Quote from Schwa

Also, I've heard this tidbit floating around that America produces 50% of the worlds medical advances (I have no idea how to verify this) and that nobel prizes have been given, 80+% of the time in the past 50 years to Americans (I'll verify this later).

Of course. The profit motive is good for promoting advances, because advance produces a resources which you and only you possess, and can therefore monopolise charging an extortionate rate for. What it's bad at is getting that treatment to the people. They make more money by giving it to ten people for $50,000,000 each than by giving it to 50,000,000 people for $10.

Quote from Schwa

England has a Queen and they like it like that. Because that attracts tourists should America also have a Queen?

America should have a monarch (preferably ours like the good colonies) so that she can tell you what to do and lend your currency a bit of character.

Quote from supernight52

Okay, the healthcare bill, or the Health Reform, is a Communistic idea brought up by Obama. No he did not pass the bill on his own, but he sure as hell paid off a lot of politicians to do it for him. (At least that's the popular belief of right now.) The Health Reform was made to bring government health insurance to all in the U.S. But all that it's doing is gonna help the rich stay rich, and throw the poor into even rougher times. Apparently, the Reform was only made 'For the good of the country.' but I know the truth. I do not have much money in my wallet, so I can't afford to have health insurance. However, the new bill now requires, under punishment by law, that you buy health insurance from the government. You are no longer able to choose your own health insurance. So unless you already had insurance from another provider, excluding Medicare, you have to get it from the government. So, if the government suddenly says, 'Hey! Now healthcare costs this much!' You have to pay that amount. It sucks if you're poor, so get used to it, and get a higher paying job.

Have you been completely ignoring everything we've been saying. This will save you money. And no, they can't just ratchet up the price whenever they feel like, because that would lose them votes.

I think some of us may have realized it, but it's not completely Obama or all the previous presidents before him. The government is always in a battle against itself, and because they're arguing nothing gets done. And whatever does get done isn't usually the right thing. It usually just slips past them while they're arguing on larger or more massive things.
Obama does sound like a retard in his speeches sometimes.... But I try to support him as a president, not savior.

Bawahaha. The guy posting as JakeisHere is actually me.

Quote from Zed

Of course. The profit motive is good for promoting advances, because advance produces a resources which you and only you possess, and can therefore monopolise charging an extortionate rate for. What it's bad at is getting that treatment to the people. They make more money by giving it to ten people for $50,000,000 each than by giving it to 50,000,000 people for $10.

Alright, here's something I can argue without looking up facts. So are you trying to say that we should sacrifice technological and medical advances for the ability to get health-care to everyone equally?

Medical advances can also simply be things that decrease the cost of certain procedures, but if nobody's paying but the government are they going to really care to try and cut costs/come up with more efficient advances with no incentive whatsoever? The answer is, of course, no.

And charging 10 people $50,000,000 each is perfectly fine. The reason of course being that apparently America is full of fat wealthy capitalist slugs. These people can dole out the money for this experimental research to make it profitable and prove its use to the doctors/nucleur-astro-bio-chemical-physicists who developed it. And once they cover the costs of inventing the 'advance' and time passes the price inevitably comes down.

- Because people are given a choice and a capitalist drive runs a fair amount of the medical industry we are able to come up with life-saving or simply cost-effective incentives that can be payed for by our richest one percent while they are experimental. - Which in a little time creates a medical advance readily available to everyone.

------

There are 8.2 million (according to BlueCross/BlueShield according to this website http://spectator.org/archives/2009/03/20/the-myth-of-the-46-million) Americans (as in citizens) who are truly without healthcare because they lack the means to afford it. 8 million out of 300 million; that is 2.7%. So what this health care bill will do is effectively kill 50% of the world's medical advances (which save countless lives) to help 2.7% of America's population who truly cannot afford healthcare.

Is that worth it?

I suppose you could consider this argument a strawman argument, but I believe my point still stands.

Quote from Orion

Bawahaha. The guy posting as JakeisHere is actually me.

No one is posting as JakeisHere...

Reply to Schwa pending.

Reply to Zed's reply pending the posting of Zed's reply.

I'm just reserving a placeholder for when I come back in an hour or so to reply.

Because I'm just that damn cool.

Quote from Zed

No one is posting as JakeisHere...

Reply to Schwa pending.

No sir, I mean in the link in in OP. I just thought it was pretty wierd.

Quote from Schwa

Alright, here's something I can argue without looking up facts. So are you trying to say that we should sacrifice technological and medical advances for the ability to get health-care to everyone equally?

Sort of. The objective of a medical system has to be to help as many people as possible. If the American system requires a hundred times more advances to get the same benefit because each individual benefit helps only 1% as many people as an advance in nationalised systems, but is only making twice as many in real terms (bearing in mind that they will have access to all of our advances and we will have access to only those of ours and other nationalised systems because the non-profit ones are willing to share) then I'd say it's failing.

Medical advances can also simply be things that decrease the cost of certain procedures, but if nobody's paying but the government are they going to really care to try and cut costs/come up with more efficient advances with no incentive whatsoever? The answer is, of course, no.

In fact the data appears to show that non-profit systems are more cost efficient than the privatised ones:

By 1994, research showed that administrative costs among for-profit hospitals had increased to 34.0 percent compared to 24.5 percent for private non-profit hospitals, and 22.9 percent for public hospitals.

-http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S.%20HCweb.pdf

The data are old, but that is irrelevant.

And charging 10 people $50,000,000 each is perfectly fine. The reason of course being that apparently America is full of fat wealthy capitalist slugs. These people can dole out the money for this experimental research to make it profitable and prove its use to the doctors/nucleur-astro-bio-chemical-physicists who developed it. And once they cover the costs of inventing the 'advance' and time passes the price inevitably comes down.

But the price tends not to come down. Certainly not as far as it could. That was my point. I wasn't talking about covering research costs, I'm just saying the price will stay at $50,000,000 because that's where it is most profitable. Until the patent runs out, that is. After that it will probably only be three times more expensive than it should be, and may prohibit as few as 50% of the population from benefiting.

- Because people are given a choice and a capitalist drive runs a fair amount of the medical industry we are able to come up with life-saving or simply cost-effective incentives that can be payed for by our richest one percent while they are experimental. - Which in a little time creates a medical advance readily available to everyone.

Can you give me any examples at all of American medical advances that are readily available to any American?

