1) That has no bearing on this discussion. Why people leave a country for political reasons or human rights has ZERO relevance to a discussion of whether or not their health care system is any good or not.

2) http://www.aneki.com/lowest_mortality.html

Attached is a table of infant mortality - as can be seen, the US is doing far worse than nations like Canada, Australia, and dozens of others. 3.44/1000 versus 6.63/1000 is a huge difference.

Now, before you say "Well, the US has a lot of immigrants and that skews our results" well I offer this:

"General Facts about Recent US immigration

The total number of immigrants per year (including illegal and refugees) is somewhat less than it was in the peak years at the start of the 20th century, when the US population was less half as large its current population. The rate of US immigration relative to the population is low rather than high. US immigration as a proportion of population is about a third of what is was in the peak years.

The foreign-born population of the US is 9.5 percent of the total population (in 2000). This can be compared to the 2000's proportions of 22.7 in Australia; 16 percent in Canada; 6.3 in France; 7.3 in Germany; 3.9 percent in Great Britain; and 5.7 in Sweden."

I can tell you, as a Canadian living in Toronto, the majority of our immigrants are now coming from places like Jamaica, Pakistan, Lebanon, and Central America along with China - not places well known for their great health care.

Back on the story about the kid and the rattlesnake bite costing 120k there is another important thing to consider.

Insurance companies set up contracts with the doctors, hospitals, etc that they work with that establish limits on how much the doc or hospital can charge for certain goods and services. For example, they might have an agreement that x-rays will cost $50. If I go get an x-ray, the original bill sent to my insurance company might be $75. My insurance company takes that and checks it with their contracts and the bill gets adjusted down to $50. That's great for me and my insurance company, but what about the uninsured guy? If he gets charged the full $75. WTF? He gets screwed twice. If the kid's insurance would have covered it, chances are the bill would have been a LOT cheaper overall.

Laws requiring employers to offer employees coverage also have plenty of loopholes that can be exploited. Before we were married, my wife lost her covereage because she got sick. She couldn't work for a month and therefore she average hr/wk was reduced below the minimum amount needed to have coverage. What the fuck is right about that?

I've heard a few stories like that - someone is working hard, good employee, etc - they get sick and insurance gets pulled out from under them, even people with cancer.

kma -- i'm going to attempt to reply to all of your statements without quoting as to avoid overly long entries, sorry in advance if i miss something.

the idea that government never manages anything better than the private sector can is an opinion, i happen to feel otherwise. I'm not going to attempt to argue that the private sector might produce produces a cheaper product -- i think arguments against this can be made but I find them somewhat pointless, when people's lives are at stake I don't want the cheapest product, i want the best product. I think that there are institutes where profit should not be the main motivator. I don't want the fire dept distracted by how much money they'll be making if they put out my house fire. I don't want educators worrying about how much profit teaching my child could bring in and i don't want health care professionals worry about weather saving my life is worth it from an economic stand point. I think people in general deserve a right to safety, education and good health regardless of economic status and I worry that when such institutes are privatized their function becomes a secondary concern after profit. the advantage of government institutions is that profit is not a main motivator. note that I am not arguing that the private sector won't give us a cheaper product, they probably would, but i feel that the product will be lesser in quality and not universally available. I think we can see this in the health care programs that we have now.

You're right, we differ greatly on these opinions.

BTW - I do not put Fire/Police/Military/etc under the "should be private column". Those are considered "public goods" and are impossible to privatize (i.e. who would you charge and how much, etc).

I put education under both columns. There are many cases where private schools outperform public schools (such is the case here in Colorado).

I also don't think that you will be given "the best product" with universal healthcare. From my understanding, you don't have a lot of choice when it comes to a universal system.

"Britain's National Health Service generally will not provide kidney dialysis for people over 55. Yet Medicare subsidizes dialysis for more than 200,000 people, whose average age is 63." - Roger LeRoy Miller, Economist

Socialized Medicine Leaves A Bad Taste in Patient's Mouths

but we could go on and on and on about this.

Bottom Line: I will always oppose Universal Healthcare in the U.S. (unless someone designs a better mousetrap--which isn't available now) and I will always vote against any candidate that supports this idea.

I am, and will always be, against "socializing" anything.

highthief,

That information is two years old. There is more current information available (my link).

Actually, privatized fire departments are becoming quite common. In southern Scottsdale the fire department is run by Rural/Metro. They are a private firm that has a contract with the city and other cities.

http://www.ruralmetro.com

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/7623/v33.html

I see your point, but that sounds like ambulance service not Fire/Rescue.

They are mostly ambulance but in many places they are fire/rescue also

What link? I gave the same mortality stats you did of 6.63/1000...

An interesting link: http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2...4_complete.pdf

Norway, Sweden, Canada and Australia ranks above the US in many places there.

I was looking at your link (2002 data) and didn't read the next sentence close enough.

I would like to find (been looking-can't find it) a breakdown of the causes of death. I think that would be very telling, but highly off-topic.

In a way, I sort-of question the Cuba statistics because they are derived from the Cuba Ministry of Health. Past performance tells me to be wary of information released as factual by Castro's regime. That being said, I cannot say for certain, if they are correct or not.

Fair enough but even disregarding Cuba (having been there, they do take care of their citizens basic needs of health care and education about 10 times better than any other Caribean island but yeah, their information isn't always solid )- other nations comparable to the US (industrialized, even higher immigration rates and with socialized medicine) are doing considerably better in terms of infant mortality than the US is.

Dude! That's 300 pages long!

Any chance of a bit of cut and paste to get to the point?

Information on US infant mortality causes. Congenital problems such as heart defects are number 1. Low birthweight is number 2 and SIDs is number 3.

White and hispanic women have roughly the same odds of having their infant survive to childhood, black women somewhat less so with low birthweight being the main difference (though black women with equal educations to white women have roughly the same odds of having a low birthweight baby).

Obviously, contributing factors to low birthweight imay nclude drug use and poor nutrition.

http://www.acu.edu:9090/~armstrongl/...y/inf_mort.htm

Sidenote - it costs that much because anti-venom is terrifically expensive to make. There is not a synthetic compound that can replace the snake venom portion. Each time a snake is milked, you don't even get enough venom to account for a dose of anti-venom. Then the venom is injected into a horse and antibodies are produced. It takes a long time. A snake bite and weekend in the hospital is not just a shot or two of anti-venom. It is many shots over several days, each costing thousands of dollers. Add to that the possibility of intensive care unit quality life support because your heart and lungs may also have been paralyzed and a probably medivac since time is such an issue, not to mention profits for insurance. So, it's really expensive. God bless the Discovery Channel for teaching me this.

On the main topic, there was a huge discussion about this (state-sponsored health care) on another forum. A poster there pointed out that one reason health care costs are soaring and quality is not rising at the same pace is that there is an inherent difficulty in systems in which the consumer is not directly billed. Meaning, when a third party (like your HMO) gets involved and the care provider is responsible to that third party and not to the consumer, value (quality to cost) will suffer. This jives well with my experience of the world. I regret that the man who posted this orignially is both much smarter than I and a better writer, so I am sure I haven't done his idea justice.

Page 139 and forward has the interesting bits.