America has been on borrowed time with health for a long time. Its one of the detractors of a purely capitalist society. Balance is the key, not blind greed.

I had a doctor tell me recently that a lot of people thought doctors are useless and don't need to exist. He said "you know most things just fix themselves" that is to say if people are willing to lose weight and change habits.

I disagree somewhat.... but think if you look back in time that even though life expectancy was shorter, unless their was a plague health was not so bad. They worked themselves to death but had a healthy life for the most part.

Its the big problems like bullet wounds and specialist help that we need doctors for..

I'll take you seriously anyway.

By media-hot, were you referring to how they all get wet when he comes into the room, or what?  I can understand another straight guy being off balance when Chris Mathews is telling him how horny he's getting, but there sure as hell weren't any hard interviews unless we're talking about a crude play on words.  Most of the outlets weren't even broadcasting them when he did blow it.

I've heard plenty of really dumb shit come out of Palin's mouth, her education on foreign affairs is lacking at best, but you apply a double standard when you give Obama a pass on every dumb shit thing he's said while deciding Palin thought Africa was a single country based on anonymous dishing by party insiders.  They haven't liked her since she started putting them in jail for corruption.  Since a rather frightening percentage of the country doesn't know that either, I wont assume it's a lie, but it's hardly fact, unlike the decades of on tape bullshit repeatedly dribbling out of the VP's corn hole.

Get rich, acrue power, donate money.  Promise them a job after they push through catastrophic legislation that could cripple millions all so you can sell a shitty lightbulb that no one is buying.

They outlawed more ecologically friendly incandescent lightbulbs in favor of a piece of shit flourescent bulb that everyone lies about to convince you it's better.  The electronic ballast doesn't do anything because they have no capacitance to store energy between pulses, and the lumens are an utter lie because they then drop down to 15% output between those pulses.  Add airborne mercury poisoning from broken bulbs, ground pollution from that same mercury during disposal, and UV emissions onto the debilitating migraines they give 10% of the population and you have one big what the fuck.  They don't even last as long under home use conditions.

If GE can do it, so can you.  All you need to do is run a major corporation that can pay them a million dollars a year for "consulting" after they leave office.  Hopefully LED will take over by then, or I'm fucked.  Or you can get together several million of your friends, and still be ignored by the GE owned media, but maybe catch the notice of enough politicians that like staying politicians over getting rich after they leave office.  We could also assume that they seriously think CFL's are better for the environment, in which case I win the argument hands down.

Here's one you'll really like.  If politicians aren't fucking morons, why is it that the GOP keeps trying to spend money to buy votes from their fiscally conservative base even after it's cost them two election cycles?

Hey if someone has the energy you could do the numbers of Finland.

At least i would be interested to see that

Aroddo,

Can you provide some details on the average tax rate per house hold in Germany?  The information your provided shows your health care is cheaper, but you also need to take in to consideration how much you pay in taxes for health care.  My understanding is Germany pays on average higher taxes then americans on average. 

Be interesting if we could see that kind of information as well.

I said I was baiting you, and I don't give Obama "a pass on every dumb shit thing he's said," although we doubtless have many disagreements on what particular utterances are dumb shit. And my conviction that Ms. Palin is perhaps irreparably under-educated isn't the point behind me poking your ribs here. I was just hoping to see if you might lay down a screed on the evils of the imperial presidency from a 'conservative' point of view.

Sure I, I like that, but it's because I believe that the 'leadership' of both major parties is a toadies' train wreck spawned by our structurally dysfunctional 'two party system.' I'm just not a fan of damning entire classes of people unless they actually all share the class-defining trait, e.g. child molesters. As a lapsed anarchist who cut his political teeth during the Reagan era, I'm completely and utterly tired of gov't-is-the-problem arguments. Food causes problems also, but we can't do without it either, at least until we pass some technological or evolutionary milestone. Check back with me when you've figured out a way to stop making people form groups that use violence as a political and/or economic tool, and then maybe we can talk about life without gov't.

That sincere rant aside, yes, I really do like watching the idiocy of the beautifully balkanized 'national' GOP pour money down that fiscal conservative sinkhole. It's almost as amusing as watching Democrats try to explain why they had no idea that some Acorn crews were ripe for a RICO indictment. (As a partisan, my only consolation there is to join Jon Stewart in mocking the not-so-investigative 'journalists' we have around today. Really, where the fuck were they? Waiting on Matt Drudge? No, wait, it took some preppy in bad pimp drag and a bimbo to do it...)

Spending lots of money on health care = something I don't consider a bad thing.

Somehow I figured this thread would be about what the US should do with the health system. Oh well, head above the parapet.

I develop medical software for hospitals in the UK (not anything to do with the national program for IT/connecting for health, before people start throwing fruit...), and I have to say the National Health System here really does meet all the bureaucratic stereotypes. Everything is slow moving and tied in red tape and paperwork, and you frequently have to deal with useless people on one hand and empire builders on the other.