------

There are 8.2 million (according to BlueCross/BlueShield according to this website http://spectator.org/archives/2009/03/20/the-myth-of-the-46-million) Americans (as in citizens) who are truly without healthcare because they lack the means to afford it. 8 million out of 300 million; that is 2.7%. So what this health care bill will do is effectively kill 50% of the world's medical advances (which save countless lives) to help 2.7% of America's population who truly cannot afford healthcare.

Is that worth it?
[/QUOTE]

So many points on that I'm not sure where to start. Firstly, any percentage at all is too high. Condemning anyone to not receive help is terrible. The fact that it's eight million and you seem to just be brushing aside that figure as insignificant is even worse.

Secondly, that is only people who are permanently without healthcare. A lot of the people without care at any one time will be, as the website states, between jobs or otherwise temporarily uninsured. But those people are still uninsured. Just because you had insurance at some point doesn't mean you're fine now. If you get ill in the interim you're just as fucked as a guy who had never been able to afford it.

Thirdly, that doesn't include the immigrants. Are you going to deny people human rights because they are in your country illegally? No. Treat 'em, then arrest 'em.

Fourthly, not including people under the age of 34 is not a valid way of determining how many people are forced to live without healthcare. Bear in mind that the under-34's are the poorest age group.

Fifthly, you make it sound as though American medical research would completely stop without privatised healthcare. The fact that you only contribute 50% in the first place rather goes against that, don't you think?

Quote from Schwa

Reply to Zed's reply pending the posting of Zed's reply.

I'm just reserving a placeholder for when I come back in an hour or so to reply.

Because I'm just that damn cool.

Aha, but, anticipating a ninja, I didn't bother to edit :)

Sort of. The objective of a medical syst

em has to be to help as many people as possible. If the American system requires a hundred times more advances to get the same benefit because each individual benefit helps only 1% as many people as an advance in nationalised systems, but is only making twice as many in real terms (bearing in mind that they will have access to all of our advances and we will have access to only those of ours and other nationalised systems because the non-profit ones are willing to share) then I'd say it's failing.[/quote]

I don't understand what you're saying here (a terrible thing to admit in a debate, I realize). An advance gives a different benefit, it does not recreate a benefit, it creates or improves.

The advance helps that 1% initially, and then it helps everybody. Honestly I don't know the statistics (and neither do you, but if you could find them they would probably help me which would be awesome) but I would say most medical advances eventually come down to reasonable levels.

I actually did make an attempt to look this up and it appears that a generic drug on average costs 30-70% (wow, that's a huge variation, also) amount less than the name-brand. The reason being that the name-brand drug developers spent the inordinate amounts of money on researching and creating the product (not to mention meeting FDA regulations and getting approval for a product) and since the product is new they have to spend, again, inordinate amounts of money on advertising so people know what the hell they're saying. Source: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/250774/understanding_the_difference_between.html?cat=71

So in a nationalized system the cost for developing any new drugs and getting the word out about the drug falls on the government, and thus the tax payers rather than an entrepreneurial team of scientists. I believe that it is reasonable to assume that the cost for research does not decrease (although advertising easily could). So the government is required to pay the costs for developing new drugs and medical advances; the funds for this come from the backs of the people, and then they are all sold the drug at a reasonable rate (which, knowing how caring the government is, won't involve profit or any reasonable amount thereof) so the research costs will never be accounted for resulting in a government deficit.

Is that really all that grand of an idea?

Back to generic drugs coming down in price. I believe patent law in the US restricts patents to 20 years, which is also the WTO standard. So a company has 20 years to recoup the losses from 15 years of research and then other companies can manufacture their product willynilly, only being required to pay for the materials necessary to create it. In a capitalist economy various smart people named Joe (not plumbers) will invariably decrease the price to reasonable levels (the money needed to produce the product with a little bit of profit). Because, believe it or not, cheaper stuff sells more than the same quality expensive stuff.

So I suppose what I was trying to say before I got lost typing this up is that the advance will inevitably help the entire population due to the nature of capitalism, and because of the expiration of patent laws it will help the entire world.

If the government pays for the research and development cost rather than a wealthy few taking the brunt of the cost for 20 years everybody suffers with higher taxes and a government deficit. Well, I suppose that's not true because our progressive tax system still puts the burden on the wealthy few. But whatever.

In fact the data appears to show that

non-profit systems are more cost efficient than the privatised ones:


-http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S.%20HCweb.pdf

The data are old, but that is irrelevant.
[/quote]

As I currently have no respone to this I am going to quote it and type some words.

But the price tends not to come do

wn. Certainly not as far as it could. That was my point. I wasn't talking about covering research costs, I'm just saying the price will stay at $50,000,000 because that's where it is most profitable. Until the patent runs out, that is. After that it will probably only be three times more expensive than it should be, and may prohibit as few as 50% of the population from benefiting.

[/quote]

Do you have any proof that they are three times as expensive as they should be? If it costs 20 monies to make x drug and my competitor is selling it at 60 monies I will get more purchasers by selling the drug at 40 monies, not only getting purchasers who would not have bought it otherwise but also stealing my competitors purchasers, until they cut their prices and so on and so forth.

Can you give me any examples at all of

American medical advances that are readily available to any American?

After looking through approximately a thousand articles this was the closest thing I could find to prove my point: http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=MWSB&p_theme=mwsb&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=0EB82649E8DF6B34&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM

Unfortunately I did not want to buy it so I don't know whether it did or not. The reason my search was troublesome is not because there are no American medical advances that have helped the lay person but because your claim is so ridiculous that people do not consider it.

Are 50% of the worlds medical advances locked up from the average person in America, let alone the whole world? I feel like people wouldn't get noble prizes for such cruelty.

- America's average lifespan has been steadily increasing; all the while we have been getting fatter and our lifestyles unhealthier. Do we live longer because we eat more fast food or because of medical advances available to everybody? (Or perhaps the richest 1% are living to 10,000 and throwing off our statistics)

Once the patent laws expire capitalism takes reign, prices will lower and the product becomes available.
------

So many points on that I'm not sure wh

ere to start. Firstly, any percentage at all is too high. Condemning anyone to not receive help is terrible. The fact that it's eight million and you seem to just be brushing aside that figure as insignificant is even worse. [/quote]

Everything is relative. Let's say there 100 people in population and there are 3 people who are in imminent danger of dying. Do you think these 100 people would be able, on their own, to sacrifice enough to support these people? To do this on their own as private persons?

The obvious answer is yes,

"But people are too selfish to actually do that" Well sure, and not exactly. Yes people are selfish, but equally people are compassionate.

