Looooooong Entry...

[ixnayonthetimma]

The big topic du jour right now is health care reform. And what follows are a few of my thoughts and observations on the health care reform debate overall. I will try to avoid any pointlessly political overtones, since it's too easy, just generates anger and shock value and usually goes nowhere but to distract from real and meaningful dialogue

Comments

[roytheboy]

As always, this was a great and well informed post

[ixnayonthetimma]

Wow. I'm shocked. An (I would assume) fairly conservative person such as yourself actually in support of a government insurance option? That's not what I've been hearing from the media, after all.

Like with so many systems, the eventual health-care reform we will get would have been the best of both sides but will actually most likely be the worst of both sides.

The most damning argument against our current system and for a universal, single-payer system is the fact that we already spend the largest part of government money percentage-wise and the most overall per-capita for health care of all the other industrialized nations, most of which have the evil socialistic health care systems being denounced so much right now. But there are legitimate concerns in that the U.S. health system is the most responsive and people CAN get the best care if they can afford it.

So yes, it's very tricky...

[sting58493]

Looking at other systems is good in theory. But in other countries those system are just as broken as ours. They also loose money every year. Also, seeing a doctor is a huge pain in the ass over there. There are less Doctors, because there is much less incentive. We do have forms of government covered plans in America. Go down to Parkland hospital. The prisoners from Lew Sterrett and those who are too poor and require government aid get care for free. The only problem is people trying to see doctors are prioritized by condition because there are so many patients. The pharmacy system has patients on a lottary to just talk to a pharmacist and get a perscription

[sting58493]

Fixing a typo in my above statement. "Theoretically, we WOULDN'T have crowding in doctor's offices right now"

[the_glass_jc]

But I think Alex was implying that we should look at other countries to learn from their mistakes. Of course, we won't.

[roytheboy]

yeah, my point wasn't that we do what they do. We see what they've done and try to improve on it. There is a lot of good there (and plenty of bad) and if we took some serious time (congress, the president, etc) we could truly have the best thing out there.