Or maybe cuz we’re a REPUBLIC, and NOT a democracy?? I know…it’s a lot to handle, but it’s true.
looks like a piece of a plane to me http://media.popularmechanics.com/images/911-flight77-debris.jpg
Hulu, FourWude:
Okay, I was ready to fire off another lengthy response to the two of you, but then it hit me that I neither feel like doing it nor gain anything by it.
Guys, EVERYTHING you’re saying has been looked at six ways from Sunday. That’s not to say that everything is 100% locked down and that any further question is impossible, but the fact is that the majority of the evidence and credible experts say one thing and a minority of them say another. There is a consensus opinion in place that is far better-rounded and supported than the alternative theories being proposed here. The presence of the minority, in itself, is not sufficient to dislodge that consensus. The presence of questions does not mean that you get to pick the answers you want.
You have countless sources at your fingertips to read, cross-reference, and think about. I neither have to nor particularly want to do the research for you. If you want to question the status quo, it’s on you to build a persuasive argument out of good, robust evidence. One of your avenues of action is to simply pick the information that serves what you want to believe and end the search right there, which seems to be what’s going on here. If that’s what you want to do, go for it. There are plenty of people on the Internet who will welcome literally anything you have to say, as long as it’s contrary to what’s been widely accepted to be true.
What I find funny is how some threads get closed far too early, and we have 10 pages of this riffraff going in endless circles to no avail…
Greetings fellow steeltown resident
I guess I should visit the Hamilton thread more often…:razzy:
im laughing in real life at this post. this is the funniest thing i have ever read
hahahahha “gangsterism” did anyone else bother to read this it owns
While I’m sure you guys are so excited to discuss 911 shit that has been debunked about 3000 times but we aren’t going to do that here. Continue discussing this like you didn’t hear me and you’re going to get an infraction for trolling.
Thanks.
lol your needlessly indignant posts are probably the most emotional in this thread, but that’s to be expected.
Making the blanket statement that U.S. citizens are dumb is a textbook example of blind emotionalism.
But by all means, keep at it [media=youtube]hsk0mNYaoKg"[/media]. I’m sure you’ll ice skate up that hill eventually.
Well a fun fact about canada, and ontario in particular: Almost 50% of every tax dollar goes to health care here!
More taxes for america are on the way.
This.
Why? I understand the benefit but taxing everyone else is not the answer
This.
Why? I understand the benefit but taxing everyone else is not the answer
Ten percent of Canada?s GDP is spent on health care for ALL Canadians, versus the USA which spends 17% of its GDP on health care but doesnt even cover 15% of the population at all and inadequately covers millions more. A more damning fact is that 31% of every dollar spent on health care in the US goes to bureaucratic overhead, whereas that figure is only 1% in Canda. 1%. America ALREADY spends double what most other comparable countries pay for health care and yet our system ranks lower in practically every metric. So gtfo out of here with that more taxes kindergarten shit.
edit: here are the numbers. this is pulled from the OECD, 2007 being the latest data available:
Now here is the World Health Organization’s last ranking of the world’s health systems:
I’ll let you all draw the conclusions.
edit 2: And next time at least post your snide dumbass comment in the health care thread
aren’t france, italy, and spain on the verge or bankruptcy? along with portugal who is #12 on that list and greece who is #14?
oh and japan who is #10 on that list
Whoa whoa whoa. Hold your horses there. There are so many factors that lead to those statistics that you left out that once again remind us that surface numbers do not adequately tell the story.
I’m going to go in reverse order starting with the World Health Organization numbers. Those values are dervied from a formula which places extra weight on everything BUT health outcomes. The WHO formula is weighted and biased towards countries which experience more cost sharing across the spectrum leading to more balanced health care costs per capita and actually reflects outcomes very little. The US is 37th on that list because of the methodolody by which health services are adminstered and that we have higher disparities in costs per capita. What’s not mentioned is those disparate costs are in reality spread much more evenly than is recognized because when people can’t pay hospitals, hospitals negotiate with insurance companies to get higher rates from them to cover their costs and not pursue many items to collections.
