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Author Topic: Sicko - The Health Care Industry  (Read 7124 times)
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spooky112483
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« Reply #20 on: August 09, 2007, 06:49:35 AM »

First I have a major problem with Mr Moore. I do not think his heart is in the right place I think he has an agenda but I wont get into that.  Basically I believe our system is the best in the world. Does it have problems? Absolutly. Nothing is perfect. The best analogy I have heard is this...imagine the DMV (your local tag department) how long are the lines there? How much red tape? and how many TAXES?? That's what we would see if the government controled our health care. Look guys, NOTHING is free. So you want free health care? You think that is your RIGHT as an American? Well, the government does not have a money tree in the White House back yard (like Rubbin Trappenburg said we keep our bulldozers Rolling Eyes) That money comes from us the tax payers. So Free health care = higher taxes. Plain and simple. I would love to be able to say to an insurance provider "oh really? you don't want to cover me? well I will just go to 'so and so insurance company' then!" That's called a free market! Let me pick and choose. Let me decide what is best for me. Let me go shopping when it comes to my insurance provider. Don't give me a government run program!!! Anyway that's my soap box and here is an email I meant to post awhile back...
 
 
 
 
 In addition to all those in countries with socialized medicine, if they have the money, seeking medical care in the USA, go to this....
 
Does government health care inevitably lead to homicidal doctors who can't wait to leap into a flaming SUV and drive it through the check-in counter? No. But government health care does lead to a dependence on medical staff imported from other countries.
 