Let's think about this logically for a second; let's say I see a starving man and behind me I see a man who's job it is to feed the poor. I know that I already pay this man a few dollars a month to do his job. Am I going to feed this poor man? No, because I know the man coming up the road behind me will do it for me.

Equally, if I see a starving man but I do not see the dole-man around will I be more likely to feed the poor man? No, because that man will get around to it eventually. Even if you, as an extremely compassionate British male, would feed that man it doesn't change the fact that knowing that something you already pay for is supposed to be doing this job already (and you expect it to) is going to decrease the chances of you paying double, out of your own charity.

We can at least agree on this?

---------

Also, what makes the government more qualified to dole out money than a locally funded private (and say, not for profit) organization? The local organization knows more about the people, those in need and those in-need-to-give, it can solicit more donations (rather than an arbitrary and set amount) than a nameless and faceless government organization.

Your homeowners association can more effectively (hopefully) pave the pot-holes in your neighborhood than a national organization with endless levels of beaurocracy.

Secondly, that is only people who are

permanently without healthcare. A lot of the people without care at any one time will be, as the website states, between jobs or otherwise temporarily uninsured. But those people are still uninsured. Just because you had insurance at some point doesn't mean you're fine now. If you get ill in the interim you're just as fucked as a guy who had never been able to afford it. [/quote]

But that doesn't mean you are incapable of getting healthcare, sure, you might go 3 months without healthcare but you'll spend years with it. The idea of nationalized healthcare is to enable people who can't feasibly get healthcare to get it.

The odds of you contracting a severely expensive life threatening disease, or even getting a terribly expensive bodily injury in those few months are so slim it's not even worth considering.

Thirdly, that doesn't include the im

migrants. Are you going to deny people human rights because they are in your country illegally? No. Treat 'em, then arrest 'em.

[/quote]

Um, sure. Let's think about this without letting that troublesome thing called 'emotion' get in the way.

Who would pay for a national healthcare system? Citizens.

Who should get the benefits? People who pay for it.

Do illegal immigrants pay for it? No.

Should they get healthcare? Probably not.

You know what the real problem is here though? If I know that I can go into a country and receive free healthcare (and a free trip back to my homecountry) and I have a lifethreatening illness that can't be treated in my own country and lets say even if I don't live in Mexico I can get to said country for under $2000. Well goddamnit I'm going to go pay $2000 to get to that country, and get treated, and then I'm going to leave.

I'm not going to contribute to the system, I'm not going to contribute to the economy, I am going to just drain money. I mean, just think about it. If healthcare is so expensive as we claim it to be (and therefore the reason we need insurance, so that we don't go bankrupt) how is treating 10,000,000 illegal immigrants at a perfect deficit going to make the system work?

I'll give you a hint, it's not.

You know what the funny thing about compassion is? It's an emotion, emotions are human. I don't recall it being the government's job to be compassionate.

Fourthly, not including people under

the age of 34 is not a valid way of determining how many people are forced to live without healthcare. Bear in mind that the under-34's are the poorest age group.
[/quote]

Yes but they are also young and healthy and thusly not at the same risk of say, cancer, as a 40 or 50 year old person. If I was young, and 'poor' (by American standards) and I could pay $150 for healthcare a year, or I could pay for a new Mustang (and apparently a new foreclosed home) what do you think I'm going to do?

Is it the government's job to make the right choices for people? To tell them what their choice should be?

The small of it is that many of these young and notoriously people simply choose to forego healthcare as a luxury, as they are truly not in need of it, for other luxuries such as phones/satellite TVs/nice cars.

Sure, it may not be perfectly valid and objective; but it's reasonable.

Fifthly, you make it sound as though A

merican medical research would completely stop without privatised healthcare. The fact that you only contribute 50% in the first place rather goes against that, don't you think?[/quote]

Let's speak skewed statistics. America makes 50% of the world's medical advances, yet contains only 5% of the world's population. Only 50%?

Obviously this is an unfair statistic, because, frankly, a bunch of the world is a cesspool.

So let's do it with the developed countries; which I take to be all of Europe, North America, and Australia as I am too lazy to actually look at all the developed countries individually.

Europe: 731,000,000
North America: 528,720,588
Australia: 21,374,000 (That's a pretty tiny number)

Total: 1,281,094,588

Let's take America's 300 million - 23.4 % of the developed worlds population.

So the rest of the world produces 1% of innovation per 20,000,000 people. America produces 1% of the world's medical innovation per 6,000,000 people. That is 3.33 times more medical innovations per person.

(What I did is 981 mil (approximate value of rest of the world) over the 50 percentages it produces, and America's 300 mil over the 50% it produces)

Are you trying to tell me that that's insignificant, or due to our inferior (I totally spelled inferior wrong, twice) education system?

This post took me an hour and half to type doing nothing but focusing on this post. You're welcome.

Jesus fucking Christ.

90% of the reason that I'm responding is a desire to see just how small the bar at the side can get. That's why I'm posting this now and editing later - I'm not having some small-ass post mess this beautiful page up.

EDIT:

Quote from Schwa

I don't understand what you're saying here (a terrible thing to admit in a debate, I realize). An advance gives a different benefit, it does not recreate a benefit, it creates or improves.

The advance helps that 1% initially, and then it helps everybody. Honestly I don't know the statistics (and neither do you, but if you could find them they would probably help me which would be awesome) but I would say most medical advances eventually come down to reasonable levels.

I actually did make an attempt to look this up and it appears that a generic drug on average costs 30-70% (wow, that's a huge variation, also) amount less than the name-brand. The reason being that the name-brand drug developers spent the inordinate amounts of money on researching and creating the product (not to mention meeting FDA regulations and getting approval for a product) and since the product is new they have to spend, again, inordinate amounts of money on advertising so people know what the hell they're saying. Source: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/250774/understanding_the_difference_between.html?cat=71

So in a nationalized system the cost for developing any new drugs and getting the word out about the drug falls on the government, and thus the tax payers rather than an entrepreneurial team of scientists. I believe that it is reasonable to assume that the cost for research does not decrease (although advertising easily could). So the government is required to pay the costs for developing new drugs and medical advances; the funds for this come from the backs of the people, and then they are all sold the drug at a reasonable rate (which, knowing how caring the government is, won't involve profit or any reasonable amount thereof) so the research costs will never be accounted for resulting in a government deficit.

The costs will fully be borne out by the tax system. Taxes invariably tax the rich more than the poor. As such we have a from each according to their ability to each according to their need system. That's as fair as it gets.