Cost per capita is of course higher in the United States. The US develops 90% of all new drugs developed in the world. We bear the costs of research and development. The US develops 80% of all new medical technologies in the world. We bear the costs of research and development. The US has 25 of the 30 best medical schools in the country. We bear the costs of educating our doctors so well. Experienced physicians in the US make 3 times their Canadian Counterparts (Hence experienced physicians who know they’re good stop taking medicare patients).
Overhead in the United States costs more because our insurance companies actually monitor for fraud. Medicare and medicaid don’t. Hence when people say they have such low overhead, its because they experience hundreds of billions of dollars of fradulent claims that are just paid out over years. There’s no oversight. In Canada overhead costs are low because the government refuses to hire a sufficient number of workers to actually improve patient experience. Instead when you need to get a primary care physician you get to go into a lottery… A LOTTERY. Or you can get on that great 6 month waiting list to be seen by a PCP to tell you what the ER told you which is that you needed surgery that if you had 6 months ago you would have been fine but now are going to suffer some worse complication.
Average wait time for surgery in the US versus average wait time in Canada? No comparison.
Availability of cutting edge medicine in the US versus availability in Canada? No comparison (But admittedly we do pay for it…)
Number of Rich Americans going to Canada for coverage versus number of Rich Canadians coming to America for coverage? Pricesless.
This being said, I think there are some things to like about the Canadian system. But we would be fooling ourselves if we thought we could take a similar single payer system, multiply its scope by 10, and just assume it would work. It wouldn’t.
For the record, I’m definetly not comfortable with the direction of the country. But I believe that commentary deserves a much more lengthy post to talk about everything so I’ll just leave it at that.
Sources? When it comes to health outcomes, the US has always ranked behind these countries in everything from infant mortality rate to longevity of cancer patients.
R&D has nothing to do with the figures I cited, neither does medical school.
Do you see how retarded this sounds, even on face value? Are you cutting and pasting this from the Heritage Foundation by any chance? Your statement is patently false.
more scare tactics that dont match up with reality. You’ve obviously never had to wait more than 6 months or put off a procedure entirely because your private insurance carrier decided it was elective, or dropped you once the dug through your records and found a pre-existing condition, or you didnt have insurance in the first place because you happened to be out of work.
Yes, there is a comparison. Sure you can juke the numbers by adding in all the elective bullshit like breast implants, lasik surgery and the like to make it seem like Canada has such terrible wait times over the US, and you can lie with your ER example above - Canada has no wait times for emergency surgery, but the fact remains that Canada covers ALL of its citizens, while for millions of Americans, their wait time is Forever. And Britain and Germany? Shorter wait times than the US for everything.
Yeah I guess that’s why we are all importing prescription drugs from CA.
Wow, thanks for settling the debate. Can you give us a few more decrees? There are a bunch of other old arguments I’m sure everyone would love to move off the table.
Heritage foundation? Really? Journal of Health Economics, I peer review for the journal. Go do some reading. These are all just from Volume 28 Issue 6 (December 2009).
Waiting-time targets in the healthcare sector: How long are we waiting?
Pages 1081-1098
Huw Dixon, Luigi Siciliani
The predictive validity of prospect theory versus expected utility in health utility measurement
Pages 1039-1047
Jose Maria Abellan-Perpian, Han Bleichrodt, Jose Luis Pinto-Prades
Health care deprivation profiles in the measurement of inequality and inequity: An application to GP fundholding in the English NHS
Pages 1048-1061
Mauro Laudicella, Richard Cookson, Andrew M. Jones, Nigel Rice
Trials, tricks and transparency: How disclosure rules affect clinical knowledge
Pages 1141-1153
Matthias Dahm, Paula Gonzlez, Nicols Porteiro
Do increased premium subsidies affect how much health insurance is purchased? Evidence from the self-employed
Pages 1197-1210
Bradley T. Heim, Ithai Z. Lurie
Reacting to rankings: Evidence from ?America’s Best Hospitals?
Pages 1154-1165
Devin G. Pope
Now that that is out of the way…
[quote=“P.Gorath, post:238, topic:95320”]
R&D has nothing to do with the figures I cited, neither does medical school.
