Or the fact my grandmother was still being tested for “unknown ailment” when she died. Her results as having stomach cancer came three months after she died. Also, when my husband and I caught pneumonia while there, there was no way of getting us seen AND tested. We could go to emergency, but we couldn’t get the tests done or not right away. My sister-in-law who is an MD advised us to return home ASAP so we could get testing, since tuberculosis is endemic there. So we returned two weeks earlier than planned and were seen, X-rayed, and medicated the next day at one of the express care places.
Then I told her it was easier to get tested and treated in Portugal now, because now they allow private care too, and everyone who even remotely can goes private. Only indigents take advantage of the “free” health care. And it’s worth about what you pay for it. There are good doctors in the system, of course, but there are a lot of indifferent ones, and money and permissions for tests and treatments are controlled by an indifferent bureaucracy. And that’s the truth everywhere you go that has “free” health care.
Okay… so far so good. I expected her to come back with some factoids, and I expected to discuss it, and maybe even have words. You see, normally I don’t discuss this with strangers, but I was in a bad mood, so I didn’t care if she argued.
Instead, as I wound down, I found she was staring at me open-mouthed. When she could speak she said “Is it really like that? I thought we had the worst health care anywhere. No one ever told me centralized healthcare had problems. I never thought that it would need a bureaucracy and of course it would be like this”– gesture at the DMV.
She’s my age or close to it. Educated. HOW could she never have heard any of this, or even be led to think about it? HOW could she plan to expatriate without having investigated better? HOW could she think pie would rain from the sky? Where are these people getting their info? How come we’re not reaching them? How come they don’t understand basic economic facts?
Yes, I’ll confess most of the time I’ll stay quiet in public rather than get in a shouting match, but the information is all over and not hard to get. And most adults know you can’t get something for nothing, right?
Are conservatives/libertarians like the tree that falls in the forest and doesn’t make a sound?
I have often given my version of the Esoteric Question;
If a Tree Falls in the Forest, and CBS, NBC, ABC, NYT, WaPo, CNN, NPR and USA Today do not report it, does it make a sound?
If a man stands alone in a forest, makes a simple statement of fact, and no woman is present, is it still wrong?
I’d answer your question, but I’d be……well, you know.
My oldest brother (a Lutheran pastor) once answered, “Yes, but he won’t know *why*”
The difference between a magnificent woman and an indoctrinated one.
The fact that it happened at the DMV could only be an irony gifted to a novelist.
And no, if a non-leftist tells the truth in the forest, it won’t be seen for the trees.
Bless you, Sarah. Stay well. My thoughts are with your boys. We may have left them more than anyone can handle or should have to, I’m just about to celebrate the first day of my last day in the fifties. Cities are going belly up in California and falling like dominoes.
And our side is LOSING the “messaging war” to….to…to…”The Greece-y Hippie policies” that are destroying not only cities, but entire nations. Subprime mortgage theory applied to healthcare, energy, border crashing, auto manufacturing, banking, real estate, insurance.
Our Department of Justice is anything but, running guns to drug cartels and covering it up,lying under oath and begging for “executive privilege” to exacerbate their lies. Foisting not only a non-race-neutral policy at our voting booths, but openly racist thuggery is shielded and protected.
The petty, vindictive “payback” for fraudulent “sins of success” heaped upon anyone with a particular heritage…usually Judeo-Christian, heterosexual, white males being the prey that is always in season.
Our cities are in tatters, with union kickbacks now coming due via unfunded and stolen pension schemes, pitting firemen and policemen against the only people who never in their lives called them “pigs”.
And yet, our timidity in confronting the Losers Lament that underlies all of leftism will write the final chapter and seal the legacy we leave behind.
We didn’t have the courage to talk to those “strangers” who happen to be the brainwashed countrymen who will vote our last ballot as a free society.
After that, all we will have remaining is secession. North and South Korea. North and South Viet Nam. North and South DisUnited States.
The Losers Lament ALWAYS suggests that it is “somebody else’s fault”, when the inevitable failure comes crashing down on their heads. They “failed” because somebody else succeeded. They need Big Brother to “protect” them just a little bit more. They need just a little more dependency. They need to open the borders a little wider. They need to gut the military a little more. They need to choke off religious institutions a little harder. They need a little looser rules and bend the Constitution just a tad more.
And…THEY have only one fault. They just didn’t EXPLAIN it well enough.
This is small c communism in full overthrow mode.
We are in the forest shouting, but nobody can hear us, Sarah. The Propaganda and Lies Ministry will make sure of that.
cfbleachers, a very good post.
The main reason why I started my blog (egged on by several of my American based and Israeli contacts, whose sources run deep) is because there is an indisputable omerta, all over the bought and paid for ‘mainstream’ media. Therefore, I felt compelled to go viral, even though many of my op-eds are published in print and online too.
By having my own blog I am able to do as much-or as little-commentary as I deem fit, revolving around pressing and fast moving events. As a Conservative (not a wishy washy one either) and Zionist blog, I hope to change the conversation, veering straight into the truthful and ‘right side’ court. I http://adinakutnicki.com/take no prisoners….
Please visit it, then decide for yourselves if it is worth passing around the web – http://adinakutnicki.com/
So far, it is causing quite a stir.
Try this link….oops – http://adinakutnicki.com/
“Our cities are in tatters, with union kickbacks now coming due via unfunded and stolen pension schemes, pitting firemen and policemen against the only people who never in their lives called them “pigs”.” — cfbleachers
Indeed. Great observation.
What you say may be true, but it is different in Castro’s Cuba. Ask Venezuela’s fearless leader.
I keep waiting for the aliens to take him home. So far they haven’t. Stupid aliens.
Sorry, they are smart aliens.
They don’t want him back!
D
Venezuela’s fearless leader AND Michael Moore who raved about Cuba’s wonderful health system but, unfortunately, never went there to get treatment for his extreme obesity and sundry psychological ailments.
Old man Fidel had an entire wing of a hospital built just for him, imports doctors from Spain, doesn’t rely much on the locals. Astonishing all the resources devoted to keeping those old guys going.
Oogoe has just declared himself strong as an ox and ready to crush the opposition in Venezuela’s October election.
(I predict OOgoe won’t last until October.)
And how’s that Canadian system working out ?
Report: Thousands fled Canada for health care in 2011
‘ “No one ever told me centralized healthcare had problems. I never thought that it would need a bureaucracy and of course it would be like this,” gesture at the DMV.’
BWAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAA!
Those people really do live in a dream world, don’t they?
They’re not so much living in a dream world as exercising Orwellian DoubleThink. Contrast the Fast and Furious debacle to ObamaCare. Thousands of guns walked across the border with no plan in place to track them and the Obama administration’s excuse is ‘the bureaucrats in charge were utterly inept!’ Then they turn around and tell us that government bureaucrats will do a wonderful job of managing our health care. We’re asked to simultaneously believe that bureaucrats are hopelessly inept and that they’re brilliantly competent.
And the Left seem to exercise this DoubleThink effortlessly. It’s like the Leftists who visited the old USSR to see the Peoples’ Paradise first hand. They were utterly convinced that it would be wonderful, but they still brought their own toilet paper.
All of that made possible by the Right’s fear of Drugs. Funny that the Right fails to make the connection.
Government’s Greatest Trick – Making you a slave to your fears.
The right’s support for the current system is easy to fix. The current system is socialist with production quotas set by the attorney general of the United States. Just grab a copy of the current quotas (it is on the DEA web site) and ask why we authorized this much and not that much and isn’t the whole thing crazy? A sane conversion follows surprisingly often.
Hi there, M.Simon! Still on the legalizing of drugs bandwagon, I see.
And making progress with it.
But I get it. You prefer that some medicines be illegal and some conditions (PTSD primarily) be untreatable. Oh. We do have other legal anti-depressants. But cheap natural medicines have to be made illegal. Can’t have 1/10th of a cent per dose medicines competing with a dollar a dose medicines.
Simon – You get what? That every conversation somehow relates to your pet topic? One-note Simon; that’s all I was saying.
Simon would vote for a socialist scumbag rather than a Christian conservative, I think, which to my mind makes the problem people like M. Simon who hate virtue more than they love liberty.
“Hi there, M.Simon! Still on the legalizing of drugs bandwagon, I see.”
And your obvious aversion to it means it’s highly likely you are a police state type of Republican. In other words, you’re every bit a big government douchebag as a democrat. You just want your version of despotism.
Simon, here’s a clue: wicked people can’t handle liberty, nor can they maintain it. Only a virtuous people can handle and maintain liberty, because liberty requires self-control, and the wicked don’t have any. So if you love your sexual immorality and drugs more than freedom, you already are a slave.
The notion M. Simon has any sexual perversions is something you need to back up. I think you’re just flinging poo.
And there is nothing immoral in and of itself in using recreational pharmaceuticals.
This Prohibition is as stupid, costly, and unhelpful as the first one.
Obama’s October surprise will be the legalization of (government-supplied) marijuana. What better way to be re-elected than to ensure that a huge number of voters will be too wasted to think rationally, plus spoiled ballots will be rampant. Post election, think Huxley’s Brave New World and ‘soma’…
“a huge number of voters will be too wasted to think rationally”
< Rolls eyes > idiot.
The woman’s utter surprise that socialized health care is less than ideal reminds me of a documentary I saw several years ago. An ER doctor in an American inner city hospital was treating a young man from the neighborhood who was suffering from a bullet wound. He voiced complete astonishment that being shot actually HURT! Although he had seen countless shootings on TV and movies – and no doubt seen more than a few in his own neighborhood – this was apparently his first direct experience as the victim of a shooting.
I only hope that the woman at the DMV encountered by the author of the article actually takes steps to learn more about socialized medicine and then tell people what she learns. But if she’s like most liberals, I expect she’ll simply wipe it from her mind and decide the whole conversation was just a bizarre dream….
The trouble with anecdotes is they work both ways.
My mother had lung cancer. Even though she couldn’t walk, the hospital threw her out on the street when her insurance stopped paying for it. Had to take her to the emergency room to get her re-admitted briefly, then eventually to home hospice care, which the state paid for.
Our health care system is just as broken as that of Portugal, the difference being, we have the highest medical costs in the world. The only reason that services are supposedly available to those with insurance (and tell that to my late mother, ha!) is because we are denying health care to the poor and those without insurance.
It’s very simple. Like most things, there is only X amount of health care to go around. Right now people with money can have all they need, because people without it can’t get any. Is that fair? Perhaps yes.
But what is not fair is how the costs have been pushed up. Medical used to be somewhat affordable. Now it’s not .The government meddles in medicine in so many different ways, all of which causes the price to skyrocket.
” Like most things, there is only X amount of health care to go around. Right now people with money can have all they need, because people without it can’t get any.”
No, the people with all the money will buy all they need. The people with no money will go to the emergency room and not pay a fricking dime. Those of us in the middle will be stuck with their bills, in the form of higher taxes, as well as our own.
And pretty soon there’s only going to be less than X amount of health care, because lots of doctors will close their doors rather than put up with Obamacare.
“Our health care system is just as broken as that of Portugal, the difference being, we have the highest medical costs in the world.”
