Healthcare & rationing

[Skipjack]

Ahh now I see, hmm, must have missed that single line.
Anyway, it was not important.

[TallDave]

Your ignorance is hilarious. They're not "a little to the left," they explicitly advocate single-payer.

No, your ignorance of your own countries politics is.
I have at least bothered to listen to Obamas adress to the congress. I did not hear anything of a single payer system. In contrary, he explicitely said that the private insurance companies will be part of the programm.

For God's sake, pay attention. I am talking about the people in your link, the ones I called "socialists," not Obama.

Two authors of the Harvard study, Himmelstein and Dr. Steffie Woolhandler are co-founders of the Physicians for a National Health Program, which supports government-backed "single-payer" health coverage

That puts them well into the "socialist" category, and quite a bit left of Obama.

[Skipjack]

For God's sake, pay attention. I am talking about the people in your link, the ones I called "socialists," not Obama.

Granted, maybe you were, I was not. I was noticing this tendency with you and Msimon in general.

How does a checkup prevent cancer?

Read it up, it is getting to late for me to look it up for you.

Oh and:

And notice the insurers always seem to lose in court anyway.

Citation please!

Ah yes, more of your expert knowledge on the U.S. Please, do tell.

I obviously know a lot more about the US than you do about my country.

In any case, we do more diagnostics than you guys.

Citation please.
And no, MRIs are not "more diagnostics". As I said, there is a lot you can not and will not see in an MRI, but that you will see in a ultrasound, or an endoscopy, or with a breath test, or a mamogram or with a simple finger up your bum.

[TallDave]

How does a checkup prevent cancer?

Read it up, it is getting to late for me to look it up for you.

Early diagnosis is not the same as prevention. "Prevention" suggest some active cause. It is extremely stupid to suggest worse diagnosis explains our better cancer survival rates.

Citation please!

It was in YOUR link.

I obviously know a lot more about the US than you do about my country.

You don't appear to know much about anything relating to America. You even thought you paid the same drug prices we do. And you thought we were a "developing country" in 1914, despite the fact our GDP was around 30% higher than yours.

Besides, your country is tiny, and frankly rather insignificant. All modesty aside, we are the world's sole superpower. It would be surprising if anyone outside of Austria knew more about your country than the U.S. Half the world confuses you with Australia.

In any case, we do more diagnostics than Europe in general.

Citation please.
And no, MRIs are not "more diagnostics".

Yes, they are. And we do more of just about everything. MRIs are just an especially obvious example.

Here's a cite for general diagnostics, comparing the U.S. to major socialized-medicine countries. It doesn't mention Austria, because, again, you're tiny.

It is often claimed that people have better access to preventive screenings in universal health care systems. But despite the large number of uninsured, cancer patients in the United States are most likely to be screened regularly, and once diagnosed, have the fastest access to treatment. For example, a Commonwealth Fund report showed that women in the United States were more likely to get a PAP test for cervical cancer every two years than women in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Great Britain, where health insurance is guaranteed by the government

[pfrit]

How does a checkup prevent cancer?

Read it up, it is getting to late for me to look it up for you.

Early diagnosis is not the same as prevention. "Prevention" suggest some active cause. It is extremely stupid to suggest worse diagnosis explains our better cancer survival rates.

Actually, there are now prevention techiniques in a check up. The HPV vaccine for one. Also a dr getting your history and doing a dna test to assess your risk for a specific cancer is another. Sigmoscopy (is that a correct spelling) is meant to identify and remove growths before they become cancerous. Heck, telling the patient to quit smoking.

[choff]

On the issue of the birthrate, people are having less children because they simply can't afford to. Immigration is encouraged by the business community to keep wages down, and low fertility is the consequence. If the immigrant population has a higher birthrate, it's because relative to the old country, wages are better for the immigrants.
The newcomers birthrate will fall once the economy can't grow as fast as the population. There is no grand scheme, just plain old market economics. The fact that so many immigrants are Muslims is probably because the economic plight of Muslim countries is, with noteable exceptions, desperate.

[Scupperer]

On the issue of the birthrate, people are having less children because they simply can't afford to.

This is a perception issue, if it's even the case, as evidenced by the high birthrate of lower income immigrants. I'd say it's more of a cultural/social issue than economic, however.

[TallDave]

Alright, no more stupid political threads for me.

Back to Polywell I go!

[tomclarke]

However, I believe that a good capitalist will not take unnecessary risks,

But you want to privatize your profits and socialize your losses. That is what we refer to these days as corpratism and was how the fascists operated.

Not good company to be in.

