Word! Thanks for you breakdown of the video BTW. Making this thread was easier than referring people to it in the other to get rebutts. That was a pretty thorough trashing of Stossel I'd say, LOL!
Well, I'm not really laughing. It wasn't that funny.
What puzzles me is how come you even
imagined that Stossel had "solved the health crisis". He himself didn't claim to have done any such thing. He didn't even
look at how to deal with any big-ticket items of essential healthcare expenditure. He seemed to think that being able to wrongfoot Michael Moore when he had control of the questions and the editing was enough to make some sort of point.
Didn't you notice that his "solutions" (actually just a couple of mildly successful niche ideas) didn't address the problems he set out at the start of the programme? I mean not
at all. No suggestion about how to decouple health insurance from employment. No suggestion about how to reduce the amount skimmed off by the insurance companies. No suggestion about how to make healthcare accessible for the disadvantaged.
He began by criticising the coupling of healthcare entitlement to employment. Easy target. But did he have an answer? Not even the ghost of a suggestion. But remember, like I keep saying, that's one of the great advantages of universal healthcare. You're free to make your employment choices without thinking about healthcare, and the burden of providing employees with health coverage is removed from businesses. I'm not quite sure why he didn't mention that....
He showed us that poor, poor woman with breast cancer and no insurance. Not her fault, it was just bad timing. But did he have an answer for her? No. Did he mention that in a universal system she'd have retained full healthcare entitlement during her transitional employment period, so that wouldn't have arisen in the first place? Funnily enough, no.
He showed us the man who was suspected of lying on his insurance application. Note how that worked. The minute the insurance company suspected that he
might have lied, they cut him off. It was up to
him to sue
them to get reinstated. Good luck with that.... He had no entitlement to be covered until such time as the insurers proved
their case in court. But suppose he had lied. The implication was that he had been uninsured, and had discovered that this lump on his leg might be malignant. He had then bought the insurance policy without coming clean about the lump, waited two weeks, and then "discovered" the lump.
We were told nothing about any reason there might have been for him not having had insurance in the first place. So how can we judge? Of course, he's another one that would have been entitled to care in a universal system, no quibbling. Was that pointed out? Oops, no.
There was a lot of irrelevant padding in there. Food insurance? You cannot be serious! Ford motor cars and mobile phones and lasik eye surgery and cosmetic surgery. Zero relevance to the questions at issue, and zero illumination of the problem. But it's amazing how much obfuscation you can stir up with bad analogies.
Then there was what can only be called a hatchet job done on universal healthcare systems. Cherrypicking headlines for examples of stuff that went wrong, apparently designed to scare the hell out of American viewers who don't know that this was not a fair portrayal of such systems. Yes, a two-second acknowledgement that Canadians are happy with their system - before spending about ten minutes finding about three people who had issues and giving them a platform to complain.
What he completely ignored was the difference in entitlement between the victims of the two systems. The victims of the US system had no redress. They'd fallen through the cracks. They weren't covered. Tough. In contrast the victims of universal healthcare failings are empowered by entitlement. Stossel obviously didn't consider that. Have you, Dan?
Rolfe.