Some 40 percent of Britain's practicing doctors were trained overseas -- and that percentage will increase, as older native doctors retire, and younger immigrant doctors take their place.
~~~99
66~~~
According to the BBC, "Over two-thirds of doctors registering to practice in the UK in 2003 were from overseas...."
~~~99
66~~~
Aneurin Bevan, the socialist who created the National Health Service after World War II, was once asked to explain how he'd talked the country's doctors into agreeing to become state employees: "I stuffed their mouths with gold," he crowed. Sixty years later, no amount of gold can persuade Britons to spend their working lives in the country's dirty, decrepit hospitals (they spend enough of their nonworking lives there, waiting to be seen, waiting for beds, waiting for operations).
~~~99
 
*** British bomb plot and Michael Moore-style health care ***
** The legacy of Britain's socialized medical system is a growing reliance on foreign doctors, like seven of the eight suspects arrested in the failed London car bombing and Glasgow airport attack. **
MARK STEYN, Syndicated columnist, Orange County Register, July 8, 2007, ©MARK STEYN
http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/opinion/nationalcolumns/article_1756372.php
 
There are many things wrong with U.S. health care, as there inevitably are with any health care system. The question is whether America wants to go down the British-Canadian-Cuban route, to name three government medical systems that Michael Moore admires in his new film "Sicko." Cuba, of course, is a totalitarian state, and even Hollywood celebrities, though they like to visit, wouldn't want to live there. (Incidentally, the best health treatment available on Cuba is at Gitmo.) The United Kingdom, by contrast, is a free society, but last week's incendiary Jeep Cherokee at Glasgow Airport has shone a rare light on the curious character of its government health system.
 
Of the eight persons arrested as of Friday in the terrorist plot, seven are doctors with the National Health Service (the eighth is the wife of one, and a lab technician at the same hospital). The bombs failed to go off because a medical syringe malfunctioned. I don't mean it malfunctioned as a syringe (even in the crumbling NHS, the syringes usually work) but as a triggering mechanism, to which it had been adapted, though evidently not too efficiently.
 
Does government health care inevitably lead to homicidal doctors who can't wait to leap into a flaming SUV and drive it through the check-in counter? No. But government health care does lead to a dependence on medical staff imported from other countries.
 
Some 40 percent of Britain's practicing doctors were trained overseas -- and that percentage will increase, as older native doctors retire, and younger immigrant doctors take their place. According to the BBC, "Over two-thirds of doctors registering to practice in the UK in 2003 were from overseas -- the vast majority from non-European countries." Five of the eight arrested are Arab Muslims, the other three Indian Muslims. Bilal Abdulla, the Wahhabi driver of the incendiary Jeep and a doctor at the Royal Alexandra Hospital near Glasgow, is one of over 2,000 Iraqi doctors working in Britain.
 
Many of these imported medical staff have never practiced in their own countries. As soon as they complete their training, they move to a Western world hungry for doctors to prop up their understaffed health systems: Dr. Abdulla got his medical qualification in Baghdad in 2004 and was practicing in Britain by 2006. His co-plotter, Mohammed Asha, a neurosurgeon, graduated in Jordan in 2004 and came to England the same year.
 
When the president talks about needing immigrants to do "the jobs Americans won't do," most of us assume he means seasonal fruit pickers and the maid who turns down your hotel bed and leaves the little chocolate on it. But in the United Kingdom the jobs Britons won't do has somehow come to encompass the medical profession.
 
Aneurin Bevan, the socialist who created the National Health Service after World War II, was once asked to explain how he'd talked the country's doctors into agreeing to become state employees: "I stuffed their mouths with gold," he crowed. Sixty years later, no amount of gold can persuade Britons to spend their working lives in the country's dirty, decrepit hospitals (they spend enough of their nonworking lives there, waiting to be seen, waiting for beds, waiting for operations). According to a report in the British Medical Journal, white males comprise 43.5 percent of the population but now account for less than a quarter of students at UK medical schools. In other words, being a doctor is no longer an attractive middle-class career proposition. That's quite a monument to six decades of Michael Moore-style socialist health care.
 
So today the NHS is hungry for medical personnel from almost anywhere on the planet, so hungry that the government set up special fast-track immigration programs: Mohammed Asha, Mohammed Haneef and their comrades didn't even require a work permit to come and practice as doctors in state hospitals. You don't have to be the smartest jihadist in the cave to see that as an opportunity, any more than it required no great expertise for the 9/11 killers to figure that the quickest place to get the picture IDs with which they boarded the planes was through Virginia's "undocumented worker" network. Everyone else from the Venezuelan peasantry to the Russia mafia knows the vulnerabilities of Western immigration systems, so why not the jihadists?
 
Maybe their mistake was trying to blow up the airport instead of wreaking subtler havoc on the infidels. Did you see this week's scare-of-the-week from the Chinese health system? "About 420 bottles of fake blood protein, albumin, were found at hospitals in Hubei province but none had been used to treat patients, said Liu Jinai, an official with the inspection division of the provincial food and drug administration."
 
Well, this being China, where public lies about public health are routine, we just have to take Liu Jinai's word that "none had been used to treat patients." But imagine what Doctor Jihad could get up to if he stopped trying to use the syringe as a detonator and just resumed using it as a syringe?
 
But beyond that the Glasgow Jeep story symbolizes a more basic reality. The NHS is the biggest employer in Europe, and it's utterly dependent on imported staff such as Dr. Asha and Dr. Abdulla. In the West, we look on mass immigration as a testament to our generosity, to our multicultural bona fides. But it's not: A dependence on mass immigration is always a structural weakness and should be understood as such. In the socialized health systems of the Continent, aging, shrinking populations of native Europeans will spend their final years being cared for by young Muslim doctors and nurses. Indeed, in the NHS, geriatric medicine is a field overwhelmingly dependent on immigrant staff.
 
And what of the other end of the medical business? Take Japan, a country with the same collapsed birth rates as Europe but with virtually no immigration. In my book, I note an interesting trend in Japanese health care: The shortage of newborn children has led to a shortage of obstetricians. For in a country with deathbed demographics, why would any talented ambitious med-school student want to go into a field in such precipitous decline? In Japan, birthing is a dying business.
 
Back at the Royal Alexandra Hospital, three doctors were under arrest, and the bomb squad performed a controlled explosion on a vehicle in the parking lot. Pulled from the flaming Cherokee, Dr. Kafeel Ahmed is now being treated for 90 percent burns in his own hospital by the very colleagues he sought to kill. But at one level he and Dr. Asha and Dr. Abdulla don't need to blow up anything at all. The fact that the National Health Service -- the "envy of the world" in every British politician's absurdly parochial cliché -- has to hire Wahhabist doctors with no background checks tells you everything about where the country's heading.
 
 