I can't resist commenting on the logic of this! Just because your cat shares soemthing (say, claws) with a pole-cat, it does not imply your cat is a pole-cat.

And as for the substance: you imply that nationalising loss-making companies is the prerogative of right-wing governments when it has been practised by left of middle governments in europe throughout the Twentieth Century and after the recent crisis in UK was opposed only by radical right-wing. Mainstream parties all thought it necessary.

Best wishes, Tom

[Skipjack]

women in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Great Britain

It is funny that the politcally biased blogs you like to cite always take the worst examples for public healthcare systems. That is like me looking for the worst parts of the US and citing those.


Also, in terms of infrastructure the US was far behind at the beginning of the 20st century (you said 1900 and thats the date I meant).
As I said before and I will say it again, you guys still (!) have free hanging power lines going to houses. We have not had that in decades.
It is ugly and dangerous, thats why. Of course free hanging is cheaper, thats why they are still doing that in developing countries like Vietnam
Your roads are also much worse than ours (other than the highways).
Heck your stormdrains are often ridiculously underdimensioned.
I have been to San Antonio Texas quite often, and gee the streets there were flooded at least once a day in summer. Some roads were unpassable for days and that in the middle of a major city.

An article in the July 31, 1909 edition of The Argus reported on a road treatment policy to improve visibility for area drivers.

Just to make this clear, roads in the US were not generally paved with asphalt until 1909. In Paris all roads had been paved with aspahlt already in 1871 and most other major european cities shortly afterwards.

Also from what I could see, many roads in the US dont have sidewalks still, even in major cities. In Austria all roads in major cities have sidewalks and many roads over land do as well.

Many farms in the US were not connected to the electrical grid until a few decades ago. They had to rely on their own generators.

Yeah, Austria is tiny, has been since WW1. Thanks for reminding me. We have no natural resources and basically no land that can be used for anything (a large part of the country is high mountains).
Compared to the US this puts us into a huge disadvantage (the US us huge and has pretty much everything, more or less, other than titan, I think).
Considering all that, we are doing pretty well for ourselves, I think.

[MSimon]

How does a checkup prevent cancer?

Read it up, it is getting to late for me to look it up for you.

Early diagnosis is not the same as prevention. "Prevention" suggest some active cause. It is extremely stupid to suggest worse diagnosis explains our better cancer survival rates.

Actually, there are now prevention techiniques in a check up. The HPV vaccine for one. Also a dr getting your history and doing a dna test to assess your risk for a specific cancer is another. Sigmoscopy (is that a correct spelling) is meant to identify and remove growths before they become cancerous. Heck, telling the patient to quit smoking.

Or you could tell them to smoke something that appears to have cancer PREVENTION characteristics. According to Tashkin who did the research.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01729.html

"We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use," he said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."

[MSimon]

Let me see here. The average of the very poorest among us (blacks) on a PP comparison (food and housing [among other things] is cheaper in in the USA) shows that the Blacks have an average income equivalent to that in Scandinavian countries.

In 2007, the average African-American income was $33,916, compared with $54,920 for whites.[50]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American

In 2004, African-American workers had the second-highest median earnings of American minority groups after Asian Americans, and African Americans had the highest level of male-female income parity of all ethnic groups in the United States.[83] Also, among American minority groups, only Asian Americans were more likely to hold white-collar occupations (management, professional, and related fields),[84] and African Americans were no more or less likely than European Americans to work in the service industry.[85] In 2001, over half of African-American households of married couples earned $50,000 or more.[85] Although in the same year African Americans were over-represented among the nation's poor, this was directly related to the disproportionate percentage of African-American families headed by single women; such families are collectively poorer, regardless of ethnicity.[85]

[MSimon]

Many farms in the US were not connected to the electrical grid until a few decades ago. They had to rely on their own generators.

It is a big country.

And in Alaska there are still a lot of places not connected to the grid.

The higher the population density the less expensive it is to get everyone hooked up.

[TDPerk]

For Maui and Skipjack's consideration, et al.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/scien ... nstapundit

[Skipjack]

We still have more than 50% of the adult population here smoking. I mean until 3 years ago (when cigarette prices went up so much), almost everyone here was smoking. Non smokers were the minority.
We are still far behind the US in this, yet we live longer. So I doubt that smoking can be made responsible for the gap in live expectancy.

In regards to cultural diversity: Well that is somewhat idiotic. How would cultural diversity affect this? If you take the entirety of Europe we do have quite some cultural diversity, btw, I would tend to say.
Heck here in my hometown I see more black people than in San Antonio Texas.