National Healthcare Now!

[Foozle]

Instead, our embarrassment of riches results in this:

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I lived without part of my skull

Briana Lane is recovering from surgery - after living with only "half of her skull" for months.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3706631.stm

Briana felt her brain "shift during the night"

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In any other country of the "first" world, this would be as absurd as a Monty Python sketch. In the U.S. it is reality. Do people even realize how little money is spent on stuff like this versus feeding the "military industrial complex"? Unreal...

[Foozle]

Universal Healthcare

Because our European and Canadian counterparts don't have to suffer the indignity of wondering if their health insurance is adequate to their needs, I offer these unique perspectives on the U.S. problem:

The Media Misses the Point (yet again, v.10.6)
http://www.node707.com/archives/002102.shtml

{comments at another site, here}
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/ste...6207806221175/

You can read your old pal Foozle's comments at the second link...

[MalikTous]

Health scare?

I'm less trusting of 'universal' second rate care than of a capitalist-based system where at least the care is good if you can pay. I'm planning to eschew health care and boycott the system if we can't rid the USA of Obamacare.

[MalikTous]

Skulled!

Sounds like someone got bombed by the bogus malpractise raids and was operating while exhausted, same thing as when he's a government drone and sleep deprived. Government isn't a solution, it's a cause of the problem! When the government allowed all those phony and frivolous malpractise suits through, it drove the prices of care sky high and spawned a whole bunch of government interference that spoiled the system. The answer should be LESS government, not more...

[Nathaniel]

So Malik, it sounds like what you are saying is that there is too much government controll of medicine (and other things), and your evidence of this is that the government "allowed" too many malpractice suites (in other words did not exert enough controll). I might be misunderstanding your point, but that is what it seems you are saying.

[Rothgo]

The US spends more per head on healthcare than the UK, or France etc, but gets worse results. I could hunt out source, but being back from holiday, I'll leave it to anyone interested to do their own homework. And of course, what constitutes "best" is of course a POV.

[Rothgo]

Note there may be some confusion above, as I've merged two threads that should never have been separate.

[Michael Moorcock]

As a reasonably well-off person with Medicare and a good back-up insurance, I enjoy what might be the best health care in the world. But it's only a shade better than in France where EVERYONE can enjoy that healthcare. Diagnostics are where the US scores, but only in terms of speed (for those of us wealthy enough).
It takes a bit longer to get an MRI, for instance in Paris, unless there's a clear urgency. But in France doctors still visit and if you can't easily get bloodwork done, for instance, someone will come to where you live and take the necessary blood. In the UK waits are longer but in general the care is good and also available to the entire population. This is what democracy promises us -- equal access to law, education and health. It's what democracy should be about in the US. Of course, taxes are higher in most of Western Europe. But, as I've shown elsewhere, high taxes well spent demonstrably show a happier population. This is true, in my experience, throughout Scandinavia, Germany, France etc. In its pursuit of individualism in a consumerist society, the US has somehow lost her way and interpreted the Constitution/Bill of Rights to mean something very different to what the founders intended.
If the Tea Party were really constitutionalists, they would take that 'We the people' stuff seriously and support higher taxation of the rich among other things, but as fundamentalist Christian tools of consumerist Republicans they lose any authority in my eyes, by going directly against the spirit of a document drawn up mostly by deist egalitarians. But I'd better not get started on what the original tea party was all about.
I want Obama to say some of this but he's turned out to be a weaker democrat than I'd feared.