The Palin sponsored process of having the oil companies distribute some of the profit from their oil ventures to the people of Alaska. Even those who, Gawd forbid, had nothing at all to do with creating that wealth
How is insisting that some of the revenue from oil owned collectively by Alaskans be shared socialism? The Alaskan people own the mineral rights to everything under the ground in Alaska. Leasing that land to oil companies and then paying some of the revenue to the owners of the leased property is not socialism. Socialism is when you take something from someone who owns it and give it to someone who does not. Like Obama wants to do with the earnings from things that are not based on the use of a collective resource. Of course, Obama wouldn't even think of doing what Palin did since he's against drilling for oil.
And it's also ironic that democrats would complain about Palin's action since they continually harp about oil company windfall profits. Oh ... maybe they just don't like the fact that Palin gave the money directly back to the people, rather than simply bloating government further as democrats intend to do with THEIR increased taxes on big oil.
Apparently, a stimulus bill provision means that "our doctors" no longer get to make healthcare decisions for us (
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q...U1MTc2NTE4YTI= ) with Dashill's "rationing board" being the goal.
Somehow I just don't see it going down that way in the States.
"somehow"?
Can't you be a little more specific as to why that won't happen. You are wrong. The language is already in the bill that was passed to allow it to happen and the democrat that Obama wanted to make his Health czar stated that was his goal. Somehow I just don't have much confidence that you really understand Obama and the democrats in this country. Perhaps your media isn't telling you everything you need to know.
I get as good basic health care as anyone in the USA. I get as good, or better, health care for serious disease as the majority of US citizens.
Maybe you do but what about other Canadians?
Why is it that so many Canadians come to America to seek medical treatment and drugs if it's so wonderful? For example, take the case of Suzanne Aucoin:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_canadian_healthcare.html
summer 2007
The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care
David Gratzer
Socialized medicine has meant rationed care and lack of innovation. Small wonder Canadians are looking to the market.
... snip ...
Mountain-bike enthusiast Suzanne Aucoin had to fight more than her Stage IV colon cancer. Her doctor suggested Erbitux—a proven cancer drug that targets cancer cells exclusively, unlike conventional chemotherapies that more crudely kill all fast-growing cells in the body—and Aucoin went to a clinic to begin treatment. But if Erbitux offered hope, Aucoin’s insurance didn’t: she received one inscrutable form letter after another, rejecting her claim for reimbursement. Yet another example of the callous hand of managed care, depriving someone of needed medical help, right? Guess again. Erbitux is standard treatment, covered by insurance companies—in the United States. Aucoin lives in Ontario, Canada.
When Aucoin appealed to an official ombudsman, the Ontario government claimed that her treatment was unproven and that she had gone to an unaccredited clinic. But the FDA in the U.S. had approved Erbitux, and her clinic was a cancer center affiliated with a prominent Catholic hospital in Buffalo. This January, the ombudsman ruled in Aucoin’s favor, awarding her the cost of treatment. She represents a dramatic new trend in Canadian health-care advocacy: finding the treatment you need in another country, and then fighting Canadian bureaucrats (and often suing) to get them to pick up the tab.
Explain these facts, if Canada's system is so great.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/BillSteigerwald/2007/09/01/uh-oh,_canada?page=full&comments=true
September 1, 2007
... snip ...
Why is the hip replacement center of Canada in Ohio -- at the Cleveland Clinic, where 10 percent of its international patients are Canadians?
Why is the Brain and Spine Clinic in Buffalo serving about 10 border-crossing Canadians a week? Why did a Calgary woman recently have to drive several hundred miles to Great Falls, Mont., to give birth to her quadruplets?
No one really knows how many Canadians come to the US for treatment each year. But it is surely in the many tens of thousands. One expert in the above link gave a conservative figure for 2006 of nearly 40,000.
If Canada's system of socialized medicine is so good, why are more and more Canadians complaining about like things like ... wait times?