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Arubagate2005
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« Reply #21 on: August 09, 2007, 01:42:40 PM »

First I have a major problem with Mr Moore. I do not think his heart is in the right place I think he has an agenda but I wont get into that.  Basically I believe our system is the best in the world. Does it have problems? Absolutly. Nothing is perfect. The best analogy I have heard is this...imagine the DMV (your local tag department) how long are the lines there? How much red tape? and how many TAXES?? That's what we would see if the government controled our health care. Look guys, NOTHING is free. So you want free health care? You think that is your RIGHT as an American? Well, the government does not have a money tree in the White House back yard (like Rubbin Trappenburg said we keep our bulldozers Rolling Eyes) That money comes from us the tax payers. So Free health care = higher taxes. Plain and simple. I would love to be able to say to an insurance provider "oh really? you don't want to cover me? well I will just go to 'so and so insurance company' then!" That's called a free market! Let me pick and choose. Let me decide what is best for me. Let me go shopping when it comes to my insurance provider. Don't give me a government run program!!! Anyway that's my soap box and here is an email I meant to post awhile back...
 <SNIP>


Based on your post, I would guess that you are young, healthy, employed and without children.  I am assuming you pay very little for your health insurance premium and you have few medical bills outside of that.  If you were a single mother, your comments would be different.  If you were a recently laid-off middle-aged exec with a family to support, your comments would be different.  If you were disabled and unable to work, or elderly with a chronic health condition, your perspective would certainly change.

I agree we have the best health care in the world, but not the best system. The issue is affordable access for all Americans.  Right now, those who are most vulnerable: children, single-parent families, the elderly or disabled not yet eligible for Medicare, are vastly underinsured.

Did you read Louise's post above?  She pays $10k per year for coverage, because of her age and pre-existing conditions.  To me, that is shameful in a country such as ours.  Did you read the piece Nonesuche posted in the Lounge about quality cancer care?  The woman in the article educated herself and sought out the best specialists to beat her cancer, at a personal cost of over $400k.  Kudos to her, but what happens to the single mom in that situation?  Or Louise?  Or the guy with a family to support and $100k equity in his home and college costs to bear?  I don't see equal, affordable access here.  Is it our right as Americans, or only the right of affluent Americans?

Also, regarding taxes . . . no one wants higher taxes, of course, but since there is no fix afoot  we don't know what the tax structure would be and how it would be distributed across the population.  From what I am assuming your perspective is, yes, your tax bill would probably go up and you would have little use for services - now.  But from Louise's perspective, if her insurance premiums were eradicated and she instead paid an additional sum, even a large one such as $200 or $500 per month in taxes, her overall cost would be dramtically improved.  So it is all relative.

Youth and good health are blessings to be thankful for, but they are fleeting.  Don't let your blessings blind you to the plight of others around you.  Public policy cannot be based solely on the needs of the young and healthy, espeically in a country with a rapidly aging population.

My turn to rant -  off my soapbox now!

 
 
 
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LouiseVargas
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« Reply #22 on: August 10, 2007, 12:09:21 AM »

Holy Cow!!!!!.

Thank you for educating me. I don't want government health care.

I never knew until recently that there is such a long wait in Canada for health care treatment and that sick people have died before their appointments. That is horrific.

Even though I pay a lot, if I am sick, I can call my Internist tonight and be in his office tomorrow. Money talks.
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crazybabyborg
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« Reply #23 on: August 10, 2007, 03:35:27 AM »

Holy Cow!!!!!.

Thank you for educating me. I don't want government health care.

I never knew until recently that there is such a long wait in Canada for health care treatment and that sick people have died before their appointments. That is horrific.

Even though I pay a lot, if I am sick, I can call my Internist tonight and be in his office tomorrow. Money talks.

I agree and I also understand your situation. Louise, I need Health Insurance also, and I'm hard pressed to afford it. Right now, I'm covered through work ( at a HIGH price ) but when this job goes, I simply will not be able to afford an individual policy. I don't have a solution, but have decided that Government Health Care isn't the answer. It's a huge problem for lots of folks.

I don't think this is the whole answer by any means, but I will say that WalMart does offer Health Insurance to individuals at a rate that is better than the vast majority of Insurance Companies will quote you. WalMart "joins" you in a huge group and is able to negotiate with well known Insurance Companies to fit your particular needs. You choose your coverage, deductables, identify your needs for pre-existing conditions, etc. and they have the weight of numbers to get a preferred group rate with various Insurance Companies to get you an optimum quote. The "service" is available to small businesses as well for their employees. It's still high, but helps a little in my experience anyway.
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Rammstein
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« Reply #24 on: August 10, 2007, 08:51:34 AM »

Holy Cow!!!!!.

Thank you for educating me. I don't want government health care.

I never knew until recently that there is such a long wait in Canada for health care treatment and that sick people have died before their appointments. That is horrific.

Even though I pay a lot, if I am sick, I can call my Internist tonight and be in his office tomorrow. Money talks.

that is English health-care which is institutionalized and thus not able to deal with change.

We have a mix of government and private money working together for good medical care and that is how it should be.
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A's Fever
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« Reply #25 on: August 10, 2007, 12:20:16 PM »

Ramm,

How is long term care for the elderly handled under your system, such as nursing homes?  Here, nursing home care is not covered by Medicare and is rarely covered by other insurance, unless a long term care policy was purchased far in advance.  TIA.
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Rammstein
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« Reply #26 on: August 12, 2007, 07:09:46 PM »

Ramm,

How is long term care for the elderly handled under your system, such as nursing homes?  Here, nursing home care is not covered by Medicare and is rarely covered by other insurance, unless a long term care policy was purchased far in advance.  TIA.

there is no term for care for the elderly, it is "as long as they live" care.

And nursing home care is given out of public funds and taxes.

Our system of caring for the elderly is built up completely different.
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