2 minutes ago, Gannan said:

Back in the 50s and 40s and and earlier, if you got hurt on the job it was your problem. People said if we compelled employers to pay the medical bills of workers who got hurt on the job, we’d have the communism. I certainly don’t want a cradle to the grave nanny state, but acting like holding business to even a small degree of accountability is full on socialism is childish and tiresome. 

I know you have to reflexively argue with everything I say.  And believe me the reformed libertarian/born-again progressive angle would be an easy road for me to take

 

But what the hell does this have to do with anything I said? 

Im merely defending our country against bull ish comments about it being 2nd world, and how awful our healthcare system is just because---shockingly---youre expected to pay for the services you receive.  

 

 

If you want to state your case for socialized medicine, then do it.  What youre talking about is a different topic and has more to do with liability in the work place.

https://www.governing.com/news/headlines/wv-the-welfare-state.html

 

"West Virginia gets more money per person from federal government programs than any other state in the country, with more than a quarter of the income in the Mountain State coming from federal benefits, according to a new study from George Washington University."

8 minutes ago, Mike31mt said:

I know you have to reflexively argue with everything I say.  And believe me the reformed libertarian/born-again progressive angle would be an easy road for me to take

 

But what the hell does this have to do with anything I said? 

Im merely defending our country against bull ish comments about it being 2nd world, and how awful our healthcare system is just because---shockingly---youre expected to pay for the services you receive.  

 

 

If you want to state your case for socialized medicine, then do it.  What youre talking about is a different topic and has more to do with liability in the work place.

I was just making a point. Do I think "progressives” go too far at times… of course. However some progressivism is necessary for a society to well, progress.

I’m not for socialized medicine. I still think it’s best provided through employers. The best federal policy is tax breaks for businesses in return for quality health care benefits for their employees. There needs to be Obamacare or exchanges of some kind for the self employed and those who otherwise can’t get insured. It’s still far too expensive though. I wanted to go into business for myself but I’d be paying 4k a month for my family for insurance on the exchange if I did. 

8 minutes ago, Boogyman said:

https://www.governing.com/news/headlines/wv-the-welfare-state.html

 

"West Virginia gets more money per person from federal government programs than any other state in the country, with more than a quarter of the income in the Mountain State coming from federal benefits, according to a new study from George Washington University."

So youre offering to pay for the healthcare for a state full of overweight smokers?  

You think youre being cute but youre not.

I was born here and I dont even want to pay for these peoples' care.

 

The solution isnt more govt handouts you f'ing lunatics. 

 

38 minutes ago, Mike31mt said:

Yes eliminate progressives like you who actively try to destroy everything the USA has ever stood for in the name of some utopian polyanna childish view of the world

You just said we're a 2nd world nation, so leave

 

You are really not worth the time arguing and going 'round and 'round. There is nothing utopian about simply building a society that is on par with what the rest of the modern, industrialized world has already been doing for decades in ensuring that the people enjoy the most basic standards of living that provide for economic power, social stability, and national security.

Yes, we are backsliding into the second world. No, I will not leave, because I love my country and won't give up on it like so many traitors who wrap themselves in the flag and spew disingenuous platitudes are are willing to do. I will seek to make it better, like a true patriot.

17 minutes ago, Mike31mt said:

So youre offering to pay for the healthcare for a state full of overweight smokers?  

You think youre being cute but youre not.

I was born here and I dont even want to pay for these peoples' care.

 

The solution isnt more govt handouts you f'ing lunatics. 

 

So maybe vote in a way that prevents all the red states from taking all our money?

1 hour ago, Mike31mt said:

Lol sure it is

Which is why world world leaders flock here for care, specifically specialized care

 

Just admit you guys are full blown socialists and dont want to pay for the services you receive.  F'ing free loaders ishing on the US

Yes the uber wealthy from places like Saudi Arabia around can pay exorbitant sums out of pocket for higher quality care here. That doesn't make our health care system as a whole "good".

Our system isn't even top level if you look at it compared to other western nations when you factor in quality of care, accessibility, cost etc. When you look at it on a cost per-capita pov the picture gets even bleaker. Regardless of what you think the solution is, acting like there aren't MAJOR problems with the US healthcare system is moronic. 

1 hour ago, EaglesRocker97 said:

 

You are really not worth the time arguing and going 'round and 'round. There is nothing utopian about simply building a society that is on par with what the rest of the modern, industrialized world has already been doing for decades in ensuring that the people enjoy the most basic standards of living that provide for economic power, social stability, and national security.