The point I was trying to make was that it is better to make a few advances that are available to everyone than to make lots that almost no one gets. The price of a treatment at profit maximisation will always be higher than the price at sales maximisation, ie. some people will be unable to get treatment when it costs extra. When demand is price inelastic, as it is for all medical treatment, there will be many many people who do not get treated.

Back to generic drugs coming down in price. I believe patent law in the US restricts patents to 20 years, which is also the WTO standard. So a company has 20 years to recoup the losses from 15 years of research and then other companies can manufacture their product willynilly, only being required to pay for the materials necessary to create it. In a capitalist economy various smart people named Joe (not plumbers) will invariably decrease the price to reasonable levels (the money needed to produce the product with a little bit of profit). Because, believe it or not, cheaper stuff sells more than the same quality expensive stuff.

Selling more isn't always the objective. You get more profit by selling at a higher price in the drugs industry because people need the drugs and will go without other things to get them. Let's take a look:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17244

Paragraph 14 of section 2. That's the one that starts with a big "A". Profit margins between 14% at their lowest and 25% at their highest. Over all products - not just monopolised ones. When the average profit margins of a company in America are 3%.

Do you have any proof that they are three times as expensive as they should be? If it costs 20 monies to make x drug and my competitor is selling it at 60 monies I will get more purchasers by selling the drug at 40 monies, not only getting purchasers who would not have bought it otherwise but also stealing my competitors purchasers, until they cut their prices and so on and so forth.

In general economics, yes, but as I showed above that's not always the case (although I was exaggerating to make a point earlier). In the pharmaceutical oligopolies there are extra factors like the costs of reverse-engineering the drug, the advertising, and the fact that they may get along quite well with the drug guys next door and have a little informal agreement not to get overly competitive.

After looking through approximately a thousand articles this was the closest thing I could find to prove my point: http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=MWSB&p_theme=mwsb&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=0EB82649E8DF6B34&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM

Unfortunately I did not want to buy it so I don't know whether it did or not. The reason my search was troublesome is not because there are no American medical advances that have helped the lay person but because your claim is so ridiculous that people do not consider it.

Are 50% of the worlds medical advances locked up from the average person in America, let alone the whole world? I feel like people wouldn't get noble prizes for such cruelty.

- America's average lifespan has been steadily increasing; all the while we have been getting fatter and our lifestyles unhealthier. Do we live longer because we eat more fast food or because of medical advances available to everybody? (Or perhaps the richest 1% are living to 10,000 and throwing off our statistics)

Once the patent laws expire capitalism takes reign, prices will lower and the product becomes available.
------

Your life expectancy could easily have been increasing off the back of our freely available advances. After all, our life expectancy is going up too, and we don't get most of your stuff. In fact, our (meaning across the EU) life expectancy is higher than yours.

The fact that at least 2.8 (or whatever) % of people in America cannot afford healthcare is alone enough to prove that the advances are not available to everyone.

Everything is relative. Let's say there 100 people in population and there are 3 people who are in imminent danger of dying. Do you think these 100 people would be able, on their own, to sacrifice enough to support these people? To do this on their own as private persons?

The obvious answer is yes,

"But people are too selfish to actually do that" Well sure, and not exactly. Yes people are selfish, but equally people are compassionate.

Let's think about this logically for a second; let's say I see a starving man and behind me I see a man who's job it is to feed the poor. I know that I already pay this man a few dollars a month to do his job. Am I going to feed this poor man? No, because I know the man coming up the road behind me will do it for me.

Equally, if I see a starving man but I do not see the dole-man around will I be more likely to feed the poor man? No, because that man will get around to it eventually. Even if you, as an extremely compassionate British male, would feed that man it doesn't change the fact that knowing that something you already pay for is supposed to be doing this job already (and you expect it to) is going to decrease the chances of you paying double, out of your own charity.

We can at least agree on this?

---------

We appear to be talking past each other. Did you not say earlier that these eight million people were getting no help? I am saying that's bad, and that you should pay the man a bit more so that the eight million do not die.

Also, what makes the government more qualified to dole out money than a locally funded private (and say, not for profit) organization? The local organization knows more about the people, those in need and those in-need-to-give, it can solicit more donations (rather than an arbitrary and set amount) than a nameless and faceless government organization.

Can it? Really? How?

Your homeowners association can more effectively (hopefully) pave the pot-holes in your neighborhood than a national organization with endless levels of beaurocracy.

Um. We don't have anything like that here so I'm not sure. I know roads are subcontracted to local councils who would be responsible for about 50,000 people and the stuff gets done. Not sure how it relates to hospitals though. Also, each hospital will treat the patients as they come in. There's no need for the doctor to ask permission from Gordon Brown for an X-ray - he just gets it done.

But that doesn't mean you are incapable of getting healthcare, sure, you might go 3 months without healthcare but you'll spend years with it. The idea of nationalized healthcare is to enable people who can't feasibly get healthcare to get it.

The odds of you contracting a severely expensive life threatening disease, or even getting a terribly expensive bodily injury in those few months are so slim it's not even worth considering.

As an individual, yes, but as a collective, no. Let's say 20,000,000 people are between jobs for two weeks each year (probably an understatement of time and an overstatement of volume, but hey). That means 800,000 people at any one time have no insurance. Therefore, when totalling up the number of people with no insurance you need to add 0.8 million. Yeah, you might only have a 1% chance of getting ill in that time, but that's 8000 people collectively getting ill while uninsured.

Um, sure. Let's think about this without letting that troublesome thing called 'emotion' get in the way.

Who would pay for a national healthcare system? Citizens.

Who should get the benefits? People who pay for it.

Do illegal immigrants pay for it? No.

Should they get healthcare? Probably not.

You know what the real problem is here though? If I know that I can go into a country and receive free healthcare (and a free trip back to my homecountry) and I have a lifethreatening illness that can't be treated in my own country and lets say even if I don't live in Mexico I can get to said country for under $2000. Well goddamnit I'm going to go pay $2000 to get to that country, and get treated, and then I'm going to leave.

I'm not going to contribute to the system, I'm not going to contribute to the economy, I am going to just drain money. I mean, just think about it. If healthcare is so expensive as we claim it to be (and therefore the reason we need insurance, so that we don't go bankrupt) how is treating 10,000,000 illegal immigrants at a perfect deficit going to make the system work?

I'll give you a hint, it's not.

Our system here is that the national health service will pay for your treatment wherever you are, and that is reciprocated by all the governments in the EU. It should be reciprocated around the world. Basically, when the US treats a Mexican the Mexican government can pay. Yeah, at the moment it probably won't, but then, at the moment the American government wouldn't pay for a Yank's treatment here either. We'd still give it to him though (although no guarantees he wouldn't be glassed before he got checked out). My point is, everywhere should have nationalised healthcare and share their facilities. The fact that it's not the case is not in itself a counter-argument.