…because we pay for the medical research that the entire rest of of the world is planning on using a decade or two down the road.
A few years ago, I was at a medical conference in Orlando, Florida. One British doctor gave a presentation about MRI diagnosis of various ailments. He casually mentioned the number of MRI machines available for their entire health system at the time – less than half a dozen. There were more clinics and hospitals with MRIs in Orlando at that time than there were in the entire country of Great Britain.
Nowadays, the situation has changed – mostly because the US bought so many massively expensive MRI setups over a decade or so that the price dropped for everyone else in the world. So now they have “cheap” health care, while the US is busily buying the next round of upgraded hardware for the rest of the planet to use in ten years or so.
The same goes for drugs. We fund development of most of the high-end pharmaceuticals, then buy the really expensive stuff until the patents run out – when the other countries start producing the stuff for pennies on the dollar, and get the bonuses without the initial investments.
If the US cut costs like everyone else, we could have cheap health care, too. And it would get better at about 1/10 the rate it does right now.
Then, of course, there’s the whole tort system. Make doctors effectively immune from lawsuits – like they are in many countries – and see the prices drop.
Not quite right on the drugs. Countries such as Canada do not acknowledge the patents at all unless the drugs are sold for production cost plus a small profit. That does not include ANY of the development costs. That is why the drug companies are so down on people re-importing drugs from Canada.
It’s not because we pay for the medical research.
It’s because we pay for gold-plated care. And that’s because America has a bizarre third-party system where your *employer* (who doesn’t know or understand your health problems) pays the insurer, who then covers anything you want covered, cost be damned.
I just went through this. For neck pain, my doctor ordered an X-ray, which showed I had arthritis of the spine. Then he ordered an MRI (which I found out later cost $1,600). Then he referred me to a neurologist to check for possible spinal cord damage.
Guess what: The neurologist didn’t even *bother* to give the MRI more than a cursory glance. He did a neurological exam on me instead, and found that I had no nerve damage. He told me that the MRI was useless, because the X-ray had already found the skeletal problem; and his neurological exam had showed the problem wasn’t serious. And then he prescribed pain medicine for my arthritis. Case closed.
A previous time, a doctor had done such a terrible job treating me that I got sicker. A little Internet searching showed that he had not treated me properly. I called my insurer to complain, and I told them NOT to reimburse him because he had done such a poor job. The insurer told me that they can’t do that; it’s between me and the doctor.
Now this segues into the issue that the author talked about.
Why aren’t conservatives listened to?
Because there are TWO different kinds of conservatives:
1. The reformers like Reagan and Gingrich, who make serious proposals to improve America’s various institutions;
2. The country-club status-quo conservatives like Bush 41, who just want to keep everything just the way it is.
The reason we don’t get listened to on health care, is because too many of us have adopted the pose that our current health care system is just wonderful just the way it is. NO IT IS NOT–and anyone who has struggled with serious illness knows it is not.
Polls show that among America’s institutions, HMOs are the least admired–for good reason. When we keep touting how wonderful our current health care system is, we end up sounding like shills for HMOs.
Conservative reform of the health care system would get listened to. But trying to criticize ObamaCare by upholding our current health care system as the greatest thing since sliced bread isn’t going to get listened to–and doesn’t deserve to. There is much wrong with it that needs reform.
Whatever you think the explanation is, we have pretty uniformly better outcomes in the US. Plus a lot of things that improve patients’ quality of life. Call it gold-plated if you like.
Sure, but it could be a lot better, and that’s the guy’s point. We do need reform of the health system…..problem for me is that I’m not smart enough to figure it out.
A while ago I came up with a few, I thought, good ideas, and then someone who actually knew a bit about the health system shot them down.
Not by reducing the money available and taxing the hell out of the providers.
I didn’t think a (published?) author would be so stupid as to come up with a single anecdote in order to try and convince us that so-called socialist medicine is nothing but garbage. Reliable statistics, my dear, that’s what we need. No moronic right- wing half truths conservatives love to put about, in order to prove their pseudo points. Why would Americans flee to Seoul and Kuala-Lumpur for bypass operations costing $16.000 (yes, sixteen thousand dollars,my dear)in the US of A, whereas in Seoul you’ll pay a “measly” $7.000 for a real quality treatment? Go figure. Current healthe care in the US is a joke, a disgrace to Western civilization!
To your second point:
‘It is the job of progressives to keep on making mistakes, and the job of conservatives to keep them from being corrected.”
- G.K Chesterton
(should read ‘neo-conservatives’)
Do you really want a system where a doctor can make serious mistakes without any way of being held accountable?
I once read a regular column in a magazine; the author was a doctor, but one that was surprisingly down-to-earth. He cited a joke that had been popular in his medical school: “What do you call the guy who graduates at the BOTTOM of his class from medical school?” Answer: “Doctor….”. In other words, everyone who graduates from medical school is a doctor but they are not all equal in abilities. Even the ones who barely passed are considered just as much a doctor as far as the patient is concerned.
What if one of the less skilled doctors makes an avoidable mistake, due to misjudgement, inexperience, other things on his mind, you name it? Do you want to give him a pass, even if it cost you a limb or a family member? I remember reading about a man who had lung cancer in one of his lungs; he went into surgery to get the bad lung removed. The surgeon removed the GOOD lung and left the bad one behind. Would you just shrug about that and say “That’s life”?
I don’t doubt that there is far too much litigation with regards to medical care but I think the solution has to be more nuanced than just making doctors immune to prosecution. There needs to be some kind of middle ground where grievous and avoidable mistakes are penalized and where honest mistakes are learning opportunities for doctors and patients.
No, I think the trouble with anecdotes is that sometimes they’re untrue. Like yours. You are either lying, ridiculously exaggeratting, or you are too dumb to realize you had a sure-fire win major lawsuit with $1 mil of damages on your hands. What you describe — a hospital discharging a patient simply because their insurance “ran out” (whatever THAT means, since insurance doesn’t generally “run out”) and not because they thought it was medically appropriate, and against the advice of the patient’s chosen personal physician, is extremely unethical and illegal. Any lawyer would rub his hands with glee if you told him of these facts (and they were true, which is the rub here). He wouldn’t charge you a dime to file the lawsuit.
You know what I think happened? I think the hospital, with the agreement of your mom’s physician, decided she should go home — for medical reasons. You disagreed. But you can’t argue the medicine, because you’re not a doctor, and besides, you’d look like a moron arguing that you know better than a guy with an MD and 10 years of clinical experimence treating cancer.
So you invent what, at first blush, and if you don’t think about it too hard, or are a gullible idiot (like the woman in this story), seems like a plausible conspiracy/selfish story. Obviously your mother’s care was costing a lot of money. Obviously it can be that the insurance might not pay the whole bill, and the hospital would get stuck with providing services for free. We all know that happens. We all know that any reasonable person would resent that, and try to avoid it. Who wants to work for no pay? And, finally, we all know people are sometimes greedy and selfish, and have impulses to be cheap in how they treat others.
And, finally, to make the story even more believable, you phrase it as “the hospital,” and not as any individual human being (like the attending doctor who SIGNED THE DISCHARGE ORDER that is necessary for the hospital to discharge). You know if you accused a fellow human being of such inhumanity — tossing an old sick lady out into the street just because she ran out of cash — your audience might question how believable that was. Do we really think ordinary people regularly behave that way? Doctors? Er…not really. We might start to wonder if you had any kind of proof of what you say.
But accuse “the hospital” — that’s safer. A hospital is just a big brick building. Some impersonal thing. We can naturally much more easily suspect a big impersonal thing of doing harm for mechanical and inhuman reasons. Saying “the hospital” did it doesn’t trigger our natural sympathy for the human you accuse — our wondering whether there isn’t another side to your tale.
And that’s why you do it. You accuse “the hospital” of monstrosity, just like the Democrats accuse “insurers” or “the health care system” or Obama’s famous “some people.” As one more sly effort to divide people, to have them view each other with suspicion instead of mutual human trust.
It’s contemptible. And so is your effort here.
Actually I find her story completely believable…if her mother was on Medicare. Medicare has yearly and lifetime caps on inpatient days. And Medicare is notorious for ‘encouraging’ people into hospice care — where they will receive only palliation, no further treatment — by dangling the carrot of full payment, while refusing to pay for ‘futile’ attempts to cure or slow down the disease process.
We could discuss why we have immigration limits on poor uneducated individuals and how ignoring those limits stresses the institutions we value to their breaking point. We could talk about how the elderly received unprecedented levels of care until ACA. Interestingly now Medicare is denying diagnostic tests for those over 75 much like any other single payer system in the world. No need to treat colon cancer if it is stage 4 before it is detected. In the meantime doctors will still prescribe blood pressure medication. Wouldn’t want granny to have sclerosis while she is dying of untreated colon cancer. Doctors are disgusted and it has only been a couple of years.
But sure let’s pretend it is just your greedy insurers that are the problem. That way Congress and the President don’t have to admit that their “genius” plan did nothing to change the cost curve because their intent was not to make positive change, but to score points with people like you. It is all about the “win” not about sound public policy. Keep on drinking your Kool-Aid and pretending the US would be perfect if only those nasty conservatives would die of colon cancer.
That is exactly what happened to my grandmother. Stage 4 colon cancer, she was obviously dying and they kept giving her Lipitor and some of her other maintenece drugs. Then, when she was in her last hours of life in a hospice they gave her an extra large dose of morphine (saw it with my own eyes) to finish her off, even though that was against her wishes. It breaks my heart. She was not even allowed to die with dignity.
Whatever happened to the Hippocratic Oath? If it is possible, do not go to a doctor who has not taken the Hippocratic Oath, for anyone who has not done so has no right to call himself a physician, nor can he be trusted. Likewise, regard those who take the Oath and deliberately break it to be the scum of the Earth. That includes people who teach medicine to those who refuse to take the Oath. The medical arts are extremely dangerous in the hands of the wicked, and our primary defense against that is demanding doctors take and abide by the Hippocratic Oath.
“It’s very simple. Like most things, there is only X amount of health care to go around.”
NO NO NO NO NO. This single error is the root of so many leftist delusions. Fact is, we can make more. More doctors, more clinics, more drugs. That’s what capitalism does every day.
Of course, a state-run economy in health care, as in anything else, creates scarcity through policies that augment demand and suppress supply. When prospective doctors find out that the state will not reimburse them enough to recoup the cost of medical school nor protect them from legal hell, then medicine no longer looks like a desirable profession. When clinics and tech companies learn that the state won’t pay enough to recoup the investments of MRI machines, they won’t buy them nor build them.
That is the inexorable logic that results in a system which operates like Soviet grocery stores — where the meat costs only a kopeck but there is no meat — or like the DMV, where their job doesn’t depend on whether you get service or not.
+1
You spotted the falicy in the argument.
“NO NO NO NO NO. This single error is the root of so many leftist delusions. Fact is, we can make more.”
