If we do, in fact, have the best healthcare in the world, that just means ours sucks less than everyone else’s, not that it’s good.
America’s Lagging Health Care System
Americans are increasingly frustrated about the subpar performance of this country’s fragmented health care system, and with good reason. A new survey of patients in seven industrialized nations underscores just how badly sick Americans fare compared with patients in other nations. One-third of the American respondents felt their system is so dysfunctional that it needs to be rebuilt completely — the highest rate in any country surveyed. The system was given poor scores both by low-income, uninsured patients and by many higher-income patients.
[…]
Given the large number of people uninsured or poorly insured in this country, it was no surprise that Americans were the most likely to go without care because of costs. Fully 37 percent of the American respondents said that they chose not to visit a doctor when sick, skipped a recommended test or treatment or failed to fill a prescription in the past year because of the cost — well above the rates in other countries.
that will only come when u ppl realize that rich should be taxed more, and the greater ur income the greater the taxation should be
Universal Health Care, brought to you by the same people who brought us great government programs like the DMV, Social Security, and Walter Reed Hospital.
I wonder if they will get those little digital ticket machines they have in my local DMV put into Emergency Rooms, with that electronic voice that calls your number, 4 hours later.
“Ding.. Number C156 with the broken leg, please take your number to nursing station number 2. Ding… Number C156 please with the….”
But it all doesn’t matter, the neo-libs have been very successful in convincing people that their own health should not be their own responsibility. We will probably end up getting Government Health Care, and with it the massive bureaucracy, rationing, and substandard service that comes with it. Welcome to the Nanny States of America.
#1, When ever people start saying rich people should be taxed more, I always have the same question. When is it too much?
Are you entitled to 30% of their income, 40%, perhaps you are entitled to 70%. At what number do you think the rich is paying their fair share? And also what do yo consider rich? A couple making over $100,000 is considered rich by many perhaps we should tax them at least 50% so they only take home $50,000.
Ya, that will teach those dirty stinking rich.
I think I read this as 67% of Americans do not want the health care system dismantled and rebuilt. It’s all in the presentation.
I pay $600 a month for insurance. I also help pay for the uninsured, just like most of you do. Medicaid and the uninsured stiffing hospitals are passed to tax payers and consumers. Most national heath schemes started in a different time, following the liberal tendencies after WWII. A comprehensive healthcare plan developed today for the US would be very different. It would be subsidies to private insurance companies based on income. They would probably roll Medicare and Medicaid together with it. It would also be mandatory to have some heath coverage for this to work. It’s hard to imagine Congress rolling this out in any efficient or usable format.
#7 – Its the same statistic, it doesnt matter how its presented.
#4 – i would consider people earning over $100,000 a month very rich, wouldn’t you? – Simply put, you need to completely re-invent most of your country, Health care is just the start. Your car manufacturing industry is complete pants, the reason you cant export cars overseas is because they are rubbish. To pay for completely free public health for everyone would require you only to tax your “gas” the same as most EU countries. A few months ago it was posted on here that the price of gas had hit an all time high of $1 a gallon, in the UK (which is quite high even for europe i believe, but regardless) we pay about £1 per litre – equivalent of you paying around $8 dollars a gallon. But this would never happen, because you need 8L V8 Tanks to drive 1 mile down the road to drop your kids in school. And even if that did change no politician would ever suggest it because it would hurt the american farmer to have free health care at the cost of considering fuel economy over buying what is considered to be “american”.
Americans are the perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, thinking you know more than you actually do.
If a system that is supposed to save lives cannot cater for all lives it is meant to save, then it is, by definition, BROKEN. I guess its the American way to leave things broken because we cannot be bothered to fix them.
Just like your Mexican Immigration problem, double the border patrol is what people hear from every politician each time election comes around. Why dont they try a solution that actually might work – maybe you cut from there debt since they cant pay it anyway, and provide incentives for american companies to put business there. That way there would be jobs for potential immigrants and they wouldn’t need to come to America.
#2.
Last time I was in my DMV it took me 10 min to re-register, pay and have my new license.
In my experience government only sucks when Republicans are in power.
Wow! $600 a month for health insurance. I’m paying €1000 a year for private health cover for a family of four and 25% of that is tax deductible. Thank god I don’t live under your system.
In my experience government only sucks when Republicans are in power.
Comment by Sounds The Alarm — 11/2/2007 @ 5:54 am
I guess you haven’t been to Chicago lately!
Health costs were low before Medicare.
Medicare fraud meant that doctors and hospitals could charge whatever they wanted, and that meant the rest of us ended up paying more to match what they could cheat the fedgov out of.
The prices are not going to drop, even if Medicare fraud is eliminated; doctors and hospitals have learned they can twist what they want out of us.
After Bush’s tax plan went into effect:
Top 1% of earners paid 36% of the taxes
Top 5% of earners paid 56% of the taxes
Top 10% of earners paid 68% of the taxes
People earning 1million or more paid in 236B in taxes
All these numbers increased after the Bush tax cuts, so despite all the blather about “tax cuts for the rich”, the rich are paying a greater % of taxes now. In fact, they also pay a bigger % of the taxes than when the highest marginal tax rate was 70%.
So in addition to paying by far, the vast amount of taxes, cutting taxes has increased the % of the tax revenue paid by the rich.
To #1 and #5, what would be a “fair” percentage for the top 10% to pay? 90%, 80%? How much more do you want them to pay and why?
Every industrialized nation but the US has national healthcare plans. The US spends more for healthcare and gets lower quality care than most of these other countries.
This rhetoric about evil “socialized” medicine has proven false.