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_canadian_healthcare.html
Canadian newspapers are now filled with stories of people frustrated by long delays for care:
VOW BROKEN ON CANCER WAIT TIMES: MOST HOSPITALS ACROSS CANADA FAIL TO MEET OTTAWA'S FOUR-WEEK GUIDELINE FOR RADIATION
PATIENTS WAIT AS P.E.T. SCANS USED IN ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS
BACK PATIENTS WAITING YEARS FOR TREATMENT: STUDY
THE DOCTOR IS ... OUT
As if a taboo had lifted, government statistics on the health-care system’s problems are suddenly available. In fact, government researchers have provided the best data on the doctor shortage, noting, for example, that more than 1.5 million Ontarians (or 12 percent of that province’s population) can’t find family physicians. Health officials in one Nova Scotia community actually resorted to a lottery to determine who’d get a doctor’s appointment.
A Commonwealth Fund study (Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: An International update on the comparative performance of American health care, May 15, 2007) found that 24% of Canadians waited 4 or more hours in the emergency room, versus just 12% in the US. And 57% waited 4 or more weeks to see a specialist, versus only 23% in the US. In a 2003 survey (
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2001977834_cihak13.html ), when hospital administrators were asked "for the average waiting time for biopsy of a possible breast cancer in a 50-year-old woman, 21 percent of administrators of Canadian hospitals said more than three weeks; only 1 percent of American hospital administrators gave the same answer." And "fifty percent of the Canadian hospital administrators said the average waiting time for a 65-year-old man who requires a routine hip replacement was more than six months; in contrast, not one American hospital administrator reported waiting periods that long. Eighty-six percent of American hospital administrators said the average waiting time was shorter than three weeks; only 3 percent of Canadian hospital administrators said their patients have this brief a wait."
So if the socialize medicine of the type Obama is envisioning is really working in Canada, why is Canads now looking to the market for solutions?
Again from
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_canadian_healthcare.html
Rick Baker helps people, and sometimes even saves lives. He describes a man who had a seizure and received a diagnosis of epilepsy. Dissatisfied with the opinion—he had no family history of epilepsy, but he did have constant headaches and nausea, which aren’t usually seen in the disorder—the man requested an MRI. The government told him that the wait would be four and a half months. So he went to Baker, who arranged to have the MRI done within 24 hours—and who, after the test discovered a brain tumor, arranged surgery within a few weeks.
Baker isn’t a neurosurgeon or even a doctor. He’s a medical broker, one member of a private sector that is rushing in to address the inadequacies of Canada’s government care. Canadians pay him to set up surgical procedures, diagnostic tests, and specialist consultations, privately and quickly.
... snip ...
Some of the services that Baker brokers almost certainly contravene Canadian law, but governments are loath to stop him. “What I am doing could be construed as civil disobedience,” he says. “There comes a time when people need to lead the government.”
Baker isn’t alone: other private-sector health options are blossoming across Canada, and the government is increasingly turning a blind eye to them, too, despite their often uncertain legal status. Private clinics are opening at a rate of about one a week. ... snip ... Testifying to the changing nature of Canadian health care, Baker observes that securing prompt care used to mean a trip south. These days, he says, he’s able to get 80 percent of his clients care in Canada, via the private sector.
And lest you think I'm just picking on Canada, note this:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_canadian_healthcare.html
Nor were the problems I identified unique to Canada—they characterized all government-run health-care systems. Consider the recent British controversy over a cancer patient who tried to get an appointment with a specialist, only to have it canceled—48 times. More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care, with 200,000 in line for longer than six months. A while back, I toured a public hospital in Washington, D.C., with Tim Evans, a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe. The hospital was dark and dingy, but Evans observed that it was cleaner than anything in his native England. In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave—when many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity—15,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren’t available.
... snip ...
And if we measure a health-care system by how well it serves its sick citizens, American medicine excels. Five-year cancer survival rates bear this out. For leukemia, the American survival rate is almost 50 percent; the European rate is just 35 percent. Esophageal carcinoma: 12 percent in the United States, 6 percent in Europe. The survival rate for prostate cancer is 81.2 percent here, yet 61.7 percent in France and down to 44.3 percent in England—a striking variation.
... snip ...
This privatizing trend is reaching Europe, too. Britain’s government-run health care dates back to the 1940s. Yet the Labour Party—which originally created the National Health Service and used to bristle at the suggestion of private medicine, dismissing it as “Americanization”—now openly favors privatization. Sir William Wells, a senior British health official, recently said: “The big trouble with a state monopoly is that it builds in massive inefficiencies and inward-looking culture.” Last year, the private sector provided about 5 percent of Britain’s nonemergency procedures; Labour aims to triple that percentage by 2008. The Labour government also works to voucherize certain surgeries, offering patients a choice of four providers, at least one private. And in a recent move, the government will contract out some primary care services, perhaps to American firms such as UnitedHealth Group and Kaiser Permanente.