Yes, we are backsliding into the second world. No, I will not leave, because I love my country and won't give up on it like so many traitors who wrap themselves in the flag and spew disingenuous platitudes are are willing to do. I will seek to make it better, like a true patriot.

Socialism -- all the cool kids are doing it

 

I just summed up your stupid posts

1 hour ago, Boogyman said:

So maybe vote in a way that prevents all the red states from taking all our money?

Thats why I voted against Obama and Biden who are actively destroying what few industries remain in this state so they can pretend to save the worlds climate or whatever

37 minutes ago, DEagle7 said:

Yes the uber wealthy from places like Saudi Arabia around can pay exorbitant sums out of pocket for higher quality care here. That doesn't make our health care system as a whole "good".

Our system isn't even top level if you look at it compared to other western nations when you factor in quality of care, accessibility, cost etc. When you look at it on a cost per-capita pov the picture gets even bleaker. Regardless of what you think the solution is, acting like there aren't MAJOR problems with the US healthcare system is moronic. 

We have a fat unhealthy population and most people dont pay taxes

We cant be a Scandinavian country and we never will be

48 minutes ago, DEagle7 said:

Yes the uber wealthy from places like Saudi Arabia around can pay exorbitant sums out of pocket for higher quality care here. That doesn't make our health care system as a whole "good".

Our system isn't even top level if you look at it compared to other western nations when you factor in quality of care, accessibility, cost etc. When you look at it on a cost per-capita pov the picture gets even bleaker. Regardless of what you think the solution is, acting like there aren't MAJOR problems with the US healthcare system is moronic. 

To be fair, I don't give a damn about accessibility or cost per capita and our system shouldn't either. Health care is not a right. Until they make it one, our health care system has superior care if you are willing and able to pay for it, and that's how it should be. So, it's fair to say we have a superior system because it does offer, in your words, "high quality care."

Talking about accessibility is a different conversation. Ferraris aren't accessible to everyone either, but nobody would argue that the product isn't of extremely high quality. If people want to prioritize accessibility over quality, then pass a Constitutional amendment and make health care a right. Until then, it's a consumer good, like all others.

@Mike31mt is about 2 Tucker Carlson shows away from shooting up a bunch of people he suspects disagree with him politically… because they’ve been brainwashed by the media.

39 minutes ago, Mike31mt said:

Socialism -- all the cool kids are doing it

 

I just summed up your stupid posts

 

Nah, you just changed the subject and misrepresented what I said in order to distract from your own stupidity. But, yeah, those countries are definitely way cooler than we are right now.

Imagine how retarded you have to be to support dems lmao

 

5 hours ago, mr_hunt said:

  dark brandon

 

 

 

 

 

28 minutes ago, vikas83 said:

To be fair, I don't give a damn about accessibility or cost per capita and our system shouldn't either. Health care is not a right. Until they make it one, our health care system has superior care if you are willing and able to pay for it, and that's how it should be. So, it's fair to say we have a superior system because it does offer, in your words, "high quality care."

Talking about accessibility is a different conversation. Ferraris aren't accessible to everyone either, but nobody would argue that the product isn't of extremely high quality. If people want to prioritize accessibility over quality, then pass a Constitutional amendment and make health care a right. Until then, it's a consumer good, like all others.

Well obviously I disagree that the system shouldn't address accessibility or cost at all. Access to preventative services and medicine dramatically reduces the cost burden of people with chronic diseases and I can't bring myself to just say "meh, F em".

But regardless when I say accessibility I'm not just talking about cost. I'm in New England, likely one of the most medically saturated areas in the world and it is next impossible to get an appointment/make referrals. Most general medicine offices aren't accepting new patients but the specialists are even worse. My mom had a blood clot in her spleen and was stuck in the hospital for a week. The wait to see a hematologist? 4 months. I had a patient who I was worried was having seizures. Soonest referral was 6 months out. Absolutely zero people here accepting new psychiatric referrals.  And God forbid you're worried your kid has autism because the wait-list for a neuropsychiatric eval is well over a year. And these aren't just people with bad insurance. 

End result? Shittier care. Worse outcomes. Higher ED burden which has higher cost. 

To use your car analogy, we basically have a rental dealership that has 5 Ferraris, 20 Mercedes, and 5000 poorly maintained Ford Pintos. 

3 minutes ago, DEagle7 said:

Well obviously I disagree that the system shouldn't address accessibility or cost at all. Access to preventative services and medicine dramatically reduces the cost burden of people with chronic diseases and I can't bring myself to just say "meh, F em".

