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interesting perspective, rahl.
someone else already said this, but the difference between your viewpoint and that which should logically be informing the debate about the healthcare system and what should be done with it is that of the anecdotal to the systemic.
roughly 40 million people without healthcare insurance of any kind in an advanced post-industrial society is a political and ethical problem. it is a systemic problem. what it really cuts to is the american class system and its inequities, but rather than talk about that, we're instead assuming, as conservatives long have, that the american class system is a fact of nature and not a matter of social choices and history and so produces "natural" outcomes that may not be wholly swell and which may require certain adjustments be made once people figure out--and god knows why it's taken this bloody long--that there are both political and ethical problems which follow from the existing arrangement in the states.
i would think something like the french model would be pretty well suited to the united states--basic health care is universal and provided free to everyone---more advanced health care is covered by mandatory insurance which is subject to a sliding fee scale--so that for the poorer segments of the population, it is free as well, but not for the more affluent. this is not a problematic situation from any viewpoint so long as you keep in mind that the objective is not to allow a so-called advanced society to have it's less affluent members subjected to poor-to-non-existent health care because of their income---or if you want to use a conservative trick--for the children of the poor to find their lives socially valued less than the lives of the children of the more affluent.
medical schools are state operations, there is no mountain of debt that you acquire to go through it.
doctors are state functionaries, so do not command whatever the market will bear as salaries.
pharmaceutical prices are strictly controlled
and whaddya know, france has one of the best health care systems in the world, and there is no compromise on research etc.
why this kind of model is not an option and only the vastly inferior english one is, i have no idea.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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