Yes but they are also young and healthy and thusly not at the same risk of say, cancer, as a 40 or 50 year old person. If I was young, and 'poor' (by American standards) and I could pay $150 for healthcare a year, or I could pay for a new Mustang (and apparently a new foreclosed home) what do you think I'm going to do?

That's why you don't give them a choice. And when they get old they will be funded in part by the next generation. And they are covered in advance in case they do get ill in that brief period.

Is it the government's job to make the right choices for people? To tell them what their choice should be?

The small of it is that many of these young and notoriously people simply choose to forego healthcare as a luxury, as they are truly not in need of it, for other luxuries such as phones/satellite TVs/nice cars.

Sure, it may not be perfectly valid and objective; but it's reasonable.

The government has no right to intervene in so far as your actions affect no one but yourself. Withholding your money from a system that gives it to the people that need it most affects other people. Ergo the government has a right to intervene.

Let's speak skewed statistics.

Oh do let's! I haven't had a chance since Jeremy.

America makes 50% of the world's medical advances, yet contains only 5% of the world's population. Only 50%?

Obviously this is an unfair statistic, because, frankly, a bunch of the world is a cesspool.

So let's do it with the developed countries; which I take to be all of Europe, North America, and Australia as I am too lazy to actually look at all the developed countries individually.

Europe: 731,000,000
North America: 528,720,588
Australia: 21,374,000 (That's a pretty tiny number)

Total: 1,281,094,588

Let's take America's 300 million - 23.4 % of the developed worlds population.

So the rest of the world produces 1% of innovation per 20,000,000 people. America produces 1% of the world's medical innovation per 6,000,000 people. That is 3.33 times more medical innovations per person.

(What I did is 981 mil (approximate value of rest of the world) over the 50 percentages it produces, and America's 300 mil over the 50% it produces)

Are you trying to tell me that that's insignificant, or due to our inferior (I totally spelled inferior wrong, twice) education system?

Not at all. The point I'm making is that the advances won't instantly stop as you implied they would. The fact that we who nationalise our work produce as much as you do shows that there will still be some production, even if it is reduced.

This post took me an hour and half to type doing nothing but focusing on this post. You're welcome.

I hope it was worth it.

I'm just posting to allow you to know that I've read your post.

I will give it an adequate response, perhaps today, or maybe tomorrow.

But it appears to me that our differences stem from different ideologies regarding specific principals that would each require an extensive debate to settle out.

Maybe I will mark these in my post.

-------------- Alright, I decided I couldn't wait until tomorrow.

Quote from Zed

The costs will fully be borne out by the tax system. Taxes invariably tax the rich more than the poor. As such we have a from each according to their ability to each according to their need system. That's as fair as it gets.

Warning, Idealogical Difference:
I would post some basic points here about what I believe but that would change the debate from health-care to the merits of socialism and wealth redistribution. If you wish you can start a separate debate thread and I will willfully participate there.

The point I was trying to make was that it is better to make a few advances that are available to everyone than to make lots that almost no one gets. The price of a treatment at profit maximisation will always be higher than the price at sales maximisation, ie. some people will be unable to get treatment when it costs extra. When demand is price inelastic, as it is for all medical treatment, there will be many many people who do not get treated.



Selling more isn't always the objective. You get more profit by selling at a higher price in the drugs industry because people need the drugs and will go without other things to get them. Let's take a look:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17244

Paragraph 14 of section 2. That's the one that starts with a big "A". Profit margins between 14% at their lowest and 25% at their highest. Over all products - not just monopolised ones. When the average profit margins of a company in America are 3%.

I suppose I cannot contest you here. But drug oligopolies are something that can be addressed within a capitalist health-care system, and are not something that a complete health-care overhaul is required for.

Your life expectancy could easily have been increasing off the back of our freely available advances. After all, our life expectancy is going up too, and we don't get most of your stuff. In fact, our (meaning across the EU) life expectancy is higher than yours.

Here is something that I am not prepared to answer currently, and I do not have the time to do the requisite research for it.

Many people will say that America is a vice-ridden country, awash in promiscuity and drug use and eating disorders and alcoholism. This is probably true, and if it is the fault of our lower life expectancy is not on the health-care system, but on the poor individual choices people make.

Since I will be looking this up later let's assume that everything that follows this colon is true:
Americans drive more; thus more Americans die in car related incidents.
Americans drink more; thus more Americans die from alcohol induced diseases / or accidents
Americans smoke more; thus more Americans die from cigarette related diseases
Americans eat a shit load of McDonalds; thus more Americans die from obesity related diseases.
Americans use drugs more often; thus more Americans die from drug use.

None of these are directly the fault of the medical industry; much less the fault of technology not being readily available.

Yes, you could argue it is the fault of the healthcare system as a whole for not adequately informing people of such and such this and such and such that - but that does not mean that there is a fault with our capitalistic system.

If we adjusted our life expectancy rates for the greater percentage of people who die from vice related diseases (as compared to the UK) I am sure our life expectancies would be far more similar, if ours was not, in fact, better.

(If you could find these statistics for me it would make my work much easier:
In UK (not the EU)
How many people die of:
Obesity related diseases
Smoking related diseases
Drug abuse related diseases
Car accidents
Alcohol related diseases (not death by DUI, as that would be covered by Car Accidents)
-You could just post it or PM it to me, or not do at all, but I will figure this out in the next few days regardless)
-----------------------
Also, I will be the first (probably on this site for that matter) to admit that I am not a lawyer. Nor a crook. I do not understand in detail how the various legal institutions between countries works; much less patents.

And I may be wrong here, but when a patent expires the information for manufacturing said product is freely available (or, if that sounds to anarchistic 'easily obtainable'). This freedom of availability, in our modern age of dial-up internet and cheap long distance phone rates, will easily cross state lines. How is the rest of the world limited from obtaining our advances, if this is the case?

The fact that at least 2.8 (or whatever) % of people in America cannot afford healthcare is alone enough to prove that the advances are not available to everyone.

I suppose I must have made a mistake in interpreting this statement, which would make sense why it seemed so ridiculous: "Can you give me any examples at all of American medical advances that are readily available to any American?" What you must have meant is that available to any-random American, in other words every American. I somehow interpreted that to mean 'any American whatsoever' which is an egregious mistake on my part.