But regardless when I say accessibility I'm not just talking about cost. I'm in New England, likely one of the most medically saturated areas in the world and it is next impossible to get an appointment/make referrals. Most general medicine offices aren't accepting new patients but the specialists are even worse. My mom had a blood clot in her spleen and was stuck in the hospital for a week. The wait to see a hematologist? 4 months. I had a patient who I was worried was having seizures. Soonest referral was 6 months out. Absolutely zero people here accepting new psychiatric referrals.  And God forbid you're worried your kid has autism because the wait-list for a neuropsychiatric eval is well over a year. And these aren't just people with bad insurance. 

End result? Shittier care. Worse outcomes. Higher ED burden which has higher cost. 

To use your car analogy, we basically have a rental dealership that has 5 Ferraris, 20 Mercedes, and 5000 poorly maintained Ford Pintos. 

I can assure you the accessibility issue is most certainly not solved over here with our national system. Quite the opposite.

1 hour ago, Mike31mt said:

Thats why I voted against Obama and Biden who are actively destroying what few industries remain in this state so they can pretend to save the worlds climate or whatever

And your state still takes more of our money than any other. Works out good for you I guess.

7 minutes ago, DrPhilly said:

I can assure you the accessibility issue is most certainly not solved over here with our national system. Quite the opposite.

We're no better though: 

Quote

Data from other nations show that universal coverage does not necessarily result in substantially longer wait times. In fact, there are a variety of circumstances in which the United States’ peer nations have shorter wait times. While the White House’s fact sheet largely focused on the United Kingdom’s health care system, no candidate currently running for president is proposing nationalizing health care providers like the U.K.’s National Health Service.12 The most comprehensive source of international comparative data on health care is the Commonwealth Fund’s "Mirror, Mirror” series, which, in 2017, examined a variety of metrics across 10 European countries and the United States. Four of these metrics were particularly useful for studying wait times.13

Patients reported that they saw a doctor or nurse on the same or next day the last time they sought medical care.

Doctors reported that patients often experience difficulty getting specialized tests—for example, CT and MRI scans.

Patients reported that they waited two months or longer for a specialist appointment.

Patients reported that they waited four months or longer for elective or nonemergency surgery.

On each of these metrics, the United States performed worse than several nations with universal coverage, though no individual nation outperforms the United States on every metric. For example, only 51 percent of U.S. patients reported being able to see a provider within a day, compared with 53 percent, 56 percent, and 67 percent of patients in Germany, France, and Australia, respectively.14 Similarly, nearly 30 percent of U.S. doctors reported that their patients have difficulty getting a specialized test, compared with only 11 percent and 15 percent of doctors in Australia and Sweden, respectively.15 U.S. outcomes on the other two metrics were better across the board but still show that the United States performs worse than other nations with more equitable health care coverage systems. For instance, in the United States, 4 percent of patients reported waiting four months or longer for nonemergency surgery, compared with only 2 percent of French patients and 0 percent of German patients.16 For specialist appointments, the situation is even worse: 6 percent of U.S. patients reported waiting two months or longer for an appointment, compared with only 4 percent of French patients and 3 percent of German patients.17

The big selling point of the US system is supposed to be that lack of universal care and socialized medicine will avoid issues like long wait times and high cost to the taxpayers but in reality we just don't. Wait times are at least as bad as even universal coverage systems and our cost per capita to the country is nearly universally higher. 

So other than great R&D and high end care for the uber wealthy, what's the up side?

And by the way I'm not even suggesting any solutions here. I don't think going full Bernie Bro is the solution. But we can at least all admit that something is Fy. 

12 minutes ago, DEagle7 said:

We're no better though: 

The big selling point of the US system is supposed to be that lack of universal care and socialized medicine will avoid issues like long wait times and high cost to the taxpayers but in reality we just don't. Wait times are at least as bad as even universal coverage systems and our cost per capita to the country is nearly universally higher. 

So other than great R&D and high end care for the uber wealthy, what's the up side?

And by the way I'm not even suggesting any solutions here. I don't think going full Bernie Bro is the solution. But we can at least all admit that something is Fy. 

I’m pro national system. Just don’t want to try and hide the warts. 

1 minute ago, DrPhilly said:

I’m pro national system. Just don’t want to try and hide the warts. 

There's no easy answer that's for sure. Nor are there easy ways to apply health care models to the US or vice versa. 

When Vikas says "healthcare isn't a right," I agree with him to the extent that it is not an enumerated or Constitutionally guaranteed right; it's not legally established. To that end, though, the country was founded on rights that had no basis other than widely held beliefs that people were entitled to certain rights simply because Americans agreed that they were supernaturally endowed with them. Even after the country was established, the Articles of Confederation did not require much of anything to uphold one's rights to life, liberty, and property. It did not codify our most basic principles of justice and equality, largely because most people accepted them as so obvious and ethically logical that they did not foresee a need for such an expansive government bureaucracy and rigorous enforcement mechanism to guarantee them. Suffice it to say, however, these were rights that existed simply because the majority concurred that they were necessary by logic.

