Dale Cooper said:
Treblaine said:
Dale Cooper said:
England's health care is bad for the taxes we pay, BUT nowhere need as bad as it is in America.
If I'm sick and I have no money I can still see a Doctor.
If I break my leg it's treated free.
If I need an operation, it's done free.
So I'm happy enough.
Emergency medical care (like broken legs, cuts, etc) are free in America. Every hospital receives federal funding on the remit that they cannot turn away or refuse to treat any injured patients who arrive. (Anyway, emergency medical care is cheap, it is serious surgery and treatment for chronic illnesses that cost a lot.)
The problem in America is the "grey areas". People who are not in poverty (they have medical cover provided by govt) yet are not rich enough for full health coverage so are stuck in a middle ground.
That is basically what Obama is trying to do, fill in the gaps between America's already extensive socialised healthcare system and the private healthcare. By European standards it is not a very socialised system at all.
That's interesting to know, I remember watching a Morgan Spurlock thing about health care in America and for low income families it looked really tough.
I hope Obama is able to make the changes, it might be because I get free health care but I do feel that everyone should be entitled to be healithy.
Well it does create a kind of welfare trap at the moment. People don't want to work longer or go for promotions as they would actually end up with less coverage. Also, due to the nuances of perhaps supporting several children one may be earning enough to not be considered "in poverty" but with the several more mouths to feed and backs to clothe can effectively put them back into poverty. Systems like these are always flawed as it is too hard to measure where poverty ends and self-sustainability begins.
I support Obama for wanting to close this gap and I think Republicans would support it too if they knew what he was doing and were not so suspicious he was trying to undercut their current liberal healthcare system (I mean liberal in the non-political, literal sense).
I have never lived in America but people seem to have a lot of misconceptions and assumptions about US healthcare and you wonder where they get their ideas from.
Perhaps it is partially down to the likes of Michael Moore as in Bowling for Columbine he accosted a Canadian walking out of the Emergency Care section of a hospital with bandage around his head, Moore makes the point that this guy did not have to pay for this treatment but implied that the same would not be true south of the border.
You really have to be careful with these Moore and Spurlock types. They are not journalists, they have no dedication to impartiality, accuracy and have absolutely no qualms with being incredibly misleading with the facts. It would be a stretch to call their work "Propaganda" as they are not working for any government or political entity (merely profit) though their methods are virtually identical.
BTW, I lol'd in Supersize Me where literally the FIRST BURGER he ate on his mission he felt sick and almost puked. And he deliberately did not try ANY of the restaurant's healthier options, he rigged his "experiment" to get the results he wanted by trying to be as unhealthy as possible yet somehow blame the restaurant for that!
Incidentally, if Michael Moore is wondering why the life expectancy is lower in USA than the "wonderful socialist utopia" of Cuba, perhaps he should not be looking at America's healthcare but America's lifestyle which he HIMSELF is a perfect example of: Obesity. Something I have in common but I blame no one but myself.
For America (and increasingly Britain) the population eats too much, drinks too much, still smokes too much, no where near enough exercise and not enough vegetables or other essential nutrients of a balanced diet. There was an article in this week's New Scientist magazine as in the US the detecting, treating and curing of diseases in very high in America, their health system in general is doing great. The problem is SO MANY people are getting diseases linked to lifestyles of excess and sloth that the odds are tipped against them. This is to spite insurance premium "incentives" to lead a healthier lifestyle, people would rather pay more, eat more and exercise less. But perhaps that's democracy; people voting with their wallets.
Cuba is almost an example of the key to longevity not from their healthcare but their borderline-poverty. In another article of New Scientist (can't remember issue) it details how the single best way to increase life expectancy is to severely reduce calorie intake, basically live on the edge of a starvation diet. The way scientist think this works is the low calories force the body to lower its metabolism, similar to a tortoise (famously long living creatures), basically like running an engine at lower RPM there is less strain to cause cancers, heart failure etc.
Considering how even today Cuba has strict food rationing and generally high cost of food goods it is a large scale example of how if we go by overall life expectancy, then a life on the edge of poverty is preferable.
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