Democrats should heed this warning from Mass.

[Kasz216]

famousringo said:

Kasz216 said:

famousringo said:

Chairman-Mao said:
Socialized health care isn't as good as people think. I'm Canadian and we have it. Our taxes are much higher and if you don't get injured then you're paying higher taxes for nothing.

Did you know that the United States spends more government money as a share of GDP on health than Canada does? The average Canadian isn't actually paying more taxes for health care than the average American does. You or your employer might be paying less in premiums, though.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_exp_pub_of_gdp-health-expenditure-public-of-gdp

Problem is... this bill... as stated by the whitehouse will EXPLODE out spending per GDP for healtchare.  This plan makes that worse.  Not better.

Yeah, I pretty much knew that the US government wouldn't have the stomach to make the changes that need to be made going into this whole health reform morass. Too much money at stake, and you can see how effective it is to raise the bogeyman of socialism in US politics, even when there's hardly anything socialist about this reform bill.

As I understand it, this bill is all about expanding access, not controlling costs. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I think most people would like to see costs go down before access is expanded.

It's actually expanding costs and INCREASING prices.  The American Medical Assosiation disliked the bill, said it would actually hurt more people then it helped and end up costing the country more money. 

The AMA changed their position in about the middle of this year due to a promise made by house democrats.  They would roll back medicare prices.  So the doctors would get paid more for every treatment they performed on a medicare patient.  In otherwors... they bribed them.

 

It's why i'm not a big fan of healthcare reform, with how the US government works... there is no way the needed changes could be made.

Plus, it's just so complicated an issue.  Non-profit insurance isn't any more cheaper then for profit insurance in many cases it's more expensive.   How is it that non-profit insurance companies can't have lower prices?

Additionally, you've got the fact that most technological breakthroughs in healthcare happen in the US.  How much of that is because of our broken system?  We spend more on healthcare scientific development then the rest of the world combined.

When we fix the problem will healthcare spending still outpace the rest of the world combined?  Will healthcare technology development slow down?  How will this effect healthcare treatment in the future?

How worse is the US care really?  Of all the "lists" done like ones by the WHO they don't really take into account any actual healthcare factors.  It's all based on cost and things like crude death rate, which ignores things like crime, lifestyle etc..  Things like Infant mortality rate are biased based on different reporting methods... etc.

 

 

I wish they could dedicate a lot of time to real questions rather then petty bickering and trying to make the other side of the argument look like boogeymen who want to kill people (on both sides they do this.)