Exactly! That’s exactly what I was going to point out. That’s the difference between natural resources and man-made products and services. There’s a given, fixed amount of certain natural resources on the planet – land, water, oil etc. Advancing technology allows us to extract more, access previously inaccessible resources, produce more from the same amount of resources, recycle some materials for reuse, but at the moment we can’t create additional amounts of these natural resources, so indeed there is a fixed X amount. But when it comes to human-made products and services there isn’t a fixed X amount (as long as they’re not based on large amounts of non-recyclable natural resources). There will be as many doctors, drugs and MRI machines as people demand and can pay for. If a rich person buys a drug it doesn’t deprive a poor person of the drug. If only the rich person can afford the drug, the drug company will produce only X amount of it. If both the rich person and the poor person can afford it the drug company will produce 2X of it. So the issue here is not that there is a fixed X amount of the drug and the grabby rich take all of it at the expense of the poor. The issue here is how do you pay for 2X or who will pay for the additional amount produced by the drug company for people who can’t afford it.
Similarly the fact that one person is rich and another is poor doesn’t necessarily mean that the rich grabbed a larger part of the given, fixed X amount of wealth because there isn’t a fixed X amount of wealth. You don’t have a fixed number of dollars growing on a fixed number of trees, where the rich are those who knocked down the poor and climbed on their bodeis to quickly pick lots and lots of dollars, leaving only a few for others to pick. The fact Israel, a tiny sleeve of mostly desert land, is a net food exporter doesn’t cause the poverty of Yemen. If Israel would disapear Yemen will still be poor. There are many causes for poverty. Yemen had an irrational policy or non-policy for water usage, so it’s drying up. Israel always sought to develop methods to minimize water waste in agriculture and private consumption as well as desalination methods, so a few years of drought don’t bring it down. If Yemen were to use the same methods of saving water on one hand and increasing the land productivity on the other it would be richer. And it being richer wouldn’t make Israel poorer because there isn’t a fixed amount of food where if one country has more food another country will have less. If you use methods to increase productivity it increases the total amount of food.
Wanna know why retail health care is so expensive?
Cuz health “insurance” gets to pay a relative pittance for treatment, and EMTALA doles out free emergency care, and guess who gets overcharged to cover the difference? The current system is a paradise for the rent-seeking medical/pharma/legal complex and their statist enablers (and THEIR clients), at the expense of everyone else.
PS: What is commonly referred to as “insurance” is actually prepaid care. If you need an oil change, does your car insurance cover that? If you need to replace a lightbulb, does your homeowners or renters insurance cover that?
I also have an anecdote about a mother with lung cancer and her treatment by the U.S. health system.
I took my mother to the E.R. While at the E.R., in addition to the many medical people we talked to, we also talked to one nice lady about how Mom was going to pay for this. She did not have insurance. She had too much money to qualify for Medicaid. She was two months too young for Medicare.
For the next 11 days, she was in the hospital. Diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. As far as I know, none of the nurses or doctors knew or cared about her financial situation. We talked to the nice lady again on the day my mom was discharged from the hospital. She wanted to make sure of where to send the bill, talk to us a little about payment plans, and gave us some info about charities that might help with paying the bill.
Mom decided she did not want to go through chemotherapy. She went home. Among the many nice things that hospice did for her was explain to her how much money she had to spend in order to qualify for Medicaid. She died six weeks after she left the hospital (just missing being old enough to qualify for Medicare).
Medicaid ended up paying for hospice, but not for her hospital stay. Whatever money is left in her estate once taxes, funeral expenses, and estate expenses are paid will go to the hospital and the other places she owed money to. Right now, it looks like they will each get less 10 percent of what they are owed. My brother and I will get no money from the estate.
Summary: No insurance, no Medicaid, no Medicare. Eleven days in hospital with exactly the same level of care as any other patient. Hospital will be lucky to get 10 percent of what they billed to my mom. Of course, this is why the same hospital charges the insurance company so much for my daughter’s gall bladder surgery, etc.
Please note: If she had had zero savings when she went to the E.R., Medicaid would have paid for hospital visit. The fact she had some money in the bank means 1) The hospital gets paid way less than they would have by Medicaid and 2) The entire proceeds of her estate go to pay bills, instead of to her heirs.
Why should Medicaid be expected to pay the patient’s bills–just to ensure the heirs get mom’s money?
My point was that the Medicaid rules provide a disincentive to saving money. IIRC, the criteria for qualifying for Medicaid is less than $5000 in the bank. You have $6000 in the bank and get lung cancer, all the $6000 goes to the hospital. Fair enough. You have $4000 in the bank and get lung cancer, you get Medicaid and you (or your heirs) get to keep every penny of the $4000. This makes no sense to me.
Although I think that ‘fairness’ has little to do with the issue, being a childish argument, Jeremy may have something resembling a point…if you squint a bit…
The system is broken. Our social contracts are either broken or inadequate.
The question, as mature adults, is what do we do about it?
Do we begin with the elimination of red tape? Do we begin with the examination of the regulatory environment? Do we begin with the excessive taxation and unwieldy labor laws which limit what the healthcare community can offer to the public? Do we limit or eliminate the high cost of a medical education, which leaves many, if not most, healthcare professionals laboring under a massive debt load for most of their careers?? These and other isues may be topics to consider when looking at the high cost of medical care in the U.S. (The cost of prescription drugs has a somewhat different, if related, dynamic.)
(Bureaucracies of any kind are noted for their empire building. How do we change what is, historically, an inevitability? Public education? Re-education?)
There are many questions to be asked, here, quite aide from ideological considerations, which are usually based upon emotional, and often immature, attachments…
The question, as mature adults, is what do we do about it?
We start by pointing out the facts: the O-care approach is not mathematically feasible, and people in the US get objectively the best care anywhere.
.The government meddles in medicine in so many different ways, all of which causes the price to skyrocket.
**************************
so….add more government???
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. There is plenty of healthcare. FIRST, why didn’t you pay if the insurance stopped paying? Don’t you love your Mom? Or don’t you have a sense of responsibility? SECOND, why didn’t you ask the hospital to work with you to find a way to continue care while you dealt with payments? I did that for my wife many times. THIRD, and most important, are you really so dumb as to think that the bureaucrats that bring us the IRS, USPS, TSA, DHS, DMV, ICE, ATF, DOE, HHS, etc care at all if you die. Hint – they do not. Obamacare will result in the painful, useless deaths of millions. Don’t think so? Well try getting something besides an over-the-counter pain medication. Unless you are terminal with cancer, its essentially impossible because of the bureaucrats. I lived with military health care for 23 years; they diagnosed my brain tumor as flu for 6 years. I was one of the lucky ones; most died within months of a correct diagnosis. I did not. I like the Australian model, but Obamacare will kill us all.
“Like most things, there is only X amount of health care to go around.”
And as soon as dolts like you give the power over it to the govt, there will be MUCH less of it and the quality will go down – no matter if you can pay for it or not.
Ours isn’t perfect, but it’s still far and away the BEST the world has. Why is it that leftists ALWAYS argue from the perspective that tiny flaws in the BEST system this world has EVER seen makes it worse than the most egregious failures the world has ever seen?
Boy, someone let all you idiots outta your cages today.
“If a Tree Falls in the Forest, and CBS, NBC, ABC, NYT, WaPo, CNN, NPR and USA Today do not report it, does it make a sound?”
It’s even easier than that. For the vast majority of the voting public in this country, if it is not in the 5 minute newscast at the top of the hour on the traffic station during your daily commute, it doesn’t exist.
That and what their Facebook friends are saying is most people’s primary source of news.
Well, I just linked this article on my Facebook page, with a comment from me. Excellent article, and an excellent comment thread!
What little information she got was filtered by the MSM, but more importantly it was the siren song of socialism and to appear elite. She obviously had health care (oops Insurance not care), but to appear to mimic the elites and their desires was very important. Your accent gave you implied credibility in this case (don’t get me going on the subconscious impact of a BBC english accent) and she could no force herself to disagree. Unfortunately here realization came only because of your implied credibility as an ethnic/national/not white bread american.
This “health outcomes” topic particularly chaps my hide. The problem is that those who design the surveys looking at health outcomes are generally in favor of government intervention since they’re all living on the government dole. The end points they choose reflect that. Do they ask how long it takes to see a specialist? No. What the postop infection rate is, or what cancer survival rates are? Only subspecialists care about those things, not the epidemiologists from WHO and the NIH who get quoted by the newspapers. Needless to say, the US leads the world in all of those parameters- but you won’t hear about it.
Instead they ask much less specific, more global questions that indirectly reflect the health status of individuals and somehow say that directly measures health care itself. And on these indirect measurements, most of the difference between the US and other first-world countries is due to lifestyle. Fast cars, homicides and risky outdoor sports could easily explain the differences in longevity, since deaths at an early age have a disproportionate effect on longevity statistics. And don’t even get me started on infant mortality and prematurity, the vast majority of which is due to multiple gestations from fertility interventions. Also the fact that sick fetuses in the US are frequently carried to term, not aborted. Between these two things, our infant mortality rate looks bad on the surface, and no one cares to explain why.
And a credulous press laps up these statistics because it’s what they want to hear, and because their health reporters (if they have any) don’t have any scientific or medical background. As I learned in med school, you can have your health care good, fast or cheap- pick any two. There is just no way around that trite old rule.
Even more to the point, socialist systems often come out on top in those comparisons because they simply exclude sick people from their stats, while the U.S. system counts everybody. It is well documented that most European countries count babies who die in the first 24 hours as “stillborn”, which is why they always appear to have lower infant mortality rates than the U.S.
“She’s my age or close to it. Educated. HOW could she never have heard any of this, or even be led to think about it?”
Well known playwright David Mamet states in his book “The Secret Knowledge” that he “had never knowingly talked with nor read the works of a Conservative before moving to Los Angeles, some eight years ago.”
That is 55 *YEARS*!
It was only then that Mamet was “introduced” to “to the works of Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele”. It was only after this passage of 55 years of his life that he “became aware of various nexuses of Conservative thought: I discovered that my radio had an AM band, and that the news and commentary on KCLA from Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, and Glenn Beck made more sense to me than the bemused and sad paternalism which had previously filled my drivetime.”
In other words, the information is certainly out there. It is available to *anyone* who wants it. But that’s the catch. They have to WANT it. As Mamet’s self-example demonstrates, they don’t want it. As he demonstrates, they “knowingly” EVADE it.
I knew David back in his early St. Nicholas days. We were all socialists back then. It was the air we breathed. It didn’t take me quite so long to figure it out. For me it was the boat people from ‘Nam. And the murder of 100,000 there. John Kerry lied. I was 32 in ’76.
Let me just say that it is the drug war that keeps a LOT of people on the left.
It still surprises me that a libertarian organization like Pajamas doesn’t hit that subject harder. I have no use for the authoritarians of the right or left.
You know, it’s funny, Simon: I wonder why a libertarian like you doesn’t hit, or, vote fraud more heavily.
Because there are other drugs besides mj that people don’t want legalized? Because there are other issues more pressing than mj legalization?
Because many readers are conservative, not libetarian?
You really are a one trick pony, aren’t you?