Sweden’s government, after the completion of the latest round of privatizations, will be contracting out some 80 percent of Stockholm’s primary care and 40 percent of its total health services, including one of the city’s largest hospitals. Since the fall of Communism, Slovakia has looked to liberalize its state-run system, introducing co-payments and privatizations. And modest market reforms have begun in Germany: increasing co-pays, enhancing insurance competition, and turning state enterprises over to the private sector (within a decade, only a minority of German hospitals will remain under state control).
So I ask you, must we go down the same road and make the same mistake and then have to do what Canada and Europe are now trying to do ... get out of the hole they dug for themselves and their people? How about instead of doing what Obama proposes (building a system much like you had years ago), we meet you half-way (as we were in the process of doing anyway)?
In June of 2008, the Toronto Star reported (
http://www.thestar.com/article/445835 ) that over 4 MILLION Canadians (12 and older) have no family doctor. That's about 15% of your population (12 and older). It said Canada's poor and underprivileged were affected the most. Now I ask you, how is that any different than the claim here in the US (by democrats) that 45 million out of 300 million (that's 15%) get inadequate health care? That 45 million statistic is used by Obama and his followers to justify his forcing through congress a crash effort to create a national health care system much like Canada's was before recent privatization, but it doesn't sound like socialized medicine has actually been the solution for 15% of your population.
In the USA it depends on who you are and how much care you can afford.
So what? That's life. Wealth has always meant better health care (on average). The powerful have always gotten better health care. Call it incentive for getting wealthy and powerful. And that's the case even in Canada and Europe today. Don't kid yourself that it's not. Here:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13429
September 2007
Does Canada's publicly funded, single payer health care system deliver better health outcomes and distribute health resources more equitably than the multi-payer heavily private U.S. system? ... snip ... We also find that Canada has no more abolished the tendency for health status to improve with income than have other countries. Indeed, the health-income gradient is slightly steeper in Canada than it is in the U.S.
What's really infuriating, is that Obama and his chronies in Washington will undoubtedly find medical care OUTSIDE the system they force the rest of us to use. Just like they generally elect out of the education system they've forced the rest of use.
As for drugs, what difference does it make where the research takes place?
What is it you think fuels the development of most new drugs (which are EXTREMELY expensive to create) and new medical technology? It's the profit motive and socialist systems tend to work against that. As a result most new drugs are created by US companies ... not in Canada or any of the socialist countries of Europe. How many large pharmaceutical companies are based in Canada. None. How many are based in Europe? A lot fewer than there were 20 years ago. So I'm concerned that Obama may be about to kill the golden goose that has created so many new and wonderful medicines and technologies. Then who will lay the eggs? Maybe we will just have to do without new drugs ... the ones that might have saved your or your children's life some day.
At the University of Manitoba not far from here, at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, researchers are developing drugs.
I'm not saying all research has stopped in socialist systems but I stand by my claim (that I can prove) that by far the bulk of new drugs are being created here in Capitalist America. Not in Canada or Europe. And they are created by pharmaceutical companies operating under the profit system, not in universities. Because developing a drug now costs BILLIONS of dollars (
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/topstory/8150/8150notw5.html and
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/25/2/420 ).
But again , what does that have to do with the health care system in any country.
Are you kidding? You think wonder drugs, vaccines and other new medical technologies that have only come to market because of the free market in the US are unimportant to the quality of your health care system?
The drugs developed anywhere will be tested in each country and allowed for use or not.
Don't kid yourself. The bulk of the development costs do not reside in testing a drug that's already been approved for use by our FDA. It's almost guaranteed to pass. The bulk of the cost is in the many drugs that failed FDA testing. Here in the US. A cost born by US pharmaceutical companies that only do what they do because they can make a profit doing it. But under socialized systems, such companies are far less successful because the profit motive is discouraged and because governments try (unsuccessfully) to manage everything. Which is why Canada and Europe's drug development system is so much smaller than the one in the United States today. Make the US like your country, and those companies may simply decide the rewards no longer outweight the risks and costs of development.
In fact I have availed myself of my gov't health care in the case of a very serious condition. What would have cost me easily a quarter of a million dollars in the USA cost me only lost wages (above what unemployment insurance paid) for 8 months. ... In the USA, without insurance I would be dead or passing a debt to my relatives.
