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Forums - General Discussion - US Universal Healthcare: How are we going to pay for it?

NKAJ on 16 August 2009
HappySqurriel said:
NKAJ said:
HappySqurriel said:
NKAJ said:
if you watch the film sicko some startling truths come to light
http://www.michaelmoore.com/sicko/checkup/

Michael Moore movies don't have any "Truths" in them, they're full of half-truths and outright lies; and the movies could best be described as propaganda for his political agenda. He cherry picks facts that support his position from a variety of sources, and then he ignores facts from these sources which disagree with his conclusions.

Does his movie demonstrate that 14% of Canadians have been unsuccessful in finding a family doctor because of the critical doctor shortage in Canada?

Does his movie demonstrate that waiting lists for major surgery are so bad in Canada that often Canadians travel to the United States and pay out of pocket to have their surgeries done in a timely fashion? Does it mention that a medical tourism industry formed in India which specifically targets Canadian patients as a lower cost alternative to traveling to the United States to get surgery in a timely fashion?

Does his moive discuss the cases of people dying from appendicitis after waiting hours in the emergency room without being seen by a doctor because of how long wait times were?

Does Michael Moore talk about how Canadians (in general) are more dissatisfied with their medical system than Americans are, and want reform to their system to make it function well?

 

Now, if you look at (pretty much) every medical system around the world you will notice a pattern that the quality, cost or access to healthcare has become dramatically worse over the past couple of decades because the cost of delivering healthcare has skyrocketed in every country; and public systems compensate by reducing the number of services they perform, which results in waiting lists and rationing. With this in mind, why is the discussion always surrounding who should pay or how fair/unfair certain systems are ... If someone was capable of re-creating a medical system as large and complicated as the American system, they should be able to list the top 10 things that are driving up the cost of healthcare and have multiple ways to manage those costs to bring healthcare costs down.

did you actually look at the link?
There are sources to back up his statements.

Where are all these facts your getting from?

btw..

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-brutal-truth-about-americarsquos-healthcare-1772580.html

Are you aware of the concept of cherry picking?

People who are cherry picking do not make up facts, they just go around to a variety of sources and take the facts which support their position while ignoring facts that disagree with their position.

Essentially, suppose there were two schools and one school had above average performance in history and poor performance in all other subjects while the other shcool had excellent performance in all subjects except for history, where the performance was average. If a cherry picker wanted to claim that the first school was better than the second school they would cite history performance to support their claim while omitting all other performance.

Michael Moore is well known for manipulating facts, and he will do everything in his power to create a false image of what he wants you to believe; and it is very easy to manipulate facts when using a movie. For example, if you want to demonstrate that the waiting times at Emergency rooms are not as bad as people claim in the Canadian system you could choose the least loaded hospital and visit it on the least busy day of the week at the least busy time of the day every week for several weeks until you had footage of a very quiet ER; and the audience of your movie would never be aware of the times you walked into the ER at this quiet hospital, on this quiet day at the quietest time of the day, and saw a man with a compound fracture that had been waiting for 4 hours to see a doctor.

while what your saying is probably true(we have the NHS in Britain and people complian about them) i think that the basic message of this film remains intact.I dont know why americans are so obsessed with thinking evrything is worse in canada but while some people may have to wait for hours more people in america wont even get any healhcare.People are working in their 80s just to have health insurance .i know america thinks its blashempy to have anything socalised but healthcare is one thing where its actually good.



"They will know heghan belongs to the helghast"

"England expects that everyman will do his duty"

"we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender"

 

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HappySqurriel on 16 August 2009
NKAJ said:

while what your saying is probably true(we have the NHS in Britain and people complian about them) i think that the basic message of this film remains intact.I dont know why americans are so obsessed with thinking evrything is worse in canada but while some people may have to wait for hours more people in america wont even get any healhcare.People are working in their 80s just to have health insurance .i know america thinks its blashempy to have anything socalised but healthcare is one thing where its actually good.

As a Canadian I know exactly why Americans believe that the Canadian system is so bad, because the Canadian system is so bad ...

For the second time in a couple of years I am without a family doctor, and this time it was because my doctor realized he could make more money while working fewer hours as a nutritionist at a weight loss clinic than he could as a doctor. This leaves me in the position where if I am ill or injured but it isn't an emergency and I do the correct thing of going into a walk in clinic I will (probably) spend 4 to 6 hours waiting to see a doctor. Emergency rooms are just as bad, and it isn't uncommon to wait 4 to 6 hours for a legitimate emergency to be treated.

The contrast between the private and public delivery of medicine is clear in the Canadian system, even though there is the assumption that it is fully delivered by the government. There is no shortage of plastic surgeons, dentists, optometrists, chiropractors, massage therapists, physiotherapists, or pharmacists who receive most of their income from people paying out of pocket for their services (or are paid through supplemental insurance); and yet every specialization for doctors within the public system, and there is (always) talk of speeding up the accreditation process for doctors from third world countries.

On top of this, the only people who don't believe that Canadians have a Two-Tier healthcare system are also the people who fight all reforms of the system. The well connected (like politicians, their close supporters, and athletes) get immediate access to healthcare in Canada, those with the money can go to the United States, and only the "poor" and "middle class" are left with little access to healthcare.

 

Now, maybe I've been mislead, but I have been told that the NHS is not that much different than the Canadian system.



SamuelRSmith on 16 August 2009

@HappySqurriel

I'm not 100% on the Canadian system, but I've heard that there is no private system at all in Canada for health-care. In the UK we have the NHS, and we also have the ability for you to get private health insurance.

