Total, unmitigated bullshit.

Where is your ‘evidence’ for these outrageous statements?

It’s the “Two Santa Clause Theory” of “Republican “Economics”" and it’s an obscenity.

I’ll take “Name two government programs scheduled to go run out of cash within the next 15 years”, Alex.

How can France, Canada, etc. get comparable health outcomes by spending as little as half what we do on health care? Why can’t we do something like they do and cut our costs as well?

In multivariate analyses, US respondents (compared with Canadians)
were less likely to have a regular doctor, more likely to have unmet health needs,
and more likely to forgo needed medicines.

I suppose you’ve got some citations to back up these Delphic pronouncements? Cause I’ve certainly got a boatload that state pretty much the exact opposite. Just a small sample…

Nolte and McKee, Measuring The Health Of Nations: Updating An Earlier Analysis Health Affairs 27 (2008): 58-71. The gist: US comes in 19 out of 19 industrialized countries (including Canada and France) in the rate of deaths amenable to health care before the age of 75. In a similar study by the same researchers 10 years ago US came in 15 out of 19. We’ve gotten worse, and are spending more for it.

That noted commie rag Business Week specifically on France:

France’s infant death rate is 3.9 per 1,000 live births, compared with 7 in the U.S., and average life expectancy is 79.4 years, two years more than in the U.S. The country has far more hospital beds and doctors per capita than America, and far lower rates of death from diabetes and heart disease. The difference in deaths from respiratory disease, an often preventable form of mortality, is particularly striking: 31.2 per 100,000 people in France, vs. 61.5 per 100,000 in the U.S.

Karen E. Lasser,MD,MPH,David U. Himmelstein,MD,and Steffie Woolhandler,MD,MPH, Access to Care, Health Status, and Health
Disparities in the United States and Canada:
Results of a Cross-National Population-Based Survey, American Journal of Public Health 96 (2006).

Feel free to cherry-pick statistics on specific diseases, and continue to provide no evidence that the differences in these diseases is due to differences in the health care systems. Just be aware that the more you continue to do these things the less anyone is likely to take you seriously.

Right now the lefties are simply saying that they can get the Benz for the price of a Hyundai, and that simply isn’t possible.

Why would anyone, except someone with more money than he knows what to do with, own a Benz? Wasteful, horrible gas milage, exorbitant insurance rates, incredibly expensive and hard-to-find spare parts, and if you can find someone to service it he’ll charge you the rates of a brain surgeon. If you want something that will get you from home to work and the store safely, reliably, and affordably, and your not as rich as Croesus, you’re much better off with the Hyundai. Actually, Pedro, come to think of it that’s an excellent metaphor for the American health care system.

All that having been said, if, as is likely, the forces of darkness and profit scupper yet again the move to a rational system of universal healthcare, I do hope that at least we can enact some of the reforms you support, Pedro. It will be sort of like fixing the ice cream machine on the titanic but hey, I like ice cream.

Maybe it’s because the VRWC recognizes that when the Federal government gets involved, the problem only gets worse.
Yes, the government can’t do anything right. In related news: Just the other day I passed by a WWII memorial. Many of the men there were on Medicare and receiving social security.

No shit.

when was the last time we had major health-care legislation and who wrote it? (Hint: it rhymes with Ked Tennedy.). If you’re so disgusted with the current system, why are you entrusting it’s architect to “reform” it?

“How can France, Canada, etc. get comparable health outcomes by spending as little as half what we do on health care? Why can’t we do something like they do and cut our costs as well?”

This is false. Canada and France’s outcomes are much worse for many different disease. Wait times are much longer, care is less complete, and overall disease outcomes are poorer.

Again, if you want to argue that you prefer a lesser health system, but one that covers everyone, then fine make that argument.

Right now the lefties are simply saying that they can get the Benz for the price of a Hyundai, and that simply isn’t possible.

I strongly believe that the health care delivery system in this country needs to be refined. I would limit for-profit health insurance companies, allow for national policies, and demand a uniform standard for billing. I think I would also follow the swiss policy and require insurance for every citizen.

The system isn’t perfect, but to throw the baby out with the bathwater and hand medicine over to the knuckleheads in Washington is a recipe for disaster.

By the way Parthenon, get back to me when you see the EOB (explaination of benefits) for your mothers care. If they pay 50 cents on the dollar for that bill I will be amazed.

In other words you keep harping on the one metric that makes our health care system look good. Yet you continue to fail to provide any reason to think that the difference is a result of how health care is managed. I assume that if you could, you would have by now.

I’ll ask one more time the question which I’ve asked many times on ow.com and elsewhere. None of our wingnut brethren and sistren seems to be able to answer it:

How can France, Canada, etc. get comparable health outcomes by spending as little as half what we do on health care? Why can’t we do something like they do and cut our costs as well?

So far the only semblance of an answer I’ve seen is that we need to spend more so that our big pharma companies can do more r&d [and marketing] on new [snot and boner] drugs, but does that even come close to explain the vast difference in health care expenditures between us and them? Uh, no.

To help you wingnuts out, here are some possible answers. You can just pick one if you like.

1. Whatever system is enacted, we republicans will make sure it is starved of funds and resources so that it can’t operate efficiently.