You sound like you think no one in the US has health insurance or that our private health insurance wouldn't provide the same benefits to someone with your equivalent job that yours does? My costs wouldn't be all that different from yours, I bet. Although I might get treated a little sooner, perhaps.
The demand for socialized medicine comes from those who CLAIM that about 45 million Americans (15% of our population) don't have insurance. Now I've already shown that Canada ... even with a socialized system ... still has at least 15% of its population with clearly inadequate coverage. But let's look at that 45 million figure for the US more closely (don't just believe what Sicko told you):
http://www.businessandmedia.org/printer/2007/20070718153509.aspx
Health Care Lie: '47 Million Uninsured Americans'
7/18/2007
... snip ...
The number of the uninsured who aren’t citizens is nearly 10 million on its own, invalidating all the claims of 40+ million “Americans” without health insurance.
... snip ...
Many of the same people pushing the incorrect numbers of uninsured Americans also claim that these people cannot “afford” insurance.
... snip ...
But according to the same Census report, there are 8.3 million uninsured people who make between $50,000 and $74,999 per year and 8.74 million who make more than $75,000 a year. That’s roughly 17 million people who ought to be able to “afford” health insurance because they make substantially more than the median household income of $46,326.
... snip ...
Subtracting non-citizens and those who can afford their own insurance but choose not to purchase it, about 20 million people are left – less than 7 percent of the population.
“Many Americans are uninsured by choice,” wrote Dr. David Gratzer in his book “The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care.”
... snip ...
“Proponents of universal health care often use the 46-million figure -- without context or qualification. It creates the false impression that a huge percentage of the population has fallen through the cracks,” Gratzer told BMI. “Again, that’s not to suggest that there is no problem, but it's very different than the universal-care crowd describes.”
Dr. Grace-Marie Turner, a BMI adviser and president of the Galen Institute, agreed that “the number [on uninsured] is inflated and affects the debate.”
Turner also pointed out that “45 percent of the uninsured are going to have insurance within four months [according to the Congressional Budget Office],” because many are transitioning between jobs and most people get health insurance through their employers.
So what is the true extent of the uninsured “crisis?” The Kaiser Family Foundation, a liberal non-profit frequently quoted by the media, puts the number of uninsured Americans who do not qualify for current government programs and make less than $50,000 a year between 13.9 million and 8.2 million. That is a much smaller figure than the media report.
Should Obama really be making decisions as big as this one on the basis of a LIE? I'm asking you to give me an honest answer.
And by the way, while we are looking, let's look at socialized medicine in Europe:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_canadian_healthcare.html
Nor were the problems I identified unique to Canada—they characterized all government-run health-care systems. Consider the recent British controversy over a cancer patient who tried to get an appointment with a specialist, only to have it canceled—48 times. More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care, with 200,000 in line for longer than six months. ... snip ... In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave—when many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity—15,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren’t available. And so on.
... snip ...
Americans live 75.3 years on average, fewer than Canadians (77.3) or the French (76.6) or the citizens of any Western European nation save Portugal. Health care influences life expectancy, of course. But a life can end because of a murder, a fall, or a car accident. Such factors aren’t academic—homicide rates in the United States are much higher than in other countries (eight times higher than in France, for instance). In The Business of Health, Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider factor out intentional and unintentional injuries from life-expectancy statistics and find that Americans who don’t die in car crashes or homicides outlive people in any other Western country.
And if we measure a health-care system by how well it serves its sick citizens, American medicine excels. Five-year cancer survival rates bear this out. For leukemia, the American survival rate is almost 50 percent; the European rate is just 35 percent. Esophageal carcinoma: 12 percent in the United States, 6 percent in Europe. The survival rate for prostate cancer is 81.2 percent here, yet 61.7 percent in France and down to 44.3 percent in England—a striking variation.
But in any case, we getting far off the OP topic. I suggest we go back to it. So, REGARDLESS of whether socialized medicine like Obama wants would work or not, do you think that loading ourselves and our children with another $8.5 trillion in debt over the next 10 years, with yearly deficits that will never be below half a trillion dollars and that will have grown to over $700 billion a year by the end of that period, is a wise thing for us Americans to do? How is Canada handling debt and deficits?