Now that that's cleared up, can you name any advance that everyone has access to? This may be an inappropriate example but indoor plumbing is an amazing technological advance, yet most of the world does not have it. I would venture to say there are even some Americans who do not have it.

----------

This is vaguely related: MRIs (credited jointly to an American and a Brit, ugh) and CT scanners (again, jointly credited to an American and a Brit, goddamnit) are considered to be "the most important medical innovations of the late 20th century". As this website shows they are far more widely available in America with more than twice of each per million people than in any other country, especially the UK. - This is apparently proven by this site http://www.ecosante.org/index2.php?base=OCDE&langh=ENG&langs=ENG&sessionid=

Which I cannot figure out how to use. So moving on -

MRI use shows the same result:


It is more available, and thus used more often in the US. http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2010/01/doctors-united-states-order-ct-scans-mri-tests.html

We appear to be talking past each other. Did you not say earlier that these eight million people were getting no help? I am saying that's bad, and that you should pay the man a bit more so that the eight million do not die.

We're not talking past each-other at all. I said that these 8 million people were unable to get health insurance, that does not mean they are not getting help from private donations and charities. No health insurance is different than no help at all.

The point I was trying to make with that post is thus:

Let's just agree that people are compassionate for a selfish reason: they don't want to feel guilty, so they pay the poor man to assuage their guilt.

This leads to an abundance of compassion (probably).

But if you know that part of your salary already goes to take care of the less fortunate than your guilt is covered, you feel no need to pay more than you already do.

Having the government doling out charity inadvertently decreases the amount of individual charity - Again, compassion is for humans, not for governments. When you take away a people's compassion you might end up with a more 'fair' (cough) society, but you end up in one devoid of what makes people great.

Furthermore the government is going to be perfectly inefficient at doling out your hard earned cash. I don't know if you remember a little storm that people like to call 'Hurricane Katrina'. Now, I can't be arsed to look up the facts so you can either believe what I say or insist I look them, but if I remember correctly private charity (from private persons) gave a significant amount (multiples of ) the amount of government aid distributed through FEMA. Not only did the government give less money than people were individually capable of, it did it extremely poorly (as it does all things) and there was a big hubbub about how much FEMA sucked for several weeks on the news.

I'm trying to say that paying the man is not the best solution, it's not even a solution that should be considered.

Can it? Really? How?

I believe it is self-evident that a local organization that knows its members and the needs of its people, and doesn't have to go through miles of red tape, will more efficiently and ably answer the needs of the people it supports. If I really need to explain and include examples I'm sure I can, though I think it would be a waste of time.

Um. We don't have anything like that here so I'm not sure. I know roads are subcontracted to local councils who would be responsible for about 50,000 people and the stuff gets done. Not sure how it relates to hospitals though. Also, each hospital will treat the patients as they come in. There's no need for the doctor to ask permission from Gordon Brown for an X-ray - he just gets it done.

They get the money from the government, thus they are asking for permission. The government has to ration out money to people and to hospitals, how is that not asking for permission from Gordon Brown?

As an individual, yes, but as a collective, no. Let's say 20,000,000 people are between jobs for two weeks each year (probably an understatement of time and an overstatement of volume, but hey). That means 800,000 people at any one time have no insurance. Therefore, when totalling up the number of people with no insurance you need to add 0.8 million. Yeah, you might only have a 1% chance of getting ill in that time, but that's 8000 people collectively getting ill while uninsured.

1% seems a little bit high, with that logic I would be severely injured 3.64 times a year. (This statement is false, it would be equally valid to say "I'd get severely hurt 3.64 times in a hundred minutes)

[Ignore this]

So to address the few people who are perfectly able to get help as soon as they get a new job (or decide to start paying, as they probably have enough funds to pay for health insurance, but choose not to and decide instead to wait for their new job to start paying) you want to overhaul our entire healthcare system?

An addition to social security unemployment benefits would easily cover this (even though social security is itself a failure). Why make things more complicated than they need to be?

Our system here is that the national health service will pay for your treatment wherever you are, and that is reciprocated by all the governments in the EU. It should be reciprocated around the world. Basically, when the US treats a Mexican the Mexican government can pay. Yeah, at the moment it probably won't, but then, at the moment the American government wouldn't pay for a Yank's treatment here either. We'd still give it to him though (although no guarantees he wouldn't be glassed before he got checked out). My point is, everywhere should have nationalised healthcare and share their facilities. The fact that it's not the case is not in itself a counter-argument.

Do you honestly believe the mexican government would pay for health care we gave in the US to one of their illegal immigrants?

Just because you do do something does make it sound. I bang my head against the wall everyday for exercise, I have a really strong neck and resistant skull. Does that mean everyone should take up my exercise method? (Eh, this isn't a good analogy)

That's why you don't give them a choice. And when they get old they will be funded in part by the next generation. And they are covered in advance in case they do get ill in that brief period.

I don't know how well that system works in Britland, but in America it is a pile of shit. Medicare (which does exactly what you described) has lost the US government more than 100 billion dollars (as in taxes can't keep up). It seems to me like it's a giant ponzi scheme, which is bad.

The government has no right to intervene in so far as your actions affect no one but yourself. Withholding your money from a system that gives it to the people that need it most affects other people. Ergo the government has a right to intervene.

This is so ... I don't even know.

So because the government has decided it has to look after everyone and minutely manage their affairs it is suddenly criminal to not pay into a system? It is suddenly okay to be taxed simply because you live?

This probably, again, comes down to idealogical differences.

Oh do let's! I haven't had a chance since Jeremy.


Not at all. The point I'm making is that the advances won't instantly stop as you implied they would. The fact that we who nationalise our work produce as much as you do shows that there will still be some production, even if it is reduced.

My point was to show the importance of capitalism in stimulating research for medical advances.

For a second let's imagine that all of the rest of the world didn't have a Nationalized Healthcare system, and that it provided the same benefits as the American quasi-capitalistic one, ergo 3.33 times the amount of medical innovation per person.

Total production of medical advances would double; it would be 213.5% of what it is currently with 981million people operating within a nationalized system.

If we assume that switching to a nationalized healthcare system in America would decrease our production of medical advances down to "Rest-of-The-Developed-World-Levels" than we find that the total innovation has decreased from 100% to 65%, nearly cut in half.

Imagine how much farther advanced we could be if the world wasn't apparently nationalized.

If you want to kill innovation a national health care system is sure the way to go, and while prices may currently be extravagant (seemingly) in a capitalistic country the rate of progress leads to more technology being invariably developed, as higher technology is developed older technology becomes cheaper. If technology stagnates the price does not change.