#10, speaking of people who think they know more than they do:
No one said, 100,000 a month wasn’t rich, that was referring to 100,00 a year. Americans have no problem buying non-American cars, as US cars have less than 50% of the market now. Gas has been > 1$ for years, so I have no idea what you’re talking about there. US companies have been moving down to Mexico for years. The problem lays with the Mexican government being so corrupt that there is no economy down there. The debt isn’t the cause of that.
So good job, on thinking you know more than you really do.
#15 way off topic here, but the top 1% earn 23% of the income, the top 10% earn 50%, leaving the other 90% earning the other 50%. If the “rich” keep paying a larger percentage of the taxes, it is because wage desparity continues to grow.
What #1 Igor is saying is: “someone other than I should pay for the government programs that I want.”
#18,
The average tax rate for the bottom 50% is 3%. Is that fair?
>>Welcome to the Nanny States of America.
We’ve had the Nanny States of America for some time now; spy cams in the bedroom, illegal wiretapping, you name it.
Only when the notion comes up of the government doing something GOOD for the people do the neocon nutbags get their knickers in a twist.
The concept of running a medical care system for profit and the concept of America being a “Christian” nation are utterly impossible to reconcile.
Who would Jesus “triage”? No one I know of wants “Health Management”, they want a freaking Doctor doing his best to cure them. Not some soulless, banal bean counting robot whose only allegiance is the the stockholders deciding whether or not they need an MRI to find that tumor before it metastasizes. Cannibalism is a less revolting concept than the American health care system as it now exists.
Mr. Mustard –
Your idea of “doing good” is taking people’s money away from them, then giving it back to them as a “program”, minus the substantial portion that is given to the middleman.
Shane Brady,
There are lies, damn lies and then there are your statistics.
You failed to mention that the top 1% in America also possess approximately that same percentage of privately held wealth.
And, of course, they have a helluva lot more disposable wealth to pay taxes from than we in the middle class. You could tax them MUCH MORE and they still wouldn’t have to give up the privates jets, villas in Tuscany, and 10,000 bottle wine cellars.
I don’t care about repealing the Bush tax cuts — I want to repeal the Reagan tax cuts which send the middle class into a two decade long death squeeze with no end in sight.
Health costs were low before Medicare.
Smashing insight. Cars were cheap before medicare too. And you could buy a house in California for $12,000. Good times, huh?
Health costs are skyrocketing because of 1 thing: people don’t die with as much regularity as they used to. It’s expensive keeping sick people alive. (That means most older people too.) Back in the good old days, they handled ’em the old fashioned way: they died.
I’ll leave the moral question of whether longer life expectancy and the ability to keep very sick people alive now is a good or bad thing. However, it is undeniably expensive.
minus the substantial portion that is given to the middleman.
Don’t be a sap.
Those “middlemen” are 99.9% card-carrying republicans.
#14-People didn’t live very long before Medicare either
#2-It would be great if American health care worked as well as DMV, VA, and Social Security do. At least, before George Bush’s unfunded war casualties swamped the VA.
As the saying goes, Republicans run on a platform that government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.
You think that government consists entirely of elected and appointed officials at the federal level? Keep dreaming.
#12 The UK health system costs about 100 billion pounds/yr or $8,000/4,000 pounds per household (25M). That gets paid for in taxes. There’s no free lunch. Costs have inflated dramatically over time, yet you have citizens pulling their own teeth.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/nhs/story/0,,679712,00.html
All of these systems are eventually going collapse under their own weight like every other attempt at centrally-planned industry, where bureaucrats try to manage supply and demand. Personally I’d rather things go back to the free market in order to bring prices down, and let people buy catastrophic insurance. The government should regulate insurers to ensure the availability of catastrophic coverage to everyone, but it doesn’t have to take over the industry or hand out blank checks to do that.
#10 – Hey! I have exclussive rights to DKE on DU!
Nobody has bothered to answer the question on why we need manditory health insurance? I can agree we need better/cheaper health care but why do we need a health care system guaranteed? That’s not the same as cheaper and better. I do have health care insurance because I decided to have it and to pay for it. I have life insurance for the same reason, disability insurance too. Auto insurance because my state mandates it as well as “uninsured motorist” insurance. Home owner’s insurance because my lender requires it. I only have SS because it is forced on me.
Hmmm the top 1% earn 23% of the income but pay 36% of the taxes that sounds fair.
Re-read many of the posts above. The liberal worldview is that the wealthy are bad people because they must have done something bad to become wealthy, therefore they deserve to be punished.
The American health care system, right now today, is the best in the world. certainly it can be improved, but turning it into a gov’t bureaucracy isn’t the answer.
#30 I don’t live in the UK. This might surprise you, but there are other countries on this side of the pond besides the UK. Saying that, I’d rather my taxes going into a health care system that helps everyone. Your tax dollars goes into to companies like Blackwater that helps no one, except maybe Dick Cheney.
>>Your idea of “doing good” is taking people’s money away from
>>them, then giving it back to them as a “program”, minus the
>>substantial portion that is given to the middleman.
That’s what we have already, except the “substantial portion” is mind-boggling, and those in need often do NOT get the medical services they need. The executives in the medical-care-denial industry require their $100,000,000.00 salaries, and the best way to insure that is by making sure people do not have access to adequate health care.
If we could turn the health care industry in this country into something with the same LOW overhead as Social Security or Medicare, that would be a revolution worth having.
Don’t hold your breath for that, as long as Dumbya’s chumps are calling the shots.
Hey, Head, where is there 99% Republicans? Most gov workers are Democrats. Most “middle men” are in cities that vote Democrat.
The Republicans are stupid enough to think they can buy votes from the Democratic Party government workers by expanding government. It sure has not worked.