[/QUOTE}
Really? You can not take an objective measurement of real cost without factoring in the cost of inputs to the system. If you just look at something that says “costs” costs come up from inputs, they don’t just mysteriously appear… Hence, R&D figures for drug prices and Medical School costs do factor into increased costs in our system.
I mean obviously you have a problem with the Heritage foundation, I mean that’s fine. I’m no fan of the Brookings Institution or the Center for Public Policy Research but I mean you don’t disregard think tanks out of hand… You could… read the research. I’ve said nothing false…
“Scare tactics”? There’s no scare tactics. What about what I said is untrue? If you are in Canada today, and you are a citizen, but do not have a Primary Care Physician, you go to your local administration office and sign up to be put on a waiting list to get a new PCP or you can win a lottery and get one sooner, never mind you don’t really get to CHOOSE your doctor… unless you go to a heavily regulated private clinic, which saddingly even the Harper Government doesn’t want to acknowledge as anything but a threat to the state system…
The truth of the matter is that the system works for those who have coverage. There were tons of things that could have been done to increase coverage in the existing system without having to push a hybridization package which does not control costs in anyway and does not come out as budget neutral as it promises.
Before we go talking about what people “Must and must not” have experienced. I’m 25, and my wife and I have already dealt with her having to fight cancer, my father has diabetes, I’m at high risk, my grandmother has had two heart attacks, my grandfather just had a stroke, and you know what? They are all fine. They recieved amazing care, far more quickly than they would have just about anywhere else in the world… You want to talk about scare tactics then instead of addressing facts decide to make assumptions about personal experiences… I think that says as much about your reasoning and logic as anything, but I’ll move on.
It’s not a lie. Or maybe it is… depending on how the Canadian Government decides to define “emergency”. I mean having stage one colon cancer isn’t an emergency. Technically you can wait 6 months. I mean if you’re having a heart attack you might be okay but heaven forbid you have anything that a bureaucrat can, in good budgetary conscious, push back as being “non-emergency” Please don’t talk about the NHS and Germany and shorter wait times. Gordon Brown and Labour for years pretended like the NHS was fine and Conservatives only started coming back in Britain when they realized they could make an electoral play on reforming a system which many in Britain have very negative experiences with… Angela Merkel won enough electoral support to origianlly form the Grand Coalition because she wanted to reform Germany’s Health Service sector.
Drug reimportation isn’t an issue with cutting edge stuff. It’s all about drugs which are nearing their patent lifespan. The United States is very generous with patent protection for new drugs, giving them quite a bit of time before they can be made into generic. You fundamentally misunderstand the issue with drug reimportation. It’s not about getting drugs you can’t get in Canada, its about getting drugs from Canada that are available but are still under patent protection. Patent protections that are not as generous in other countries and hence have to be sold at lower (subsidized) costs to other countries. That is a debate as much about patent law and the protection of copyrights and defending the ability to innovate as it is about drugs.
This isn’t about settling debates. I think a lively debate should take place. But it’s about looking at real facts, and seeing what the truly best policy conclusion is. Should the United States Federal Government be putting another 950 billion dollars of spending on the backs of our children? Can we trust the USFG to implment the cuts needed to make the bill as deficit neutral as they claim? Can the USFG effectively administer such a program? Has the USFG invariably overstepped its authority and violated the States’ rights? Does the USFG have a role in regulating 17% of the United States Economy?
It’s easy to say “Governement can provide healthcare for every citizen”. But should you introduce a radical change to a health system regime that has 85% of people covered with insurance? 90% of whom are either “Satisfied, happy, or very happy” with? At the end of the day, the United States has passed health care reform legislation. Now the debate has to turn to whether or not it can do what it promises. I do not believe it can. From a strictly acadmic point of view, I do not find the World Health Organization particularly credible on a whole host of issues. Least of which are the basis by which it measures “Health Outcomes”.
In the interest of not derailing this thread, if you want to continue this, I think PMs might be a way to go, so that the thread can probably get back onto the general topic without our discussion.
I’m pretty sure I’ve posted it somewhere here before, but I recommend that everybody read this article. The current legislation unfortunately doesn’t much resemble the ideal that the article describes, but it’s an interesting look at the deeper roots of the problems with American health care.