If most Americans today think that healthcare is a human right and most democracies around the world give it a legal basis, then it's reasonable to say that it IS a human right, since most humans believe that it is, even if some countries haven't legally protected it. Yes, it needs to be enshrined in the Constitution, for the very reason that, nearly 250 years after our founding document was written, it has become a fundamental right necessary for a constitutional republic to survive and thrive as a global power. We are a sicker, slower, and weaker nation without universal access to high-quality healthcare.

With that said, Obamacare and Medicare for All is not the answer.

1 hour ago, EaglesRocker97 said:

When Vikas says "healthcare isn't a right," I agree with him to the extent that it is not an enumerated or Constitutionally guaranteed right; it's not legally established. To that end, though, the country was founded on rights that had no basis other than widely held beliefs that people were entitled to certain rights simply because Americans agreed that they were supernaturally endowed with them. Even after the country was established, the Articles of Confederation did not require much of anything to uphold one's rights to life, liberty, and property. It did not codify our most basic principles of justice and equality, largely because most people accepted them as so obvious and ethically logical that they did not foresee a need for such an expansive government bureaucracy and rigorous enforcement mechanism to guarantee them. Suffice it to say, however, these were rights that existed simply because the majority concurred that they were necessary by logic.

If most Americans today think that healthcare is a human right and most democracies around the world give it a legal basis, then it's reasonable to say that it IS a human right, since most humans believe that it is, even if some countries haven't legally protected it. Yes, it needs to be enshrined in the Constitution, for the very reason that, nearly 250 years after our founding document was written, it has become a fundamental right necessary for a constitutional republic to survive and thrive as a global power. We are a sicker, slower, and weaker nation without universal access to high-quality healthcare.

With that said, Obamacare and Medicare for All is not the answer.

THEN. PASS. AN. AMENDMENT. TO. THE. CONSTITUTION.

There's a mechanism to add health care as a right, if that's what people want. Until then, it is not the function of the Federal government.

2 hours ago, DEagle7 said:

Well obviously I disagree that the system shouldn't address accessibility or cost at all. Access to preventative services and medicine dramatically reduces the cost burden of people with chronic diseases and I can't bring myself to just say "meh, F em".

But regardless when I say accessibility I'm not just talking about cost. I'm in New England, likely one of the most medically saturated areas in the world and it is next impossible to get an appointment/make referrals. Most general medicine offices aren't accepting new patients but the specialists are even worse. My mom had a blood clot in her spleen and was stuck in the hospital for a week. The wait to see a hematologist? 4 months. I had a patient who I was worried was having seizures. Soonest referral was 6 months out. Absolutely zero people here accepting new psychiatric referrals.  And God forbid you're worried your kid has autism because the wait-list for a neuropsychiatric eval is well over a year. And these aren't just people with bad insurance. 

End result? Shittier care. Worse outcomes. Higher ED burden which has higher cost. 

To use your car analogy, we basically have a rental dealership that has 5 Ferraris, 20 Mercedes, and 5000 poorly maintained Ford Pintos. 

No, it's simply a matter of cost and most people can't or won't pay what it costs. 

About 2.5 months ago, I woke up on a Friday and couldn't hear out of my left ear. I called my doctor, and he had me take a nasal spray to see if it cleared up. By Saturday, when the hearing hadn't returned, he realized I needed to see a top ENT specialist immediately and put me on Prednisone right away. The best doctor at Cedars had no availability for 2 months, but he got me in Monday afternoon. Why? Because I pay my primary care physician over 20k per year simply to be on call and give me access to these things. Nothing is impossible -- it's all just a matter of cost. I had SSHL - sudden neural hearing loss -- and the main factor impacting recovery is how quickly it is treated. Luckily, after about 3 weeks of treatment (steroid injections into my ear drum, hyperbaric chamber) I regained 100% of my hearing.

Also, let's remember why it's so hard to see a specialist -- because people are completely divorced from the cost of the care they receive. Much like college, government subsidies create massive demand. But unlike college, specialists can't raise prices as they please, so they either have long wait times and/or refuse to treat Medicare/Medicaid patients. 

3 hours ago, DEagle7 said:

There's no easy answer that's for sure. Nor are there easy ways to apply health care models to the US or vice versa. 

Umm, there is an easy answer. Trump is going to unveil it in two weeks.