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Why doesn't America offer free health carE?

Because then the giant, engorged pharmaceutical companies wouldn't make exorbitant profits off of our health!
 
Nothing worth anything is FREE.. I fear the day it becomes that way. 🙁 And it will, then our HC system will turn to S*** like the rest of the worlds.
 
I don't know why doesn't safeway give free food?
Ford free cars?
Maytag free appliances?
Mcdonalsd free big Macs?
John Deere free tractors?

 
Originally posted by: daniel49
I don't know why doesn't safeway give free food?
Ford free cars?
Maytag free appliances?
Mcdonalsd free big Macs?
John Deere free tractors?
Click to expand...

Canada and Cuba are 2 places I know of that offer free health care.

If you were trying to use that as an argument, its a stupid one....
 
Originally posted by: IamDavid
Nothing worth anything is FREE.. I fear the day it becomes that way. 🙁 And it will, then our HC system will turn to S*** like the rest of the worlds.
Click to expand...

To be more accurate you should say nothing is actually FREE. Thre is no such thing as free healthcare ANYWHERE in the world because everyone is paying for it through taxes of all different types. The quality of the care is also less than optimal, as is anything a government tries to run.
 
Originally posted by: Lucifer
Originally posted by: daniel49
I don't know why doesn't safeway give free food?
Ford free cars?
Maytag free appliances?
Mcdonalsd free big Macs?
John Deere free tractors?
Click to expand...

Canada and Cuba are 2 places I know of that offer free health care.

If you were trying to use that as an argument, its a stupid one....
Click to expand...

Is the quality of healthcare in Canada or Cuba the same as in the US? Is healthcare really free if you have to pay higher taxes? Actually, it is free if you don't plan on working too much.

Edit. Ronstang you beat me to it. 🙂
 
Originally posted by: Lucifer
Originally posted by: jrenz
Why should we?
Click to expand...

I wasn't stating we should. I'm curious as to why we don't.
Click to expand...

It's my belief that the government is so vastly inefficient in any venture it is involved in, that healthcare provided by the government would waste more money that currently.
 
Because we have a market economy. This is America.

Healthcare is better paid for than free. America has amazing health care for the people that can afford it...which is most people. Canada has sucky healthcare for everyone, even if you can afford better.

Now, if you're talking about energy, that's a whole different story, because deregulation of energy is an unmitigated disaster.
 
First of all, there is no such thing as free...it's called taxes.

Second of all, because health care is not the government's business.
 
i wouldnt call it free healthcare..i would call it pitying humans, the thing that most who bitch about it wont admit is that they would rather that a lot of people simply died than have to pitch in to help the sick amongst us. i find it seriously disturbing this hidden philosophy of let them die, reminds me of the nazis in some ways, let the inferiors get filtered out of the race.. its like you think they were just meant to be dead or suffering
 
Originally posted by: ntdz
First of all, there is no such thing as free...it's called taxes.

Second of all, because health care is not the government's business.
Click to expand...

I think what ntdz means to say, is he doesn't trust Bush handling his health care needs.
 
Originally posted by: IamDavid
Nothing worth anything is FREE.. I fear the day it becomes that way. 🙁 And it will, then our HC system will turn to S*** like the rest of the worlds.
Click to expand...
Like HMO's are worth a sh!!t. Hell HMO's replace drugs prescribed by Doctors withj different drugs that might not be as effective, deny procedures that would relieve symptoms because it's not life threatening and generally give their ci=ustomers a hard time just to save money so their Stockholders can make money. HMO's and Pharmicutical Companies are two areas where Capitalism doesn't work for the benefit of society.
 
Originally posted by: Red Dawn
Originally posted by: IamDavid
Nothing worth anything is FREE.. I fear the day it becomes that way. 🙁 And it will, then our HC system will turn to S*** like the rest of the worlds.
Click to expand...
Like HMO's are worth a sh!!t. Hell HMO's replace drugs prescribed by Doctors withj different drugs that might not be as effective, deny procedures that would relieve symptoms because it's not life threatening and generally give their ci=ustomers a hard time just to save money so their Stockholders can make money. HMO's and Pharmicutical Companies are two areas where Capitalism doesn't work for the benefit of society.
Click to expand...

QFT
 
Originally posted by: Ronstang
Originally posted by: IamDavid
Nothing worth anything is FREE.. I fear the day it becomes that way. 🙁 And it will, then our HC system will turn to S*** like the rest of the worlds.
Click to expand...

To be more accurate you should say nothing is actually FREE. Thre is no such thing as free healthcare ANYWHERE in the world because everyone is paying for it through taxes of all different types. The quality of the care is also less than optimal, as is anything a government tries to run.
Click to expand...

O'rly?

Healthcare rankings of countries

Overall, the findings indicate that the U.S. health care system often performs relatively poorly from the patient perspective. The U.S. system ranked first on effectiveness but ranked last on other dimensions of quality (Figure ES-1). It performed particularly poorly in terms of providing care equitably, safely, efficiently, or in a patient-centered manner. On measures of timeliness, the U.S. system did not score as well as some of the other countries and rarely received top scores. For all countries, responses indicate room for improvement. Yet, the other five countries spend considerably less on health care per person and as a percent of gross domestic product than the United States. These findings indicate that, from the perspective of the patients it serves, the U.S. health care system could do much better in achieving high-quality performance for the nation's substantial investment in health.



Key Findings

* Patient safety: Among sicker adults, Americans had the highest rate of receiving wrong medications or doses in the prior two years. Among sicker adults who had a lab test in the past two years, adults in the U.S. were more likely than their counterparts in the other countries to have been given incorrect results or experienced delays in notification about abnormal results, with rates double those reported in Germany or the U.K. Rates of lab errors were also relatively high in Canada.