But, I don't think I know of anyone who would get rid of it. Some want to run it using competitive market principles to some extent, but there is basically no political opposition to continued free healthcare for all. Now I'm certainly not saying a monolith like the NHS is the right solution, but government involvement in providing healthcare is definitely a good thing.

The thing too few people here in the US understand is that burdensome paperwork, useless people, and empire builders are all typical products of any large-scale, formal organization. We miss too many opportunities for real process improvement because we'd rather wave flags proclaiming the glory of the free market or the righteousness of public service. For the long haul, we might actually be better off taking time to look at individual trees more often than we stare at the forest in fear or awe.

p.s. For my fellow Amurricans who might like to see the gov't stripped down to little more than the Defense Department, please don't forget that the form (as in fill-in-the-boxes) was invented by an early 19th-century US general who thought his staff officers talked too much at their regular meetings. His basic idea was that 'if what you have to say can't fit in the boxes I've drawn on this paper, I don't need to know it.' That's just a tidbit from a book called "Technopoly" by Neil Postman, and I have no idea how well that particular general fared in his career on the field or behind the desk.

You prove my point.  Beaurocracy comes with size.  The bigger it is, the more layers it needs.  The cure for beaurocracy is obviously smaller, not larger.  Our solution is instead to take a few hundred insurance companies and condense them into one?  Unless you're one of the idiots that really thinks a tax payer subsidized public option is going to compete, and not kill private insurance, that has to be the end result you're expecting.

Insurance companies measuring policy holders in the tens of thousands instead of millions would be just fine.  That's more than enough of a cross section to spread out catastrophic coverage, and actually small enough to manage efficiently without the guy at the top losing his hair over it.  All we need to do is get Uncle-Fuck-Me-in-the-Ass to take down the entry barriers it put up to protect the existing, horribly broken framework that it created.

Our big companies need to go away, instead of getting bailouts and forming cabals, conveniently ignored by Uncle, to stay alive.

No, I wasn't proving your point. Bureaucracy comes with formality, and the chances of it becoming problematically inefficient increase with size. In a highly technological world soon to hold more than 7 billion people, some large bureaucracies are necessary (inevitable). At least if you want things like relatively stable commerce, nonviolent resolutions to conflicts over fresh water sources, or meaningful borders for a continent-spanning nation.

Necessary evils, restricted to the bare necessities.  A government run health care industry is not a necessary evil, it's just damning outselves to do it.

Exactly! What I don't understand it that the government keeps bailing out these big companies, then claiming that they'll help small businesses. Wouldn't competition be worse if you have to go against the federal government?

Also, if we're doing comparisons about health care costs, I'd like to see the tax rates of each compared nation. And if I'm not mistaken, aren't goods in Europe typically more expensive then here in the United States?

What's not to understand?  The politicians retire into consultation positions where they get paid millions to do nothing after they leave office.  I'm sure there will be plenty of current White House officials and congressmen that end up working for GE.  They fixed the lightbulb game for them, are giving them all kinds of goodies in the stimulus and environmental bills, and have so far ignored the illegal activities they are obviously up to with retain chains.  All those stores that have isle after isle of nothing but GE products aren't just unable to find competing brands.  Only part of that will be payback for the media coverage they got for the last election cycle.

To play that game with small businesses, you have to line the pockets of a whole bunch of them, there's more risk of things like jail.

You're missing the point from us 'serious' lefties. We don't want a "government run health care industry." We want basic health care as a public good and we have no objection to rich people using some of their discretionary income to satisfy their various needs for boutique service, cutting-edge technology, etc.

Again with the broad-brush rejection of variation within major categories. I'm a former academic who lost credit with fashionable career-climbers because I remain convinced that the old iron triangle talk is a very useful thing to bring up with young civics students; in any democracy, any public policy apparatus is always vulnerable to capture by the private interests whose actions motivated the creation of that policy. But the mere existence of the revolving door connecting public policy makers and captains of industry is no reason to condemn either group as a whole. It's the tawdry 'revolving' stuff that deserves to be stamped out. Hence my great chagrin over today's news from the Supremes that Buckley v. Valeo was an understatement, and not the 1st Amendment travesty that many of us have considered it to be all along.

By the less derogatory definition, yes I would be broad-brushing.  By the secondary, I'll take one from the numerous agencies they've set up and assume guilt until they prove their innocence.  I don't consider everyone that runs for office to be a politician, but you can't find a single one of them in a leadership position that isn't dirty.  The only problem we have is our media never reports on it.  Hastert, that fucking putz, was as dirty as it got, and we never heard a word of it till after he left.  It's common practice to buy land and then put a road through it in the highway bill.  It's so common practice that he made millions doing just that and no one cares.