For example, computer power doubles every 18months, but prices remain the same for a base system (while specs go up)

I hope it was worth it.

Another hour on this post :D

whats it matter if Obama f***s America? Weren't we already f***ed in the first place?

^This guy speaks sense^

Quote from Schwa

Warning, Idealogical Difference:
I would post some basic points here about what I believe but that would change the debate from health-care to the merits of socialism and wealth redistribution. If you wish you can start a separate debate thread and I will willfully participate there.

Ya know, I was the third most right-wing guy in my school? Just throwing it out there. I don't think I could adequately represent socialism.

Many people will say that America is a v

ice-ridden country, awash in promiscuity and drug use and eating disorders and alcoholism. This is probably true, and if it is the fault of our lower life expectancy is not on the health-care system, but on the poor individual choices people make.[/QUOTE]

More the reason to get a good system up and running :)

I'll combine these next bits for easy comparison.

Since I will be looking this up later le

t's assume that everything that follows this colon is true:
Americans drive more; thus more Americans die in car related incidents.[/QUOTE]

http://www.monash.edu.au/muarc/reports/papers/fatals.html

Yup. After adjusting for population, 50% more deaths than the closest competitor, and 150% more than us. That's about 5.2 deaths per 100,000 for the UK and about 13.5 for you.

Americans drink more; thus more American

s die from alcohol induced diseases / or accidents[/QUOTE]

This one would surprise me. We are very heavy drinkers. Then again, practice makes perfect - we might not die from it as often. Lemme check.

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_health/Summary_responses.pdf - 6488 deaths for us. That's 10.56 deaths per 100,000.

For you - http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5337a2.htm - 75,766 or 24.7 per 100,000

Ok, that's ridiculous. I would like to assert doubt over these figures, although I confess that I can't find any more reliable sources than the Centre for Disease Control and the Office of National Statistics.

Americans smoke more; thus more American

s die from cigarette related diseases[/QUOTE]

443,000 per year for you - http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/index.htm - or 148 per 100,000

106,000 per year for us - http://www.patient.co.uk/ - or 176 per 100,000. Got you on this one, although I'm not especially proud of it.

Americans eat a shit load of McDonalds;

thus more Americans die from obesity related diseases.[/QUOTE]

It'll be embarrassingly high for us too I expect.

US - http://cardiology.jwatch.org/cgi/content/full/2005/520/1 - 400,000 = 133 per 100,000

UK - http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/8243.php - 30,000 = 50 per 100,000

Oh. That could have been worse.

Americans use drugs more often; thus mor

e Americans die from drug use.[/QUOTE]

US - http://drugwarfacts.org/cms/?q=node/30 - 17,000 = 5.6 per 100,000

UK - http://www.sgul.ac.uk/about-st-georges/divisions/faculty-of-medicine-and-biomedical-sciences/mental-health/icdp/website-pdfs/np-SAD%2010th%20annual%20report.pdf - 1490 = 2.5 per 100,000


So yes, apart from smoking which we, as Europeans, apparently excel at, being born an American appears to be bad for your health.

None of these are directly the fault of

the medical industry; much less the fault of technology not being readily available.

Yes, you could argue it is the fault of the healthcare system as a whole for not adequately informing people of such and such this and such and such that - but that does not mean that there is a fault with our capitalistic system. [/QUOTE]

So how does the capitalist system go about warning people of the dangers? Or do they not bother because it's more profitable for them if people keep on getting ill? I'm trolling a little but - I assume your government does something.

If we adjusted our life expectancy rates

for the greater percentage of people who die from vice related diseases (as compared to the UK) I am sure our life expectancies would be far more similar, if ours was not, in fact, better.[/QUOTE]

Be my guest. I just spent far too long finding all that to be bothered to analyse it. If it is the case then it would not be unexpected since the people who can afford the last 20 years worth of patented medical advances will probably drag it up a bit.

Also, I will be the first (probably on

this site for that matter) to admit that I am not a lawyer. Nor a crook. I do not understand in detail how the various legal institutions between countries works; much less patents.

And I may be wrong here, but when a patent expires the information for manufacturing said product is freely available (or, if that sounds to anarchistic 'easily obtainable'). This freedom of availability, in our modern age of dial-up internet and cheap long distance phone rates, will easily cross state lines. How is the rest of the world limited from obtaining our advances, if this is the case?[/QUOTE]

You're allowed to copy the product, but they won't actually provide blueprints or recipes. You still gotta work back from the answer. I would also like to point out that twenty years is a really long time when we're talking about cutting-edge scientific research.

I suppose I must have made a mistake in

interpreting this statement, which would make sense why it seemed so ridiculous: "Can you give me any examples at all of American medical advances that are readily available to any American?" What you must have meant is that available to any-random American, in other words every American. I somehow interpreted that to mean 'any American whatsoever' which is an egregious mistake on my part.[/QUOTE

Haha. Partly my fault - I could have worded it better.

Now that that's cleared up, can you name

any advance that everyone has access to? This may be an inappropriate example but indoor plumbing is an amazing technological advance, yet most of the world does not have it. I would venture to say there are even some Americans who do not have it. [/QUOTE]

I can name a British advance that anyone in Britain has access to, yes. Penicillin was brought to public attention by Alexander Flemming, a Scotsman who won a Nobel Prize for it. Anyone in Britain can get easy access to penicillin on the NHS.

This is vaguely related: MRIs (credited

jointly to an American and a Brit, ugh) and CT scanners (again, jointly credited to an American and a Brit, goddamnit) are considered to be "the most important medical innovations of the late 20th century". As this website shows they are far more widely available in America with more than twice of each per million people than in any other country, especially the UK. - This is apparently proven by this site http://www.ecosante.org/index2.php?base=OCDE&langh=ENG&langs=ENG&sessionid=

Which I cannot figure out how to use. So moving on -

MRI use shows the same result:
[i*mg]http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/mri-usage-chart.gif[/img]

It is more available, and thus used more often in the US. http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2010/01/doctors-united-states-order-ct-scans-mri-tests.html
[/QUOTE]

It is widely known that doctors in America perform a lot more harmless but not-always-beneficial procedures such as MRI scans than anyone else because the profits of performing such scans are high and there's always the off chance that something might be there which would get the doctor sued if he hadn't spotted. In Britain we only bother if there's reasonable grounds for the suspicion, ie. the doctor can see a lump.