2. Americans are dumber than the Canadians and Europeans – how do you think we got Bush elected – twice!!

3. We republicans will continue to starve the public education system of funds and resources, so the pool of competent, well-educated administrators for the system will remain low.

4. If we ever enact a national health care system, we wingnuts will go so batshit postal that the health system will be swamped by us shooting ourselves and each other with our constitutionally protected firearms.

5. It’s teh 6ov3rme3nt!!1one!!L So I don’t care if it could work on not, I just no likee.

Don’t like these answers? Give me your own, because I’m really having a hard time figuring you guys out.

Keep pulling those figures out of your ass; eventually you’ll find Jimmy Hoffa and Amelia Earhardt up there as well.

In the US if she didn’t have health insurance and couldn’t afford it out of pocket she would NEVER get an MRI.

What’s an MRI out of pocket cost these days? A couple months rent? Three months without food?

Assuming she wasn’t just laid off because her job was outsourced to India or China….

Ours US population is 307,212,123 (July 2009 est.).

The EU’s population is ethnically diverse.

The EU’s diversity is reflected in it’s members languages: “Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, and Swedish”.

There are also a lot of Arabs in the EU that aren’t reflected in the major languages spoken.

Despite the EU’s significantly larger size and marked diversity, it still provides it’s citizens with longer lives, lower infant mortality rates, and all at a sharply lower cost.

Your complain that the tiny countries beating our American corporate-medical-industries health outcomes don’t count because they are tiny.

But the European Union, which has a considerably larger population beats US as well on multiple health metrics.

EU citizens live longer than US.

EU has a lower infant mortality rate than US.

And the EU spends less per capita and less as a percentage of GDP to achieve those superior health outcomes.

Why do you hate American allies “SFC B”?

Young and healthy folks are much less likely to buy health insurance if their employer doesn’t do it for them.

They’re likely to go without the sort of expensive, covers “everything” (I know it doesn’t cover everything but it is far more comprehensive than it needs to be) insurance which employers currently provide. Our current system doesn’t allow a business to sell an insurance coverage which would cover only catastrophic injury or illness. Something with a high co-pay, but a low monthly free, which would protect those young, healthy Americans who would otherwise “go naked” from the sort of injury which can cause those high medical bills everyone fears. Think of it as liability-only car insurance. There are better market-based initiatives which can be done, for cheaper and with better results, than going ahead and sinking a trillion or two, in addition to the inevitable increase of gov’t intervention in our lives, through a gov’t health care plan.

At first he argues that the metric is bogus because 13 of the listings aren’t even countries…

I’m not arguing the metric is bogus. NR is saying that the US ranks 49th out of the countries in the world in life expectancy. It doesn’t, a dozen of the “countries” NR is referring to are no such things, and are, instead, tiny former European colonies which are still administered by their holders.

…then he argues that the US should be compared to the whole of the EU which, last I checked, isn’t a country.

My point is that, when you’re comparing the US to a country like Germany you’re comparing a country with three times the population and a whole host of different races and ethnicities with each of their attendant illnesses. For example, Sickle Cell Anemia affects about 1,500 people in Germany. In America there are 80,000. A homogeneous population makes treating illness and diseases a lot easier and a lot cheaper. On that list the only “entity” even close to the US is the EU. It is about 1/3 larger, but also has a more heterogeneous population, including those recently admitted Eastern European countries you referred to. Also, I don’t know why you object to the inclusion of those countries as each and every one of them has a national health care option of some kind.

…which includes recently admitted Eastern European countries with a low standard of living…

And the US includes Mississippi and West Virginia.

and the health provider side isn’t restricted through licensing programs designed to protect current providers you might be able to tell whether the market will be able to meet health care needs.

I’m not sure what this refers to, but am curious.

The current residency system drives people away from the medical profession. There is no reason to have doctors doing their residency put in the hours they do. It accomplishes nothing while possibly even leading to poorer care. The requirement to have licensed doctors prevents the opening of clinics in neighborhoods which can provide the sort of cheap, effective preventive care so many long for (malpractice insurance factors into this as well). Treatment currently administered by doctors for simple things like in-grown toenails don’t require doctors to perform, or even supervise. One doesn’t need to be a dentist to clean teeth, yet a group of highly qualified dental assistants couldn’t open their own business offering teeth cleaning, and nothing but teeth cleaning, because there needs to be a DD there. Changing the rules to open up competition would result in better care and be done for less money. Instead we’re going to be required to spend an extra $1,000,000,000,000.00 to break it even more.

What cold blooded American would demand that other Americans go out and pay hard cash for the privilege of being healthy?

This one. Take a sack lunch once a week for a year instead of eating out at lunch and use the savings to get your $300 annual check-up. Next question.

My mom just fell in her kitchen and tore her MCL two days ago. Diagnosis alone, before any treatment, she’s already in four figures.

Sorry about your mom, hope she’s alright. Thankfully it didn’t happen in Canada where’d she’d be waiting 10 weeks for the MRI necessary. Luckily, if it was just an MCL tear, the treatment won’t be very expensive as it’s basically anti-inflammatory medication and rest.

Who is actually asking doctors, or anyone for that matter, to work for free?

And since paying doctors directly for their services is such a point of pride for you, we can assume that you don’t have insurance and are currently paying the full cost of your health care out of pocket, correct?