away that incentive and we're left with lackluster services.

I have not seen an argument from you as to why it would work. All I've seen is "it could work" and "don't say it can't because you can't prove it." You provide us with your idea of national healthcare, in great detail, and we can review it.

Socialized healthcare? Canadian-style publicly funded services? Government subsidization?

Employees that receive tips aren't going to be getting $7.50/hr. That is just for everyone else and it won't reach that point until 2009. Minimum wage has not been increasing with inflation. Congress was just fixing this oversight. If everyone dealt with it years ago they can deal with it now.

If you think a wage increase of more than $2 per hour isn't going to affect overhead of small businesses, you're nuts. If you think you can find a business owner that's willing to take a cut in profits to pay his employees more, I have some beachfront property in Wyoming you might be interested in.

Also look at the drop in employment rates during the 1996 wage adjustment.

So you are going to scold me for having some trust in my candidates but you think it's fine to trust Ron Paul on religion?

Yes, because you have no fucking clue what you're talking about. Research Paul's voting record. If you can't figure out how to do that, you shouldn't be allowed to say such stupid things.

Oh noes, a Christian Libertarian candidate with an R after his name. He's going to bring Jesus back and make him vice president! Please.

Once you do that, look into how useless Obama, Clinton, McCain, and Guilliani are and how bad they would be for us. It's all more of the same. D, R - it doesn't matter with most candidates because all but one (that I can figure out) is a globalist that's running for more power, influence, and money.

[EEfz6]

Originally Posted by Khet

No need to get cocky with me. I was a systems administrator. I left the computer science field to pursue something more fulfilling. Have some etiquette. Do you talk to people like this in person?

I fail to see where I was getting cocky. I am an engineer, so I used an engineering company as an example because I can relate to it. I know what the effects would be, and I laid them out. Why so defensive? Do you talk to people like this in person.