* Effectiveness: The indicators of effectiveness in the 2004 and 2005 surveys were grouped into four categories: prevention, chronic care, primary care, and hospital care and coordination. Compared with the other five countries, U.S. patients fared particularly well on receipt of preventive care and care for the chronically ill, although all countries had considerable room for improvement. Canada scored well on primary care, and Germany ranked first on hospital care and coordination. Across the indicators of effectiveness, the U.S. ranked first and New Zealand ranked last.

* Patient-centeredness: In 2004 and 2005, survey questions asked patients to rate the quality of their physician care in four areas: communication, choice and continuity, patient engagement, and responsiveness to patient preference. On measures of communication and patient engagement, New Zealand ranked highest. Germany was first on measures of choice and continuity, and Australia performed well on responsiveness to patient preference. Across the measures of patient-centeredness, Germany generally was highest, followed by New Zealand. The U.S. ranked last on nearly all aspects of patient-centeredness.

* Timeliness: Germany and the U.S. stand out among the six countries in terms of patients with health problems reporting the least difficulty waiting to see a specialist or have elective or non-emergency surgery. Yet Americans, along with Canadians, were more likely to say they waited six days or more for an appointment with a doctor or had trouble getting care on nights and weekends. Across all five measures of timeliness, Germany and New Zealand ranked first and second, respectively. The U.K. ranked fifth, and Canada ranked last.

* Efficiency: The 2005 survey included four questions on coordination of care that serve as indicators of health care system efficiency. Compared with their counterparts in other countries, sicker adults in the U.S. more often reported that they visited the emergency room for a condition that could have been treated by a regular doctor had one been available and that their medical records or test results failed to reach their doctor's office in time for appointments. About one of four U.S. sicker adults reported these concerns. U.S. sicker adults, along with their German counterparts, also were more likely to be sent for duplicate tests by different clinicians. On measures of efficiency, the U.S. ranked last among the six countries, with Germany and New Zealand ranking first and second, respectively.

* Equity: Nine measures from the two surveys gauged the extent to which patients' income affected their ability to access care. The U.S. scored last on seven of the nine measures of low-income patients not receiving needed care and had the greatest disparities in terms of access to care between those with below-average and above-average incomes. With low rankings on all measures, the U.S. ranked last among the six countries in terms of equity in the health care system. The U.K. ranked first, with no or negligible differences in terms of patients' access to care by income. The U.S. is the only country surveyed with large numbers of uninsured, and this contributed to its low rating for equity in the health care system. But even among above-average income respondents, the U.S. lagged considerably behind their counterparts in other countries.
Click to expand...
 
Originally posted by: Lucifer
I'm just curious. Can someone please enlighten me?

Thanks.
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Because Canada's system apparently sucks and that's apparently the only way to do nationalized health care - or so Rush and Hannity say.

Also, I hear that horrible communist Cuba place has nationalized health care and so does Chavez's horrible country.

Nationalized health insurance is UN-'MERICAN.
 
Originally posted by: Lucifer
I'm just curious. Can someone please enlighten me?

Thanks.
Click to expand...

Nothing is free, you should know that. Nationalized healthcare isn't all it's cracked up to be.

1. It raises taxes.
2. It leads to a huge expansion in government.
3. It often leads to rationing, meaning some bureaucrat decides what's important and what isn't.
4. Socialized systems are often under funded. This means that when they run out of money many procedures are quickly classified as ?elective? and patients have to wait, sometimes for extended periods.

I don't know much about Cuba, for obvious reasons, but I do know Canadian nationals have come to the US for procedures that they couldn't get done in a timely fashion in Canada.


 
Originally posted by: jrenz
Originally posted by: Lucifer
Originally posted by: jrenz
Why should we?
Click to expand...

I wasn't stating we should. I'm curious as to why we don't.
Click to expand...

It's my belief that the government is so vastly inefficient in any venture it is involved in, that healthcare provided by the government would waste more money that currently.
Click to expand...

I worked at a Fortune 100 company that made the Federal Government look like a model of efficiency. Until I worked there, I thought that the profit motive generally made a company more efficient than government or non-profit.

Its all in how you run things. I know "Private For-Profit = Good, Gub'mint=bad" is practically religion for Republicans, but like their other faith based agendas, I just don't buy it.
 
Originally posted by: HardWarrior
Originally posted by: Lucifer
I'm just curious. Can someone please enlighten me?

Thanks.
Click to expand...

Nothing is free, you should know that. Nationalized healthcare isn't all it's cracked up to be.

1. It raises taxes.
2. It leads to a huge expansion in government.
3. It often leads to rationing, meaning some bureaucrat decides what's important and what isn't.
4. Socialized systems are often under funded. This means that when they run out of money many procedures are quickly classified as ?elective? and patients have to wait, sometimes for extended periods.

I don't know much about Cuba, for obvious reasons, but I do know Canadian nationals have come to the US for procedures that they couldn't get done in a timely fashion in Canada.
Click to expand...

1. My health insurance premiums are going up - what's the difference if I pay the government for health insurance or some CEO?
2. I don't see this as an evil in itself, so long as the expansion has a purpose. I don't hear Repubs bvtching about military spending.
3. HMOs ration care, too. Some idiot behind a desk decides if the procedure is justified. What difference does it make whether that person is employed by UnitedHellCare or the Federal Government?
4. Its all in how you do things. Don't put the taxes for the national health insurance in the general fund. Don't allow IOU's. Keep the funding seperate.
 
Originally posted by: joshw10
Originally posted by: ntdz
First of all, there is no such thing as free...it's called taxes.

Second of all, because health care is not the government's business.
Click to expand...

I think what ntdz means to say, is he doesn't trust Bush handling his health care needs.
Click to expand...

But he does trust him with nukes and pretzels. Hmmm.
 
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