Democrats don't understand competition and basic economics? Seriously? So is this a basic rule that all Democrats must obey by or something? I bet you think all Democrats are "filthy pinky commies" too. Just because it's different to your economic philosophy doesn't mean it's wrong. Of course they understand economics, they understand it just as well as any Republican does, they just have a different take on it to you, it doesn't mean they don't understand it.

I don't support either the Democrats or Republicans, I think they are both very bad parties, quite frankly the USA needs a third party. But I often side with the Democrats over the Republicans simply because the hardcore Republicans can be so condesending to them at times, like this statement was. Even your sigs condesending.

Honestly the US is judged "poorly" on healthcare because of two stats.

First is infant mortality rate. The US performs worse in this because the US counts all infants. While every other country disregards infants if they're born too small, or weigh to little, or are too sick.

The US counts everybody born as a person. Other countries don't.

The second is average life expectancy. Which is effected by things like the US much higher murder rate.

When it comes to life expectancies for diseases. Nobody beats the USA. As that OCED report listesd... the US is top in cardiovasculiar and cancer. The worlds two biggest killers.

If the healthcare system truley didn't reach most people... our survivial rates wouldn't be that good.  Our system does reach everybody.  It just costs everyone differently based on your decisions.  Any talk of "treatment differences" should note that reports show that the UK has significant "treatment differences" based on wealth despite it being "universal"... because the poor are unhealthy and such things are overinflated.

Come on.  The US has several third parties.  The way US political history is no 3rd party will ever win here.  With economics, I am arguing based on ECON 101 priniples.  Dems use that 1930s Keynesian bullcrap and the GOP uses Austrian economics.  I already overhead small biz owners in my home county saying that if the 8% pr tax is part of the bill it would force him to layoff his employees thus adding to the public (govt) option which in turn leads to long lines and eventually rationing like the NHS.  Obama stated in 2003 he wanted this and this year Barney Frank said that HR 3200 is the best way to get single payer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3BS4C9el98

Read Ezekiel Emmanuel's (Obama's Chief Advisor on Healthcare) report on heath rationing here: http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/PIIS0140673609601379.pdf

And no, I am not making this up.

But a third party has won the presidency before Halogamer.

A third party your very familiar with. Well they aren't a third party anymore.


Bull Moose almost pulled it off too... and should have if they didn't get screwed by backdoor politics.

Teddy Roosevelt was one of a kind though. An extreme moderate so to speak. He was a moderate but he wasn't middle of the road in the way he acted unlike current passive moderates.

I think we'll look back at this in 50 years and say "Whew, we came really close to screwing up our healthcare system." quite honestly.  But I'm one of those libertarians you mentioned...

Where I think your wrong is that what you consider people just being scared by fearmongering etc...is actually just people talking about existing socialized medicine as practiced by other nations. The left in general seems to me to think that talking about what actually happens under these kinds of systems is off limits simply because it is scarey...thats actually why it needs to be talked about though because it is frightening the kinds of things that happen on a regular basis in these systems.  And nobody can actually say "Well thats not the plan we're talking about for the US" because there is no one single plan at the moment, and a socialized style plan is on the table as you yourself pointed out.  We would be fools not to look at other examples of what has happened before trying the system ourselves.

The entire conversation is really moot though at the moment since we can't even afford it. Unless someone is silly enough to think a budget nuetral socialized medicine plan is anything but a pipe dream.

The United States pays twice as much for healthcare as Australia does (per capita).

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_hea_car_fun_tot_per_cap-care-funding-total-per-capita

The United States, Great Britain, and Australia are very similar countries in regards to economics, government, and society, yet somehow America pays a huge amount more for healthcare than they do.

Whigs?  They were were the major party against the Jacksonian Dems in the 2nd Party System.  For Bull-Moose Teddy got 88 electoral votes to Wilson's 435 and Taft's 8.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1912

Teddy was an uber progressive.  He would run as a reformist, pro-welfare Democrat if he were alive today.

This isn't even amusing any more.

By economics 101 I think you mean Republican economics 101. I mean most of developed Europe uses fairly Keynesian economics and countries like Britain, France and Germany can't just be tossed aside, they all have primarily private mixed economies with a heavy government influence and it works well. 

As for rationing, the rationing in the UK is reasonable, everyone gets access to a reasonable amount of healthcare, logically you have to draw a line somewhere so costs aren't going to spiral out of hand. For example if two drugs exist which have the same effect, but one is twice as much as the other, then the sensible policy is to use the cheaper one. You've taken logical policies out of hand.

What are the statistics for doctors in America who have turned away patients because they have no money or insurance? Surely this is a more insane and inhumane way to provide healthcare than rationing. The 7 million Americans who stand to lose their health insurance over the next year due to the recession wont even get the chance to get any treatment (outside of medicaid of course). This is partly the inneficiency that Kenyesian economics talks about, people could die in a private healthcare system because they have no access to healthcare, in a public one they will.

I'm just glad the USA has medicaid.

lol, You know what I mean though, a serious third party. One that poses a real threat at every election. If you had a libertarian party that had socially liberal policies then it would gain a lot of support over there, it would steal a fair few of the Republicans and Democrats. I would imagine Mafoo would be the first in line sign up haha.

(puts on Academia hat)

The fun of it is the fact that it has been scientifically proven that countries with our system of elections will always default to a two-party system, unless there are regional irregularities (Canada has 4 major parties i believe, one of which is purely regionalist). Because we have no provision for runoffs, and our elections are run by plurality, not by majority, a third party will never ever be viable in the long run, simply because a third party would primarily leech votes from one of the big two, and fears about the other of the big two winning will force the majority of voters to go for the rational choice.

Like with the Libertarians, or the Greens, or the Communists. The average Libertarian will just vote Republican, because he would rather have a Republican in office than a democrat, and if enough Libertarians voted for the actual Libertarian candidate, that would just sap votes from the Republican base and allow the Democrat to win. Ditto for Greens or Commies in the case of Democrats. The better of the rational choices gets voted for, not the voters ideal candidate (else i would vote for something a little more radically left-wing, if there was a point to it)

It's called Duverger's law, and is one of the few absolute laws in political science.

EDIT: Forgot to add that that doesn't mean it's impossible for a third party to gain ground in the long run, but it has to kill one of the big two in order to do it. As the new party rises, the older will have to fail. If they can't kill the old party, their days are numbered, as with the Progressives in the example Halogamer mentioned