Rossmci90

What do you base this statement on? If you are going to claim to know exactly what's going to happen with socialised healthcare at least provide some evidence to back up your claim rather than expect us to believe you.

__________________

IcyPatriot

A good place to see the practicality of this on a local level is in Massachusetts right now. There is a serious shortage of internal medicine doctors. Some people are waiting 3-6 months to get an appointment.

For people who do not have a regular doctor - take notice and get a regular doctor now because initially there are shortages of certain kinds of care.

On another note ... a good time for young people to get into healthcare. While they won't get rich like some before them. They will be in great demand. Especially the general medicine type doctors for kids, adults and seniors.

PatsFanInVa

Okay, we can't talk about Sweden. How about Singapore, Bermuda, Japan, Hong Kong, Macau, Iceland, France, Finland, Anguilla, Norway, Malta, Andorra, Czech Republic, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Israel, Slovenia, Liechtenstein, South Korea, Denmark, Austria, Belgium, Guernsey, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Jersey, Australia, Portugal, Gibralter, The United Kingdom, New Zealand, Monaco, Wallis and Fortuna, Canada, Ireland, Greece, San Marino, Taiwan, Isle of Man, Italy, or Cuba?

https://www.cia.gov/library/publicat.../2091rank.html

Once again, this is not from Pravda or the National Enquirer. This is from the CIA World Fact Book.

I understand how terribly difficult it is to compare the terrible methodological hurdles in comparing American infant mortality rates to anybody elses. After all, these rates are ours. The French no doubt have their babies in rustic cottages, the Germans in forests, and the Israelis -- mais bein sur -- in mangers.

Or alternately, we might just have higher infant mortality than 44 different countries, in the country that spends the most per capita on health care.

Similarly our pathetic showing in life expectancy just should not even be mentioned in the same breath as health care. What could health possible have to do with living longer? And on and on.

Or, roll them all up together if you like. The World Health Organization ranks the US 37th overall, behind most of the European countries, Japan, Israel, and a couple of Arab nations. We may comfort ourselves that Cuba ranks 39th, so we must be doing something right, and somehow making up the infant mortality gap (which is, after all, slight). If you count a good health system to mean "slightly better than Cuba's."

The World Health Organization's ranking of the world's health systems

Yes, of course, it's all about the definitions and the methodology. We trail in pretty much any indicator you could come up with, except high-tech interventions. Bully. But that's just a sliver of all medicine -- albeit a highly lucrative one.

There are always a variety of factors, terribly complicated confounding differences, blah blah blah.

The numbers always come out the same. Study a different set of stats, and you find that we once again suck. Our health care just is not very good.

Prevention of preventable deaths. Lifespan. Infant Mortality. By any significant measure of a health system's performance society-wide, we're doing a bad job.

The most difficult thing about having this conversation is the predictable layers of outright denial:

First come the anecdotes, the equivalents of which (for this nation) were simply never cherry-picked, because they make the opposite point; then the denial that the point is to scare people; then -- by necessity -- the indemnification from objective fact: Claims that no set of statistics can capture international comparisons, unless they are carefully selected to skew "our" way (or more accurately, to favor the status quo); Otherwise, factual comparisons are secretly unreliable because of this or that confounding factor; and so on, and so on.

I can see arguments on the costs, right now, of the bill. I really can. It does make an actual impact on my worldview.

But you're barking up the wrong tree when you go into high dudgeon when confronted by statistical evidence.

The right-wing echo chamber operates in a fact-free bubble. Reality does not. These lies are excuses for a system that unnecessarily lets more people die. Why are you in favor of it?

PFnV

wistahpatsfan

OUCH!
That's gotta hurt, DaBruinz!
You OK there?...Can I get you some smelling salts? How many fingers I got up?

apple strudel

PatsFanInVa is the best poster in this forum, and he has the patience of Job.

wistahpatsfan

I want him to write my eulogy.

IcyPatriot

I think he sparks one up then hits the keyboard ... his fingers can't stop.

wistahpatsfan

WOW!

Great idea!

.....be right back!

PatsFanInVa

One limitation that some may find regrettable about gubmit work is that (actually like a lot of other occupations,) we're eligible for random testing. Dunno what happens if you pop positive, but I really don't want to find out

But my wife and I started talking about confounding factors, and went and got a bunch of stats, and figured out the average life-years lost to murder in the US, i.e., the number we could add to life expectancy if we had a murder rate of zero (it came out to about 4 months, enough to bring us up to the life expectancy of Bosnia-Herzogovenia.)

But the point here isn't to make another statistical point, it's to illustrate that we are fugged up people in Washington. This kind of thing IS our drug.

PFnV

wistahpatsfan

Not just in Washington but in every other town and city in America. The fight isn't against one set of idealogies, but against ignorance and intellectual laziness, IMO. No one's williing to even pretend they're interested in the truth and facts. They are content to jump on one train or another without even wondering where it's going.