Ok, you brought up an interesting point that, as far as I know, never gets mentioned: The cost in terms of time wasted while in a ‘free’ healthcare facility waiting to be seen. When they calculate total health care costs in countries with socialized medicine, do they factor-in the dollar cost of man-hours wasted between the time care is first sought and the time when care is finally received?
I bet they don’t. I bet this ‘hidden’ cost is swept under the rug. But it should be a huge cost. Even for a student, as you (the writer) were, that time wasted while waiting could have been spent productively – if not studying, then working at a part-time job. It’s a cost, and a good economist should be able to estimate what the dollar value of that time was.
What you’re referring to is “opportunity cost”, and some have tried to address it. Alan Krueger, an economics professor at Princeton, has calculated that “Americans age 15 and older collectively spent 847 million hours waiting for medical services to be provided in 2007.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/a-hidden-cost-of-health-care-patient-time/
Intersting article on US time wasted wiating for medical treatment. A quick read of it implies it is time we travel getting or waiting at the doctor (or similar). What I think #10. Astro was asking is how much time is lost in other countries waiting for an appointment, you know the 3 to 6 month wait in some National Health services for testing (mri, xrays, etc). I went to the Dr. one day and had an appointment to have a chest xray that same day. While I blew about 4 hours or maybe 6 with the doctor that day (instead of working), I didn’t have to wait and get sicker.
I looked at the NHS budget (about 112 billion pounds, if I recall). 80% of it was wages and salaries of NHS employees. Payroll. I find it hard to believe that 80% of the real costs of medical care in the UK is NHS employee payroll. I would assume that much of it is just not being accounted for in the NHS budget per se.
Also, I believe the “costs” in the US are actually based on the % of GDP deemed to be in the “Health Care” sector of the economy as a whole (1/6 of the total), which obviously would include pharma companies, biotech, medical device, etc industries whose share of the GDP is really not part of the “cost of medical care” any more than auto manufacturers’ or Boeing’s share of the GDP is part of “cost of transportation”. The left has a cottage industry called “Studies by experts show…” that is really just bogus propaganda dressed up in an academic’s costume.
5. JeremyR
No, it’s NOT that simple. My taxes pay for government employees to have Cadillac health care plans when I, as a self-employed person, do not have a Cadillac health plan.
Are these government employees more highly skilled than I am? For the most part: hell, no.
Sara Hoyt’s anecdote of the woman in the DMV line confirms my opinion that most people who unfavorably compare the US with other countries have very little knowledge of what things are like outside the US.
but Jeremy IS simple. In his mind, there are guys in white hats and black hats. Anything that doesn’t go the way he wants it to, is because of someone wearing a black hat. See, isn’t that simple. Welcome to Jeremy’s mind.
but Jeremy IS simple. In his mind, there are guys in white hats and black hats. Anything that doesn’t go the way he wants it to, is because of someone wearing a black hat. See, isn’t that simple? Welcome to Jeremy’s mind.
There are lots of ways they game the numbers when government runs your healthcare system. They do not count premature babies which they leave to die of exposure for example. In France they simply aren’t available to see you. A gentleman I know fell off his bike and needed his collarbone set. When he went to the proper place for treatment he was told there was no one qualified to set his bone since they were on vacation and he would have to come back. This went on until the bone set itself… incorrectly… and now he has a huge lump there. But that kept expenses down and would look like a great success for single payer. In a country with a 70% tax rate there is nothing left to seek treatment outside the authorized channels.
In Japan if you want good treatment you have to bribe the doctors because what they are officially paid does not cover the expense of treatment. It is like so many things you get for “free” where you end up paying for the “free” thing twice if you want it done correctly just like we do with having to send our kids to private schools while paying for public ones.
I suspect that this lady would not have even given you a hearing were it not for the fact that you had the moral authority of being a foreigner. She thought you would approve of her anti-American idiocy. When you did not she suddenly did not feel so cool and since in her value system the most important thing is what others think of her (and of us) she was forced to listen in a different manner than she would have done had you been completely whitebread. It is the herd mentality.
When Obama was elected it was truly a moment out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers where we wake up one day and find out alien pods have been put under everyone’s beds and turned them into drones. How is it that we could live in the freest and richest country the world has ever known and our citizenry would pine for tyranny? But the pod in this case was our education system and it has been slowly inserting its tentacles into the collective consciousness of our youth for so long that they don’t know any better. It was shocking to me that a guy like Obama who had consorted with a rogue’s gallery of Marxists, racists and terrorists to the point of seeking them out as his mentors could be elected president.
Countries do not survive that sort of thing for long so we might all be looking for a different nationality if the rest of the world were not just as bad off. The US of today is infinitely worse in every way compared to what it was when I was growing up and it is hard to feel the same love or loyalty to it as I did then knowing that all of its institutions have failed or been co-opted.
My friend had the exact same injury in Canada- the clavicle had to be rebroken and set here. The thing is, that kind of injury, while painful and debilitating, won’t affect overall health stats. I’ve been behind the scenes at NHS hospitals in the UK and I can assure you, no American would ever put up with what goes on there and the JCAHO would have them shut down in a heart beat. As my friend, who worked overseas for years told me, “It’s amazing how hard it is to kill a human being.”
“I suspect that this lady would not have even given you a hearing were it not for the fact that you had the moral authority of being a foreigner. ”
An excellent point. Had it been me, a middle-aged Southern white male, she would have labeled me a racist sexist homophobe and that would have been the end of the discussion. Even so, you have to remember that leftism is essentially the cluster B personality disorders (narcissism, borderline, antisocial, and histrionic) cast in the form of politics. And Cluster B’s have a remarkable facility for excluding from their brains any knowledge that contradicts their pre-conceived notions. Most likely, as soon as Sarah left, the blonde lady forgot that the conversation ever took place. That’s why we don’t make more of an effort to discuss issues with leftists: it’s a waste of time.
She’s making the classic “moral authority” error: because state-run medical is “more important” than other government functions, somehow the bureaucracy and processes involved will be “better”. This would be because the people doing the work simply care more and have pure motivations.
Of course, that’s assuming she thought about it much at all beyond thinking that medical care should be “free”, and that Europe is the acme of world civilization because of state-run medicine.
Even if she were right about them caring more and having pure motivations, that doesn’t translate into competence. Someone who cares a lot but doesn’t know what they’re doing will wind up making problems worse.
Have fans of big government never gone to the DMV (or in some states, the Secy of State office)? You immediately know you’re in a government office. How? Because there are more people waiting than in any other waiting room you experience. Where else do you have to stand in line to get a number and there’s a human being handing out the numbers because, after all, we’re not highly skilled public employees, so we need a highly skilled public employee to tell us to which line to stand in when they call our number.
Do fans of big government never deal with rude, insolent, belligerent, and incompetent public employees? Every time I go to the Secy of State office I ask the folks around me if they have to wait like that anywhere in the private sector. Then I tell them if they want health care to be like that, to be sure and vote for the Democrats.
A little snarky there, Ronnie. CA DMv’s do over 30 (some over 50) types of transactions. Not all techs are capable of doing them all. The tech giving you a number is qualifying you for the shortest possible wait time for a tech capable of helping you. Or you could have planned ahead and phoned for an appointment for an even shorter wait time. But that’s not important.
“A little snarky there, Ronnie. CA DMv’s do over 30 (some over 50) types of transactions. Not all techs are capable of doing them all. ”
Of course the irony of YOUR example is lost on you. You obviously find it acceptable that an GOVERNMENT organization meant to issue a license plate is so damned complicated that there are over 50 types of transactions that ‘Techs’ cant handle them all. You have got to be breathtakingly stupid.
I can handle the DMV wait actually. I’m somewhat comforted by the fact that they’re not hiring twice the number of current employees just to make my wait time shorter. I’m sure they would love to augment their staff using more of my tax dollars.
What is sickening is their accountable-to-no-one, degrade-the-customer attitude. Only a monopoly can create this kind of attitude, and I hope I’m dead by the time healthcare becomes their monopoly.
Ms. Hoyt’s story would make a great Youtube video. It’s got viral written all over it.
Romney campaign are you listening?
There’s a funny thing here. People often don’t understand that time, their time, is a cost.
But that’s beside the point. The hidden costs of “Free” health care are multiple. Right now many folks in Toronto can’t get even a half-decent family doctor, if they can get one at all. Most of the doctors are just stamp collectors, and the ones that know what they’re doing are more valuable than gold. Many people are going to walk-ins that can’t even be bothered with anything, don’t care about you, and just want your health card number. They could care less if they actually help you.
I noticed when I lived in Toronto that I — an American working for an American company with American health insurance that paid cash money — instantly went to the front of lines.
There are precisely zero reasons why the free market cannot do for healthcare what it has done for any other segment of the economy. How is it that healthcare and insurance are not viewed in the exact same way that other goods and services are? In a truly fre market environment, everyone would be catered to. Wal-Mart is happy to sell to the low end of the retail market. McDonald’s feeds the low end of the restaurant trade. Both companies who are scorned by capitalism-hating lefties, but who do more for low-income folks than all the government programs put together. There is no reason why free market capitalism cannot work the same “magic of the market” on healthcare and insurance, given the chance – meaning without government getting in the way.
“How is it that healthcare and insurance are not viewed in the exact same way that other goods and services are?”
Because some people regard health care as a “right;” therefore, everyone should get it for “free.”
@ bobcat- give that man a cigar! or a beer, or a medal…
Yep that’s exactly right. It infuriates me to no good end that people are that STUPID. Even AFTER you try to verbally sledgehammer logic through their thick skulls.
It’s been that way in the USA ever since Medicare began to rule the marketplace. I had no health insurance in the late 1960′s when I had my daughter. I paid my doctor in installments (he quoted me a package price for prenatal care and delivery), and I paid the hospital the same way – on the installment plan. Of course, since medical costs were not crazy high then, I was afford to pay them myself, even though our family was far from rich.
If I can borrow $50k for a truck why can’t I get medical credit with a hospital? I’m not about to pool my risk with fat, sugar eating, alcoholics who don’t exercise. I’ll make my deal with the doctors I need thank you very much. If I get cancer or something that costs more than I can pay … I’ll just die and go to be with Jesus. The system we have is stupid.
Q. If I can borrow $50k for a truck why can’t I get medical credit with a hospital?
A. Because the lender can repossess a truck for non-payment.
Not long ago I was debating a liberal who asserted that the rich are hoarding health-care so the poor will get sick and die. I asked, “How do you ‘hoard’ health-care? Do you really think rich people waste their days in waiting rooms trying to convince someone to jab them with a needle or saw their legs off? Do they cancel their Carribean vacation so they can have three-rounds of chemo because they enjoy chemo?” The liberal then claimed the rich are stockpiling vaccines, so I pointed out that it only takes one jab for a vaccination and further jabs would probbly damage the immune system. I guess to an idiot a vaccine is just like taking vitamins because both words start with ‘v’. Such total ignorance and paranoia makes rational discussion almost impossible.
Arguing with a liberal is the same as arguing with a drunk. Nothing can be gained with either, and it tends to make both of them irrationally angry. But enjoy it if you must.
I’ve been around a long time, but, praise God, I’ve never met a liberal quite that loony.
This outcome stuff is BS. The reason that our”outcomes” aren’t as good as other developed countries is because of gangs, drugs and cars. We have a high murder rate because of social chaos in the inner cities that make many of our metropolitan areas more dangerous than Mogidishu. These same neighborhoods are inhabited by drug users who OD and have high infant mortality rates. While our highway fatality rates are among the lowest in the world measures by rate per million passenger miles we drive twice as much as anybody else except the Canadians. Subtract those numbers from our death rate our.medical system outperforms every other developed nation. I read some years back that if our demographics looked like Canada our life expectancy would be two years longer than theirs and our longevity once we reached 60 exceeds every developed country except Japan.
heck, you don’t have to go to Portugal: Ask any American Indian who relies on the Indian Health Service about the high quality of “free health care”.
Which is probably why I saw exactly two articles on the IHS during the discussion on health care.
In Minnesota, we had a full time secretary whose job was to find “alternative sources of funding” for our patients (mostly Medicare or Medicaid) and why any tribe with a casino is taking over their own hospitals.
heck, you don’t have to go to Portugal: Ask any American Indian who relies on the Indian Health Service about the high quality of “free health care”.
Just thought it should be emphasized.
Liberalism took over the schools, the quality of education in the US plummeted.
Liberalism took over the courts, the quality of justice depends on whether or not you can afford an expensive attorney and rig a favorable judge. For tort cases, it’s like the lottery and a field day for shysters. The prime driver of high medical costs starts here with malpractice.
Liberalism took over media, making truth ‘relative’, and fathoming such depths as to have no credibility to 4 in 5 Americans.
Liberalism took over higher education and now a degree is rarely worth the paper it is written on. Instead of learning to think, undergrads are taught how to think like a progressive, which is to say not at all.
Liberals infest almost every layer of bankrupting governments, local, state, and national. Look at the ones going the fastest – bluer than blue.
And now,
they want the hospitals and the doctors and the decision-making for every citizen to fall under their purview, taxable, controllable, punishable. What could go wrong?
Great post – and to answer your question – no – they do not listen to us. What the liberals have to offer is irresponsibility, and that’s a big seller to most people, at least until confronted with the inevitable bill…
Free health care = writing a blank check your body will have to cash.
How? because no body goddamn told her. At least you finally did. What astounds me is when someone from Canada or the UK tells me how much better things are, and the usual response when I point out the horrible lines, the dramatically worse survival rates for the most common cancers, and point out the repeated press coverage of people being left to die in a hallway rather than screw up someone’s quarterly “outcome” report.
(Dammit —) the usual response is this “you just don’t understand” sniff.
An acquaintance from the UK once told me about how his mother had just broken a hip. They reduced the fracture and put her to bed — an old treatment method that has an associated mortality of around 50 percent. Bedridden old people get pneumonia, the “old man’s friend”.
He told me she was getting the best treatment. I told him in some confusion “No she’s not! In this country they’d replace the hip and have her walking the next day. Lower mortality and much higher quality of life.”
Response: the offended sniff and a refusal to talk about it further.
“HOW could she never have heard any of this, or even be led to think about it? … Where are these people getting their info? How come we’re not reaching them? How come they don’t understand basic economic facts?”
Public schools stopped teaching civics, logic and anything to do with economics a lonnnnggg time ago. Most of their info come from the MSM which can be boiled down to “socialism good, capitalism bad.” Most of the doctors I know, are retiring early as not to get DMVed in the near future.
“Are conservatives/libertarians like the tree that falls in the forest and doesn’t make a sound?”
As I once read, if a pigressive ever took the time to give your position a honest assesmment, he would be forced to reacess all of his opinions and beliefs and that scares them to no ends. It’s easier for them to ignore and/or riddicule you.
Sarah, et. al. They honest-to-god get their news from NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC and CNN.
And they vote.
Scary.
By the way all, google/bing: postcode lottery health
For how great it has become in the UK.
People like to talk about the problems with private medicine in the US but don’t recognize the problems that can come with it or even because of it.
Well, I’ve had some experiences of my own with “socialized medicine” over the years. Let’s start with the UK.
UK1: When I was in the Air Force, I lived in the UK for two years. One of my co-workers was married. The small base we were assigned to did not have its own hospital. Any medical care beyond cold and flu bugs that wasn’t severe enough to be evacuated was handled by local UK hospitals. This included my co-worker’s wife’s pregnancy.
It was a second child so the pregnancy was “routine” (It Says Here). She had a problem with hemorrhaging with the first child but a second was “routine”, by policy. The doctors were warned of the problem but a second pregnancy was routine. After the child was born, she started bleeding. She bled to death in the hospital. A “routine” childbirth (even though the first had had the exact same problem and the doctors had been told that) and she bled to death in the f*king hospital.
Oh, your wife died? Too bad, so sad. But how could we know something like this could happen since it was a routine pregnancy? You told us? But it was a routine pregnancy.
***
UK2: At the same time there was a great debate going on among doctors regarding the subject of “crib death” (was still being called “SIDS”–Sudden Infant Death Syndrome–back then I believe). A very popular theory was that it was a result of meternal neglect/negligence if not outright what would now be called Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy. That “theory” had been thoroughly debunked in the US for literally decades. But in the UK a mother who just lost her baby was as likely as not to have the added burden of having her doctor blame you for the loss.
***
Another “poster child” for socialized medicine is Japan.
Japan1: My wife’s uncle had cancer. I visited him in the hospital once. Filthy place. Seriously. If I ever get seriously ill or injured in Japan, stabilize me and get me out of there if you have to send me on deck space on a freighter. That’s only moderate hyperbole.
Eventually he was deemed an “unlikely prospect” for a cure. Treatment was cut off _including_ pain medication. In the end he ended up dousing himself with gasoline and lighting himself on fire. I am dead serious. No hyperbole. He literally burned himself to death rather than face the untreated pain of his progressing cancer.
***
Japan2: While visiting Japan on business I attended a Judo club as a guest (Judo was my sport of choice at that time). In the course of randori I managed to sprain my shoulder. Not “serious” in any major way but lordy did it hurt. I could not buy over the counter pain medication anywhere. Not aspirin, not acetaminophen, not ibuprofin, not naproxen sodium, nothing. They have some topical “pain patches” (and predated their availability in the US) but those were worthless for anything like this). The only “pain killer” available was ethanol but . . . I don’t drink. Short of going to the hospital (see above) there was _nothing_ I could do except apply ice and tough it out.
***
Japan3: While returning from another business trip I tripped on an escalator in Tokyo station and sprained my ankle. It didn’t seem to bad at first but by the time I got to Narita it was quite painful. Fortunately (yeah, right) there was an actual medical clinic in Narita right off the walkway from the train station. I stopped in there (Yeah, I’m not covered by their “national health care” but I could pay for it so I figured….)
When I got in, I was told simply that the orthopedist was not in and so nobody could look at my ankle. Excuse me? A sprain, something anybody in the US with MD, or even PA, after their name could handle and they couldn’t even look at it and splint it/tape it up/ or something? They had to have a specialist come in for even a sprained ankle?
So the question there becomes, are doctors who aren’t specialists in orthopedics not trained in diagnosis and treatments of things like sprains or are they simply forbidden based on the government control that always comes with government payment?
***
And those are just the experiences I was personally involved with. I also know some ex-pats from various countries with “socialized medicine”.
This is, of course, the point where someone will say “but I’ve experienced socialized medicine and had good experiences.” Well, does your good experiences make my bad experiences go away any more than my good experiences with American health care make the bad experiences that are sited as reasons for going to “socialized medicine” go away? If those bad experiences count on the one side then mine count on the other. And once you recognize that “socialized medicine” has its own problems the choice of which is “better” is no longer so “obvious” as proponents would like to claim.
You can keep your socialized medicine. Just keep it far away from me.
“You can keep your socialized medicine. Just keep it far away from me.”
The running joke with my little band of expats is, “socialized medicine is great! As long as you don’t get sick or have a spill.”
The best response would have been, “I hope you get what you want.”
My stock reply is “You know, this country doesn’t require exit visas.”
Not yet
This one looks aggravating. I think I’ll just keep my powder dry and move on.
She probably went to Harvard.
Am I surprised? Not in the least.
My grandmother probably made it through the 6th grade or so, but she could reel off the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and other key events and dates by heart.
I spent many decades dealing with younger, supposed Liberal Arts “college graduates,” (see here bub, it says so right on this here diploma) a few, here and there, were obviously well-educated and pretty sharp, but many of them, from the questions they asked and what they said, had only a very hazy idea–some of them–that something called WWII had happened, what the fighting was all about, where it happened, and who was involved.
Despite supposedly fairly universal K-12 “education,” Computers, the Internet and TV, libraries all over the place, and massive numbers of students in colleges and universities, we live in a dumbed-down age, in which many of our undergraduates are often studying watered down versions of the subjects that were taught in our high schools a century ago with a lot more rigor. Moreover, comparing the rigorous Liberal Arts curriculum of a first rate university from, say, 1900 or earlier with one from today could make you weep.
Then–Latin, Greek, and likely Hebrew, the Greek and Roman Classics, History, Geography, Philosophy, Politics and Government, Rhetoric, Ethics, Mathematics, Economics, Literature, Art, perhaps Astronomy and, certainly, study of the Bible (thus the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew), and an expected full load of courses, generally high standards, and no excuses.
Today? Well, in the Liberal Arts Departments we do have all sorts of grievance and victim “studies” let’s see, there’s Feminist/Womeyn’s, Chicano, Asian, Black, Native American, GLBT, and other “victim” group studies, lotsa “survey” courses, some modern, progressive schools do now have TV and Soap Opera studies, the language requirements are fading, geography is poorly attended, math too, and I don’t believe that rhetoric and logic are required anymore. But, al la Penn State, we do have Football and Basketball and other supremely important sports. Bible studies? Do you want to get picketed, or sued?
We are today kind, humane, and “progressive” though, and although we admittedly do have grade inflation, we don’t want to encourage unhealthy elitism and competition, bruise egos and maybe give someone PTSD or something so, here and there, its no tests or no marks at all, marking on the curve, etc. etc., because “everyone’s a winner, and there are no losers.”
Educated and informed people with a toolkit full of analytical skills, strong ethical/religious principles, a good grounding in History, and minds of their own are hard to deceive and hard to lead, but deprive them of that knowledge and tool kit, drop the character formation, limit the information they routinely have access to, dumb things down, and deceiving them and leading them becomes so much easier.
Anyone else had experience with the German system? It worked well for me and anyone I knew (citizen or expat). I was not in the system and was therefore a cash customer but my favorable experience seemed to be quite general among the citizens.
The scheme there lets people choose providers and hospitals at will, so they compete for business. Instead of a cost burden as patients are in the assigned-facility systems of the UK and Canada, patients are income generators and hence facilities compete for their business by providing good care promptly.
We should not forget that there are systems in other countries that work pretty well. I would prefer the German system to the looming catastrophe that is Obamacare.
The German system does have different insurance providers: publicly subsidized ones and private ones. Private patients have shorter waits to get appointments. Doctors complain about payments and paperwork, and those employed by hospitals complain of terrible working hours. I do think the system is better that GB’s, but it is not perfect. It also seems to take longer for some new procedures (microsurgery) to become standard; however there is freedom for doctors to establish a minispecialty for these. There have been some system reforms, like having patients pay a small amount for prescriptions to prevent people from seeing a doctor to get a free prescription for tylenol. Overall, the system seems better than many, but again, it is not perfect and it struggles with costs.
I was stationed in Germany, and a soldier got in a fight with a medic (During the Carter Administration) and got stabbed, holing the heart. The ambulance called by the bar owner took him to the local German hospital.
The operating crew was assembled, but wouldn’t operate until the patient got bad enough that it met their criteria for an emergency. In this case the pericardium occluded the stab hole, so the blood pressure was low, but not zero. After two hours, the patient twitched, the pericardium retracted, and a blood fountain was followed by zero blood pressure, so they operated. They did a great job, but the patient had to first die…
“Educated and informed people with a toolkit full of analytical skills, strong ethical/religious principles, a good grounding in History, and minds of their own are hard to deceive and hard to lead, ..”
And today will get you on Janet Napolitano’s terror watch list.
I went to school for 4 years in Canada during the 70′s. Even then, good doctors were leaving Canada like rats leaving a sinking ship. I went to a large institution and sadly there was an epidemic of, get this,appendicitis attacks. This quack could make more money from the system if it was not a controlled ailment-so he diagnosed so many appendicitis attacks-it would fry your brain. He came and examined me at the school infirmary -I had tonsillitis- and guess what the diagnosis was? Your right, appendicitis! Luckily, I am an American, so I convinced him that I would take care of this with my own doctor in the States.
About a year later, at age 21, I needed dental care. I got into a dentist in a very large town. He looked at my x-rays and couldn’t decide which tooth was giving me a problem. He solved the problem by extracting both of my teeth! Ah, the joys of socialized medicine. Needless to say-I had to go home and get expensive bridgework done as a result.
I saw the elderly in Canada waiting months for an exam for cancer and don’t even think about influenza! Thank goodness for good nurses! Of course, you know our good nurses will be delegated to the end of the food chain when universal health care comes to the States. Why? Because good nurses will be too expensive and they will only make a few dollars an hour as in England and Scotland and in socialist countries of Europe. We will not get the brightest and the best as either doctors or nurses. Yes, we will get “free” health care but at the sacrifice of the best diagnostic tools and the brightest young men and women.
Don’t EVEN get me started concerning the cost of new medical research!!!
Did I write to my senators about this? Both of my Democratic senators received long letters detailing my fears and experience. Did they listen? No, they fell in line like the other dummies who voted for this mess.
There was a video from one of the Occupy events where a guy who had immigrated from Russia took a few minutes to educate one of the protesters. After explaining that the secret police in his former country would grab people and disappear them and nobody would ever hear from them again, the occupying kid started to respond. I thought he was going to say what the older generation of hippies would say: that THOSE Communists did it wrong; now these NEW Communists, HIS guys, wouldn’t do it that way; they’d do it right.
He did not say that.
What he said was that he had never heard that about them before.
He’d never heard that.
How can this be? No high-school or college-age kid in this country would stand outside in public and say he’d never heard that the Nazis sent people to death camps. The kid in the video can’t be unique. Are we dealing with an entire generation that simply doesn’t know what the USSR was? Or what Cuba is? Or North Korea?
What do they think the Cold War was? What was the Berlin Wall, what was it for, how did it work, why did Ronald Reagan say what he said and why was that an important and courageous thing? Where did Tom Clancy get his plots?
The adults who raised this kid must be about my age. For us, this was part of life: MAD, Star Wars, the Russian Bear, Pravda, stories of desperate escape, friendship tours where grade school children exchanged tense visits…. How is it that the kid didn’t learn from his parents? Even without a formal ‘unit’ in some useless Social Studies class, how did the people he grew up with somehow not convey this information, which must be as familiar to them as anything else they know? How did he not absorb it from books, movies, magazines, newspapers, other people, the air, the way he must have absorbed knowledge of Nazis or Redcoats or ancient Egyptians?
It’s not just economics, or just healthcare; and it can’t be blamed entirely on bad schools (although…). The ignorance is comprehensive.
What do we do about it?
“No high-school or college-age kid in this country would stand outside in public and say he’d never heard that the Nazis sent people to death camps.”
When I returned to college in the late 1980s, I talked to many students in their twenties; all were graduates of California high schools. I met kids who didn’t know in which century World War II had occcured. Axis powers? Forget it. One kid, who had never heard about a Cuban missile crisis, thought Cuba was in Europe—somewhere. All said they had passed high school history courses. If you meet any, ask them what the three branches of the federal government are, which branch has veto power and which branch is unelected. “Tripartite…is that an English word?”
When our generations are shuffling down the hallways of assisted living facilities, clinging to walkers, assuming we can afford it, their generation will be in charge. Don’t reflect too long.
And woe to the Baby Boomers who helped legalize abortion. They will now reap the whirlwind, for they placed no value on the lives of their children, and they taught their surviving children the same. Now that they grow old, it is those children who will be in charge of their care, but what reason do they have to think of their parents as human beings and not money pits? Given their rearing, many of them will be inclined to say, “Doc, just kill Mom and Dad, and do it quickly so I can inherit their money.”
I had a teacher once (my senior year of high school, in our History of Genocide class) return a paper I wrote about Japanese war crimes in WWII. He said he didn’t believe it, that I was making it up, that *no* human being could ever treat another in that manner. I then proceeded to lay out my sources for him, and suggested he might want to include Asia in his curriculum in the future. He was pretty badly shaken by the time I was done, much the same as my reaction when first reading it all, too. He meant well, but he’d just never heard of it before.
There’s a willful ignorance out there, I think, where the furthest they take my generation into the horrors of the 20th century is the Holocaust, and the things that have happened in South America, Africa, Asia and Russia/Eastern Europe tend to get pushed to the wayside. As horrible as the Holocaust was, I can’t help but believe that some of this socialist agitation would die down pretty fast if we’d been given the truth about the rest of the world.
I think you can run out of insurance. Our coverage has some lifetime limits under the policy. The limits are fairly high: a few million dollars. But, as you suggest, if the limits were surpassed, coverage would presumably be picked up by the government without the need to check out of the hospital followed by an emergency room re-admittance.
After 10 years, insurance for paralyzed HS athlete ran out, went on state care.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-03-01/news/ct-met-rockys-healthcare-battle-0301-20110301_1_health-insurance-plans-health-care-costs-annette-clark
Athlete died 10 months later, exceeding estimated survival time of quadriplegics.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-01-08/news/ct-met-rocky-clark-follow-20120108_1_annette-clark-health-insurance-medical-equipment
Read Charles Murray’s Bell Curve and you will understand a lot. Most of the people you come in contact with in the course of a day have an IQ of 100 or less. They are not interested in much besides American Idol and have not the foggiest notion about government except what they can get from it. They are not interested in learning anything. If it is “free” they want it. The horror of it that they can vote. No one should be allowed to vote without passing a test similar to the one must take in order to get citizenship. Don’t count on that ever happening. The politicians want that about as much as they want term limits. I despair for our country.
It is a Statistical Fact that 1/2 of Everyone is Below Average!
Undisputable.
Outside the fictional Lake Wobegon, that is
In the beginning of this United States, you could not vote unless you were a male property owner. That eliminated a lot of the people you are talking about here. As a female, I resent the gender bias. The attempt by our founding fathers to have an informed electorate is, however, appreciated.
Thinking about the right to vote, property ownership as a qualification did make a lot of sense i.e. such ownership usually demonstrated that someone had enough education, smarts, and drive to accumulate some capital and usually insured that, in the interest of protecting their capital, such property owners would pay attention to politics and to what was going on; they “had some skin in the game.”
Heinlein’s idea of military service as the prime qualification –putting your skin at “risk,” also has merit.
Today, however, with the percentage of those paying no tax–either Federal or State–about to hit 50%, the dangers of voters who’s only interest may be in keeping the gravy coming–no matter what that policy will do to the overall state and its citizens–is all too evident, and reminds us of the quote–likely spurious–attributed to 18th century Scottish Lawyer, Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodehouselee, and de Tocqueville, a variant of which was sometimes used by President Reagan in his speeches (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_Fraser_Tytler), thoughts that, whoever wrote them, strike me as being, unfortunately, likely true, and very apt for today:
“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.”
I would combine both the heinlin and property owner approach, but also include a way for non-real-property owners, by the following in voter qualifications:
1. Anybody who can document they have paid at least $3000 in the past year year in total taxes to all levels of gov. You would do this by presenting tax receipts to get voter registration, with renewal required every presidential election year. Any tax receipt counts, property, FICA, income tax, local fees, even sales and telephone taxes (if you want to save all those receipts). Since the sales taxes would not have your name on them, they would be confiscated at registration to prevented repeated use for voter registration fraud. And the floor should be indexed to inflation, so nobody could bring in new voters by inflating the currency. Note that this is not a poll tax, these are taxes you already had to pay anyway, it just ensures you are a citizen that pays some decent amount to support the gov, and you had enough interest in voting to bring in the receipts to register.
2. Anybody who served at least 4 yrs in the military, with an honerable discharge, regardlesss of taxes currently paid, since they already paid their dues another way.
Or to quote the much more pithy Benjamin Franklin:
“A democracy, if you can keep it.” and
“When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”
Sorry, that first quote should have been “A Republic,if you can keep it” quite a different thing.
An informed electorate with skin in the game. That’s why college towns are so screwy. You’re not a grownup until you’re married with kids and have roots in a community.
That’s why Professor Richard Florida and his mayoral groupies love bohemians and gays so much. It’s those pesky families with children who give so much grief about crime in the streets, intermittent trash pickup and lousy schools and potholed streets.
“Most of the people you come in contact with in the course of a day have an IQ of 100 or less.”
It’s also true that most of the people you meet have an IQ of 100 or more.
See definition of average.
Re: the USSR: Only reason I know as much about it as I do is that Mom studied Russian in college and took Russian (USSR) geography. IIRC, the USSR dissolved that semester. I, personally, read “The Killer Department” and the related movie “Citizen X” (which, for true crime information, actually gives a lot of insight into how the USSR worked … or didn’t).
In school? We didn’t learn much. And I graduated HS in 1999. The “average” history class learned US history from 1900 to 1980 or so, and not in that much detail. The AP History class I was part of never got near learning about the 20th century, we didn’t have enough time. The US history classes I took in college also didn’t get close to it.
As for the whole socialized healthcare system BS goes … I have, variously, pointed out that college education costs skyrocketed once the Federal government started taking part — and made student loans unbankruptable. That the housing market imploded after — at the government’s “request” — lending standards were decreased. That the number of doctors who TAKE Medicare and Medicaid has steadily decreased (I read last week that in 2000, 67% in TX would take new patients using either system. It’s down to 31%).
And … I get accused of wanting the poor to die in hovels, or some other BS.
I WAS poor, growing up. I’m not, by the standards of someone who wasn’t in poverty as a child by a matter of <$10/yr, now. I've made my choices — I live, all things considered — a fairly simple life, and I am content to do so. It's not all choices, but a lot of it is. I do what I can to be healthy, to avoid straining the system personally. I try to encourage those I interact with often to do the same (although my suggestions normally fall on deaf ears).
The reality is, as soon as the government is the primary arbitrator of medical expenditures, the number one reason for bankruptcy (medical bills) will no longer be allowed to be bankrupted. They can't afford to let those bills go unpaid; too many mouths will be open to take it in the form of paychecks. It won't just be a matter of "no doctors, little care, and extra taxes." It'll be a matter of never digging out of a hole when a catastrophe hits.
The Left’s Marxist, Gramscian, 1940s onward, “conspiracy of shared values” project, their “long march through the institutions/culture” has resulted in the Left’s broad campaign of attack against, subversion, weakening, and/or capture—among many other key foundation stones and building blocks of “bourgeois” civilization—of all of the main organs of propaganda—the Educational and a large chunk of the Religious establishment, the Family, the Media, and the Arts/culture in general—it’s no accident that Bill Ayers has spent several decades working in teacher education, curriculum development, and “school reform,” and has been extremely influential in doing so—the critical institutions that educate, and, yes, “indoctrinate” and (in)form and, in the process, largely orient and “unite” our citizens.
Leftist agitprop and its Postmodern thought have replaced more substantial, “old fashioned” courses, information, and viewpoints that ”might have given people ideas,” and the unifying, positive, “exceptional” American history “narrative” that used to take people from all over the world and from all classes and walks of life, and turn them into pretty solidly American citizens, American citizens who all had the same basic set of ideas and information to work from, and a powerful, unifying “vision” of and love for America as their foundation, and at their core.
Instead, the emphasis is now on shattering that former positive image and unity–and its power–through things like “victim” studies, and ethnic, linguistic, and cultural “pride,” a deliberate effort to, in the words of Saul Alinsky, “rub raw the wounds of discontent,” and to divide, atomize, isolate, and Balkanize students—later to be citizens and voters–along ethnic, cultural, social, and, now, economic lines. And that old, traditional curriculum has been stood on its head to now, increasingly, turn out Oikophobes—not people who love America, not Americans who are part of one good, great, and exceptional nation, but people who—more and more often– view the United States with skepticism, and with cynicism, view us as “the bad guy,” and the source of all the world’s ills.
And, along the way, these new “graduates” view of reality has been very carefully blinkered, narrowed, and tailored to support that new Leftist story/narrative about America and its immoral, greedy, and evil ideals, motives, activities, and our unmerited place in the World; one small result of this “transformation,” in knowledge, “consciousness,” and viewpoint, it seems to me, the woman just itching to move to Canada to bask in their superior, “free,” Socialist medical care.
“tailored to support that new Leftist story/narrative about America”
Meanwhile, Paul Johnson’s “A History of the American People” is on Thomas Sowell’s list of Suggested Readings: “plainly written books that can take the reader from square one — little or no previous knowledge of the subject — to a fundamental understanding of the issues involved”
http://www.tsowell.com/SuggestedRead.htm
I suspect works of the ilk of Howard Zinn’s “acclaimed” “A People’s History of the United States” are what you are more likely to find assigned as a textbook.
I assume so, Seth. Living in San Francisco but having no children in the local school system, I suspect that diversity of thought isn’t on the agenda.
I’m continually amazed at how pervasive lefty thought is. I went to a “Beatles Concert” last night, we’ll actually an impersonation group from Vegas called “Yesterday.” Pretty good in a Vegas way but we had our “shut up and sing” moment and the crowd, mostly too young to have any present sense impression of The Beatles, just roared its approval.
The guy impersonating Lennon was forty-something trying to look and act like the young smartass that was Lennon in his prime. They’re doing the post-Sgt. Pepper part of the show demonstrating how The Beatles became increasingly irrelevant after Sgt. Pepper, though not intentionally. So, the Lennon character is introducing “Revolution” best known in its “White Album” version released in 1968 at the heighth of “peace and love” and the anti-war movement. So, our genius singer goes into a rant about how it is a protest song against Nixon and the Viet Nam War and, to borrow a cliche, the crowd went wild!
Except that it isn’t, and anyone who knows anything about the times, the politics, or The Beatles knows it wasn’t; it is a jab against the hard lefties, the violence, and the ugliness of the times hiding in a guise of “peace,” e.g., “if you’ve been carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/you ain’t gonna make with anyone, anyhow.” It really is more the hippy-trippy get stoned and tend your own vegetables philosophy that the lefty activists and organizers just hated – and they hated The Beatles for it. Yet, the mention of the evil Nixon, the automatic assoctions of The War, got a Pavlovian response from much of the audience, when in reality in ’68 Nixon was running on bringing The War to an honorable conclusion and the greatest liability Humphrey had was his association with LBJ’s war; the riots didn’t happen at the Republican Convention that year. But it demonstrates just how thoroughly the Left has rewritten history. I doubt the guy playing Lennon knows jack about either politics or history; he just picked up that idea by osmosis from the media and culture we live in. The mostly under 50 crowd only knows what they’ve been told about the era and its politics and that one incident graphically demonstrates just how wrongly they’ve been taught. But, at least they confined themselves to stuff done by The Beatles before the breakup so we didn’t have to hear “Imagine” and watch a bunch of useful idiots hit the flaming lighter app on their smartphones, hold them in the air, and sway back and forth looking stoned and stupid.
Darwin said it would end like this.
On Capitol Hill perhaps a dozen years ago the excitement was all about the “Canadian model” of health care, and its supposed efficiencies, low cost, and success; you heard very little in the way of nay saying. Yet, you could find, with a little investigation, that things were not then and are not now, so rosy. I was particularly interested in an article I saw a couple of years ago, about how the health care bureaucrats in the Canadian government had decreed that, in the interests of economy and efficiency, there was to be only one CAT Scan or MRI unit—I forget which—to serve each two or three hundred square mile area.
Well, it turned out that, as a result of this dicta, many people were stacked up for months waiting for their appointment, and that appointments were scheduled at all hours of the day and night, and some with little notice when, for some reason, a cancellation occurred.
I particularly remember one story about how a patient, hurting, and who really needed to find out what was wrong with them, just happened to be on the furthest edge of that geographic area, and ended up having to try to make an appointment opened up by a cancellation by driving something on the order of a hundred miles or more in the cold and dark, through the mostly deserted Canadian wild in subfreezing temperatures, to make their in the middle of the night/early A.M. appointment, or risk not being able to get another crack at the machine for months.
Oh, yeah, that was great health care.
I met a Canadian woman in a local American hospital who had accompanied her husband to the U.S. for heart surgery. She cited callous indifference as a major reason for deciding not to have the surgery done in her home system.
“Are conservatives/libertarians like the tree that falls in the forest and doesn’t make a sound?”
No. To make a sound, the tree has to actually fall. Like you said, you generally stay silent and avoid the confrontation. You got lucky, because you were cranky… because your tree fell in the forest and made a sound.
Most folks find me cranky and combative. Me! (innocent look) Liberals do not get to spout their stupidity around me without getting an earful. My tree falls whenever the wind blows, when subjected to Liberal hot air.
I guess I was not raised properly.
As cranky as I am, I have too short a fuse to be combative to any good end. Living in San Francisco has used up my patience and soured me on our species, even with the many decent and genuinely nice local examples I have met over the years, all of whom may assume my unspoken values match their beliefs.
As Paul Ryan warns, we have one shot, here at the crossroads in 2012; once the takers outnumber the makers the slide accelerates to its inevitable conclusion. My greatest sadness is from thinking about future generations.
Wonderful conversation.
I think I’ll have to find some tutoring or something on how to get a foreign accent! It’s all about expensively learning a foreign language (I’ve studied the usual French, German, and Spanish–but that was mumble decades ago), I haven’t found anything that will merely teach you to speak with an accent. I guess Meryl Streep does not want to share.
So, a “lady” who’d sell her citizenship for a free doctor’s appointment doesn’t think she has an accent. Why am I not surprised?
I’m Rachel Peepers and I’d like, before I hit the hay, to tell Sarah Hoyt and the rest of you sincere thinkers, that every word I say feels like it’s falling into the forest of silence. On deaf ears. I’ve felt this for the last six months.
I’m so frustrated I don’t care about starting two paragraphs off with the same word. Bad form, you know.
Anyhoots, here’s my frustration expanded.
Relating to the Presidential campaign, not only can’t the Republicans figure out the “how to say it”, but they don’t know the “what to say.” If anybody is still with me, please whistle; really, any sound will do.
The Republicans headed by Mitt McCain have screwed the pooch in terms of both campaign strategy (the “what to say”, and the execution (the “how to say it”.)
90% of Republicans think a good commercial is showing Obama saying something, and then showing Obama contradicting himself. 10% realize this is a bad strategy and bad execution because number one, there’s no benefit, and number two, nobody cares that Obama contradicts himself. Painting Obama a hypocrite is not how you drop a commercial bomb on his head. Which hopefully lets independent voters see him in his lying, misguided, corrupt,crybaby, small c communist state.
So this is what Rachel is faced with:
Watching Obama send this country in the wrong direction.
Down the wrong track both domestically and internationally. As every day, I wake up in the morning to Rasmussen telling me 50% of the nation’s likely voters either doesn’t realize the clear and present danger Obama presents or don’t care. And possibly are cheering for Obama to utterly destroy the United State’s place as the preeminent world leader.
Simultaneously, I watch Mitt McCain’s campaign remind me of a football player who picks up a fumble and runs in the wrong direction. Effort without results.
Obama’s screwing up the country while Mitt is playing jump the shark with his campaign, trying to save the country. It almost has the irony of an actor killing Lincoln in a theatre.
Obama’s running a sensational campaign. Mitt, lost in his own underwear, thinks Condi might be a good choice for VP. I’m afraid the Bain brain’s going batty.
Rice is nice, but debatably not even a conservative.
My husband asks me why I stay up late at night to write. I tell him I can’t sleep. I tell him I feel like every day is March 6, 1836 (groundhog day the movie) and I’m stationed on the west wall of the Alamo.
Sarah, your intentions for writing this piece were admirable. But there’s a reason it should sound like Mitt’s in the forest; honey, his volume is turned down. Way down. He’s confused as to what to say. And he hasn’t hired the talent that knows how to say it.
Tactically, Mark Levin and Rush have it right. Mitt has to attack with the ferocity of the Russians attacking Berlin in 1945. So far he hasn’t fired a shot that’s hit its mark.
I love PJM, but I check the other pro Romney sites to see if anybody’s shouting, “hey Mitt, get with it. Open Fire. The ‘
National Review doesn’t realize what’s happening. American Thinker has no clue. Michelle Malkin is grinding axes that don’t matter. And my brilliant buddy, Porretto of Liberty Torch is as frustrated as I’ve ever seen him. He took the idiot John Roberts running on ObamaCare very hard.
The old George Allen Redskins were the only team that ever consistently won with defense. At stake is much more than the Lombardi Trophy.
We need someone to lead us across the Delaware for a Christmas war party. I have deep doubts that Mitt McCain can even stand in a rowboat without losing his balance.
Every day, my friends, we’re losing ground. It’s like we’re invaded France and the Germans are pushing us back to the Obama and Utah Beaches. It’s like Montgomery is in charge of the allied expeditionary force.
Mitt McCain’s campaign war reminds me of the April 17, 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion.
So there you have it. 800 more words from me about a situation that’s making me physically and mentally ill; seeing my country go down the drain. Screaming for Mitt to start attacking. And living each down in the middle of the Romney forest, where all we here is us birds and a few wise old owls. At this rate, we won’t just lose the election. Like pigs, we’ll be slaughtered.
And Sarah, that’s not the kind of signature to win friends. It’s haughty. A little to proud. A bit arrogant. I think you can handle the truth.
Nice, and very recognizable, anecdote. Having lived in a place or two outside the US, I summarized my observations on the socialized medicine systems I’ve experienced first-hand here:
http://spinstrangenesscharm.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/socialized-medicine-part-4-summary-and-outlook/
Note that the three systems described there (Germany, Belgium, Israel) are NOT state-run healthcare on the UK and Canadian model but state-regulated systems with mandatory coverage. Even so, they are replete with problems. Israel’s comes the closest of anybody to working (thanks to uniquely “young” demographics) yet has been on the brink of insolvency for as long as I remember. The Belgian (and Dutch) cost containment “solution” is mass euthanasia of the elderly, with or without consent — if that is the price of ‘socialized medicine’, may they put it on their sandwich and choke on it (Dutch expression). Meanwhile, Germany (where socialized medicine was first introduced) is quietly going to a two-tier system, with bare-bones available to everybody and quality care to those with private supplemental insurance.
As usual from your description, out of the very poor socialist systems you describe, it sounds like the Germans got it the least bad. I have noticed on most matters, Germans may be socialists, but at least they are not completely idiotic socialists. Perhaps having experience with both the exceses of Nazism, and Soviet occupation, they have learned at least a few lessons.
Yet again, the elephant is missed.
I’ve come from a blended system (Australia) which has problems but gets one part of the socialized aspect right: everyone gets billed first THEN makes their claim for reimbursement (with exceptions where a hospital or doctor chooses to charge only the government payment). Private insurance has multiple options starting with what’s called “ancillary” – more generous specialist rebates, drug rebates for drugs that aren’t on the government list, dental, optical and assorted other things – and moving up to the gold-plated coverage.
No matter what level of coverage you’ve got, you get the bill and then you make the claim for whatever is covered.
Moving from that to the US system was a shock. My first impression was how primitive the US setup was. I was accustomed to doctors in the worst parts of town having computerized records, short waiting times, and equipment that looked moderately new. Linoleum floors, paper records, unreadable handwriting, and the doctor doesn’t bother to spend more than a couple of minutes with you? I was in shock (I’m prepared to concede that I was incredibly lucky in the assorted doctors I saw in Australia…).
Since then, I think I’ve figured out a few things. The single worst thing about the US system is the employer-based coverage. It makes health coverage incredibly difficult for the self-employed – and people like me with “interesting” conditions will stay with a crappy job if it’s got good health cover because we can’t afford not to (When you take medication that would cost in the order of $1000 a month without the coverage, you don’t have too many options unless you’re making megabucks). On top of that, directly billing the insurer means that the patient isn’t the customer. The patient is the PRODUCT.
On the whole, though… The fact that the US health care system has flaws is not reason to add yet another layer of bureaucracy on top of the multiple layers already there. Target the flaws, investigate ways to fix them (and only them) with the fewest possible unintended consequences (does no-one ever ask “what could go wrong if we do this?”?), and for $DEITY’s sake, re-evaluate everything every few years and drop it if it’s worse than that problem it was supposed to fix.
Massive bills that no-one has read – and no-one CAN read because they’re so bloody obfuscated – are not the answer.
“My first impression was how primitive the US setup was. ”
LMAO! It’s easy to call people liars when they try to foist this kind of BS on people.
I commend you Sarah for educating the lady. It’s hard to believe that someone her age could be so ignorant. Most likely because she believes the information spewing daily from network news.
I had a conversation with a retired Air Force Colonel a few days ago who lives in Washington D.C. and claims he is a Republican. He said he is firmly convinced that people are against Obama because he is black and for no other reason. How can an educated person come to such a conclusion? By hearing it in the media over and over and over again. Many people have stopped thinking, and are listening to so-called journalists who are half-wits and allowed to say the most outrageous things without fear of being punished. If any of us acted this irresponsibly in our jobs we’d be fired in a nanosecond. But, being stupid in the media environment is the pathway to career growth. And there are plenty of other stupid people eating it up.
When was this statement made?
“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
a) 1917 in Russia
b) 1940 in China
c) 2007 in Venezuala
d) July 13, 2012 in Roanoke VA
If you answered (d), you are correct!
To see the video of the leader of what’s left of the free world making this astonishing statement, go to Powerllineblog.com and link on Scott Johnson’s July 15th article, entitled “The Obamaian persuasion in American politics”
Yes, it is truly absurd. Channeling Elizabeth Warren who said the same things a few months ago. I call it the “If you became financially sucessful and had Ms. Green in the eighth grade, you should hand over all of your property to me” speech.
maybe we should stop spending time in the forest and head to our local dmv’s to get the word out
Maybe the mystified woman reads the New York Times, after all Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman himself has certified; “In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false”
There you have it, I’m sure Mr. Krugman would be happy to confirm the above statement applies to Portugal as well. Now we only need to discern why Mrs. Holt would lie about government healthcare in Portugal. Hmmm, I have no facts, I don’t know Mrs. Holt and I’m half drunk before 1pm but I think I know racism when I see it.
Which is especially confusing seeing as Sarah is Portuguese.
Actually, Sarah is *American* – she’s a citizen. But she is of Portuguese birth and upbringing.
Big E,
You might change your mind if you had more information.
I read UK newspapers frequently and there is quite a big of reporting on the NHS. The UK Daily Mail in particular seems to send out “Woodward and Bernstein-type” reporters regarding NHS problems. I lived through Watergate and appreciate good reporting of things the government wishes you would not find out about.
Here are 5 NHS May 2012 stories. There may be more for May but I don’t get to read the Daily Mail – well, on a daily basis!
1) May 7 2012 UK Daily Mail.
Google: “Time to end the scandal of our 9-to-5 NHS: ‘It’s outrageous patients suffer because my colleagues refuse to give up their weekends,’ says top A&E doctor”
2) May 3, 2012, UK Daily Mail.
Google: “He should have been saved:’ Coroner blasts hospital staff over baby boy who died after he was sent home from hospital THREE times”
3) May 2, 2012, UK Daily Mail.
Google “Young mother left in coma for life after hospital blunder saw her given 32 times safe dose of labour-inducing drug”
4) May 24, 2012, UK Daily Mail.
Google: “Hungarian doctor who burned hole in spine of boy, 4, with massive overdose of ‘acid’ is suspended”
5 May 23, 2012, UK Daily Mail.
Google: “Newborn twins killed after doctor gave them TEN TIMES the prescribed dose of morphine”
Why bother reading British newspapers to know what happens in the UK when you have the NYT, the best informed, most intelligent and most trusted of them all, right there in the US? Do the Brits know anything about Britain? Surely nothing comparable to what Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman himself can tell you.
Here is another UK Daily Mail on how the one NHS made up for insufficient nurses – they used security guards! The imagination boggles on that one.
July 14, 2012, UK Daily Mail
Google: “Security guards used instead of nurses at scandal-hit hospital”
A blogger to this article made referrals to other NHS problems, which I read only a few, so I cannot vouch for all.
http://www.thisisleicestershir…
Even now the NHS is failing to learn the lessons from Stafford. Preferring instead to delude itself into believing the Stafford Hospital scandal was somehow a “one-off”.
http://www.expressandstar.com/…
Yet more “institutional abuse” and another “failure of management” at all levels.
http://www.communitycare.co.uk…
Incompetence, waste, profligacy but that’s ok YOU are paying for it.
http://www.taxpayersalliance.c…
And its no better in Wales
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.u…
or Scotland
http://www.scotsman.com/edinbu…
Perhaps I was a little too subtle but I was being sarcastic. I know liberals like to argue based on dubious authority, declare the case closed and then toss accusations of racism around but wasn’t it a clue that the comment was way too spot on?
I got your sarchasm, but you have to be careful about sarchastic paradies of leftists though. Because no matter how over the top and stupid you try and make it sound, a lot of them actually do talk like that. So no matter how incredibly stupid it sounds, it is still hard to tell.
Here’s another – I read this one yesterday. The by-line is “Security guards at a cash-strapped hospital were used to look after vulnerable patients, a damning report by the healthcare watchdog has found as a litany of failures were uncovered.
July 14, 2012 UK Daily Mail
Google: “Security guards used instead of nurses at scandal-hit hospital: report”
A blogger halfway down page 2 of the comments gives about half a dozen more articles about NHS letting the British public down. Here they are, along with his remarks:
http://www.expressandstar.com/…
Yet more “institutional abuse” and another “failure of management” at all levels.
http://www.communitycare.co.uk…
Incompetence, waste, profligacy but that’s ok YOU are paying for it.
http://www.taxpayersalliance.c…
And its no better in Wales
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.u…
or Scotland
http://www.scotsman.com/edinbu…
Actually, a succinct rejoinder might have been, “If you ever see a sample coming through your lab with my name on it, promise me you’ll hand it off to some other tech.”
Anyone exposed to the Sandy Dennis classic, “Thank You All Very Much” (1969), with its grim depiction of the UK’s health care system, would be providing a non-invasive, no-cost, irrefutable diagnosis of intractable psychosis, were they to ever mention socialized medicine in the same breath as our system (except to cite it as a cautionary tale).
Sorry to be flippant. This is truly a serious issue with potentially deadly consequences. It is simply that, on this gorgeous day, with my favorite bunny munching contentedly in the yard, jays in the birdbath, and cardinals at the feeder, thinking seriously about the implications of all of this is simply too dreadful, and I desperately need a 24-hour moratorium. Or in the words of Zhivago, “Someone has to keep on living.”
“How to Replace Obamacare”
http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/how-to-replace-obamacare
Dont be too despondent. You may have gotten that idiot leftist to once in her life hear a real fact and have to think about it. If she keeps asking questions like that of other strangers, and doesn’t just get reassurance of her superior views when she gets back to her leftist cacoon, she might even start changing her views. She was probably quite prepared for you to start bragging on the glories of portugese national health care, and it must have shocked her deeply to hear differently.
Rachel Peepers:
WTF? I mean, seriously, WTF was that?
(More sarcasm that misfired?)
Its ridiculously UNTRUE what you write here. You should be ashamed of yourself! Comparing Portugal to the US in health care, is comparing a Ferrari with an Honda. No one dies at the hospital doorstep in Portugal… like it happens in the US! And that makes a major difference, doesn’t it?