We're not talking past each-other at all

. I said that these 8 million people were unable to get health insurance, that does not mean they are not getting help from private donations and charities. No health insurance is different than no help at all.

The point I was trying to make with that post is thus:

Let's just agree that people are compassionate for a selfish reason: they don't want to feel guilty, so they pay the poor man to assuage their guilt.

This leads to an abundance of compassion (probably).

But if you know that part of your salary already goes to take care of the less fortunate than your guilt is covered, you feel no need to pay more than you already do.

Having the government doling out charity inadvertently decreases the amount of individual charity - Again, compassion is for humans, not for governments. When you take away a people's compassion you might end up with a more 'fair' (cough) society, but you end up in one devoid of what makes people great. [/QUOTE]

Your argument is that if you split the service up into charity and government provision then there will be little/no charity. Therefore we either need a complete charity system - what you're suggesting - or a complete government system - like I'm suggesting. From my brief read over your points before I pressed "quote" I believe there is a more appropriate place to discuss which is better below. Onwards!

Furthermore the government is going to b

e perfectly inefficient at doling out your hard earned cash. I don't know if you remember a little storm that people like to call 'Hurricane Katrina'. Now, I can't be arsed to look up the facts so you can either believe what I say or insist I look them, but if I remember correctly private charity (from private persons) gave a significant amount (multiples of ) the amount of government aid distributed through FEMA. Not only did the government give less money than people were individually capable of, it did it extremely poorly (as it does all things) and there was a big hubbub about how much FEMA sucked for several weeks on the news.

I'm trying to say that paying the man is not the best solution, it's not even a solution that should be considered.[/QUOTE]

Oh good. I'm glad I won't have to scroll back up and edit myself. Now then.

I'll take your word on the data. The fact that the government didn't do much to help isn't necessarily indicative that the system is flawed. As I remember you were under republicans at the time. That can't ever bode well for getting things done or throwing enough money at a project.

Joking aside, charity is not a reliable way to fund anything. Back in whenever it was you were at the tail end of one of the biggest and longest periods of economic growth ever. Everyone felt rich. Everyone felt that they could spare something to help their fellow Americans whose images were being broadcast on every channel 24/7. What if it happened during recession? What if the story wasn't broadcast, like 99% of suffering isn't. Since the markets tanked international aid has fallen off 10% and charitable donations by the public 15%. That's a lot. The government can run a deficit in recession and a surplus in periods of growth so that there is no shortage of funds.

What about if things aren't broadcast across the country? Look at Madeline McCann. I don't know if you've heard of her, since she was British. She went missing in Portugal a few years back, and because she was an especially photogenic little girl and had an abnormality of the eye that was the cute sort of mutation rather than the ugly kind (I think her left iris was unusually colourful) her story was very heavily reported on for about six months. A public appeal was set up to receive donations that would aid in the investigation to try to find her (all completely unsuccessful if you're wondering). The British public gave two million pounds. Do you know how much money goes to finding children that are not broadcast on the news? £20 and 50p each. That means you get ninety seven thousand times more money when you broadcast on the news emotionally with pictures of people you can relate to suffering.

What's better then? To rely on the charity of people who will give when they feel like it to whoever cries on TV the most, or to rely on a government who can look at everything objectively and provide stable finance.

I believe it is self-evident that a loca

l organization that knows its members and the needs of its people, and doesn't have to go through miles of red tape, will more efficiently and ably answer the needs of the people it supports. If I really need to explain and include examples I'm sure I can, though I think it would be a waste of time.[/QUOTE]

When it's a small group of people who all know each other and are just trying to work together to do something that benefits only them, then sure, the people benefiting can get together and get it organised properly. A hospital just isn't like that. Human social groups naturally consist of 150 people. Unless you are planning to have two million hospitals in the US it's just not practical to have each social group care for themselves. With a standard sized hospital, whether it's run privately or nationally, you just cannot get a personal kind of service with people than know you by your first name and are all working together like you suggest.

They get the money from the government,

thus they are asking for permission. The government has to ration out money to people and to hospitals, how is that not asking for permission from Gordon Brown?[/QUOTE]

They get a budget, but that doesn't mean they're massively inefficient or filling out a phone-book's worth of forms to put a cast on a broken arm. I expect you'd find private hospital departments get budgets too. Each hospital gets a patient walking through its doors, it sends the patient to whichever doctor is on duty and free, that doctor diagnoses and either sends the patient to another part of the hospital for treatment or prescribes something on the spot. One prescription form or one x-ray-this-person's-arm form and that's it. That form is copied into the patient's medical record for easy access next time they're treated somewhere and then it's all done. No inefficiency there.

So to address the few people who are pe

rfectly able to get help as soon as they get a new job (or decide to start paying, as they probably have enough funds to pay for health insurance, but choose not to and decide instead to wait for their new job to start paying) you want to overhaul our entire healthcare system?[/QUOTE]

Can't insure people with pre-existing conditions, remember?

An addition to social security unemploym

ent benefits would easily cover this (even though social security is itself a failure). Why make things more complicated than they need to be?[/QUOTE]

Je n'comprendé pas.

Do you honestly believe the mexican gove

rnment would pay for health care we gave in the US to one of their illegal immigrants? [/QUOTE]

Like I said, no, but they should, as should you. I'm advocating a global nationalised system here. You can't just say that you won't do it until they do it either because they'd say the same and no one would do it. Take the initiative.

Just because you do do something does[n't] make it sound. I bang my head against the wall everyday for exercise, I have a really strong neck and resistant skull. Does that mean everyone should take up my exercise method? (Eh, this isn't a good analogy)

If everyone wanted a strong neck then yes. I am assuming everyone wants to be cared for if the get sick. Maybe that's overly presumptuous of me.

I don't know how well that system works

in Britland, but in America it is a pile of shit. Medicare (which does exactly what you described) has lost the US government more than 100 billion dollars (as in taxes can't keep up). It seems to me like it's a giant ponzi scheme, which is bad.[/QUOTE]

If taxes can't keep up then you're not taxing high enough.

This is so ... I don't even know.

So

because the government has decided it has to look after everyone and minutely manage their affairs it is suddenly criminal to not pay into a system? It is suddenly okay to be taxed simply because you live?

This probably, again, comes down to idealogical differences.[/QUOTE]

If you're doing something that hurts someone else, ie. withholding money from them that they need, then the government needs to step in. That's the entire basis of government and law.

My point was to show the importance of c

apitalism in stimulating research f

I'll be right back for this last point. Hopefully before you log in.

Too late :D

I suppose I'll wait for you finished response before beginning my own.

Done .