Doctors/Dentists/Opticians/etc are allowed to work in both systems (the NHS covers every area of health, not just hospital care). So, if you go private, or if you go NHS, you will see the same people - the difference is that if you go private, you'll be able to see a specialist within the next day or so, and if you go NHS you'll have to wait a week or two.

There's this misconception from the UK that as time goes on, the NHS has been getting worse. But the truth is quite the reverse. 15 years ago wait times would have been months for specialist care, it's now down to 1-2 weeks. You would have had to wait a couple of weeks before to see a GP (family doctor), now they will see you on the day.

The system is by no-means perfect, as Kasz has pointed out on numerous occasions, people do get rejected health-care, but those people do have the right to go private if they are rejected by the NHS.

The thing I hate, though, is when people say that social health-care leads to rationing. Yes, it's true, but all forms of health-care lead to rationing, it's just the private health-care rations according to wealth, whilst social heal-care rations according to priority (well, it should - individual systems may be broken, but that is the overall aim).



HappySqurriel on 16 August 2009
SamuelRSmith said:
@HappySqurriel

I'm not 100% on the Canadian system, but I've heard that there is no private system at all in Canada for health-care. In the UK we have the NHS, and we also have the ability for you to get private health insurance.

Doctors/Dentists/Opticians/etc are allowed to work in both systems (the NHS covers every area of health, not just hospital care). So, if you go private, or if you go NHS, you will see the same people - the difference is that if you go private, you'll be able to see a specialist within the next day or so, and if you go NHS you'll have to wait a week or two.

There's this misconception from the UK that as time goes on, the NHS has been getting worse. But the truth is quite the reverse. 15 years ago wait times would have been months for specialist care, it's now down to 1-2 weeks. You would have had to wait a couple of weeks before to see a GP (family doctor), now they will see you on the day.

The system is by no-means perfect, as Kasz has pointed out on numerous occasions, people do get rejected health-care, but those people do have the right to go private if they are rejected by the NHS.

The thing I hate, though, is when people say that social health-care leads to rationing. Yes, it's true, but all forms of health-care lead to rationing, it's just the private health-care rations according to wealth, whilst social heal-care rations according to priority (well, it should - individual systems may be broken, but that is the overall aim).

Well, from the sound of it the NHS was designed a lot better than the Canadian system because (as I've argued for years for a two tier healthcare system) if someone is willing to pay for their own medical care the money (in the public system) that would have gone to their care can now be devoted towards other patients.

 



Kasz216 on 16 August 2009

The big difference being everyone rejected has paid into the system their entire lives.

Healthcare can't be considered a right if their is rationing going on... and at least most people rejected for treatment in the USA aren't paying for it.

Now if we could come up with a universal healthcare plan that didn't introduce rationing, but also kept the free spirit that drives technological advances foward.

THAT would be something to have.

For example by backing it with a government program that would MAKE the government money. Like life insurance or something.



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TheRealMafoo on 16 August 2009

I once saw Michael Moore in an interview say that he doesn't care if he lies in his movies. He has a political view of the world he wants everyone to agree with, and anything he puts in a movie justifies that end, regardless of if it's true or not.



Kasz216 on 16 August 2009
TheRealMafoo said:
I once saw Michael Moore in an interview say that he doesn't care if he lies in his movies. He has a political view of the world he wants everyone to agree with, and anything he puts in a movie justifies that end, regardless of if it's true or not.

If by "the end" you mean "pad his giant bank account."

Dude like every other dude you see campaigning for the poor is in it for one reason.

To not be poor and cash in on the money for little effort.

Guy is a con man like Al Gore and all those "Family value" republicans.  Supporting one line of thought publically... but acting worse then those they criticize in their private lives. 



NKAJ on 16 August 2009
HappySqurriel said:
NKAJ said:

while what your saying is probably true(we have the NHS in Britain and people complian about them) i think that the basic message of this film remains intact.I dont know why americans are so obsessed with thinking evrything is worse in canada but while some people may have to wait for hours more people in america wont even get any healhcare.People are working in their 80s just to have health insurance .i know america thinks its blashempy to have anything socalised but healthcare is one thing where its actually good.

As a Canadian I know exactly why Americans believe that the Canadian system is so bad, because the Canadian system is so bad ...

For the second time in a couple of years I am without a family doctor, and this time it was because my doctor realized he could make more money while working fewer hours as a nutritionist at a weight loss clinic than he could as a doctor. This leaves me in the position where if I am ill or injured but it isn't an emergency and I do the correct thing of going into a walk in clinic I will (probably) spend 4 to 6 hours waiting to see a doctor. Emergency rooms are just as bad, and it isn't uncommon to wait 4 to 6 hours for a legitimate emergency to be treated.

The contrast between the private and public delivery of medicine is clear in the Canadian system, even though there is the assumption that it is fully delivered by the government. There is no shortage of plastic surgeons, dentists, optometrists, chiropractors, massage therapists, physiotherapists, or pharmacists who receive most of their income from people paying out of pocket for their services (or are paid through supplemental insurance); and yet every specialization for doctors within the public system, and there is (always) talk of speeding up the accreditation process for doctors from third world countries.

On top of this, the only people who don't believe that Canadians have a Two-Tier healthcare system are also the people who fight all reforms of the system. The well connected (like politicians, their close supporters, and athletes) get immediate access to healthcare in Canada, those with the money can go to the United States, and only the "poor" and "middle class" are left with little access to healthcare.

 

Now, maybe I've been mislead, but I have been told that the NHS is not that much different than the Canadian system.


sorry i didnt realise you were canadian...

SamuelIRSmoth knows more about it than me..



"They will know heghan belongs to the helghast"

"England expects that everyman will do his duty"

"we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender"