[Flipside]

I suppose the only thing that concerns me about the current healthcare plan is the banding system, where it only seems to apply to people below a certain wage, I can see that causing problems if it is kept.

[iamzack]

I've always kinda wondered why health insurance isn't done like car insurance.

[Flipside]

One thing that always makes me laugh is that one American paper claimed Stephen Hawking would have died under the NHS, without bothering to find out that Stephen Hawkings, despite the electronic American accent, was a student at Oxford and states emphatically that the NHS saved his life.

It's scaremongering like that which has led to much of this being farcical rather than factual, it's kind of depressing.

[iamzack]

No, it's extremely depressing. These people are ****ing with my future ability to get care outside of an ER. Ugh.

[Rhymes]

No, it's extremely depressing. These people are ****ing with my future ability to get care outside of an ER. Ugh.

Of course they are--it's politics.  Politicians are ****ing assholes like that.

[BloodEagle]

He didn't win by much last time around.

However, lots of people are calling the douchebag a hero and such nonsense. Why can't we just put all the morons on a big island together and forget about them? They'll be happy with their straight white christian only demographic, and the rest of us can work on improving civilization.

Wow. .... Just wow.

[Flipside]

It just doesn't make sense, a healthy populace is a productive populace, someone who cannot work because he has, for example, a dislocated kneecap, but is not 'at risk' because of it is screwed, he cannot be productive and earn income for the country he lives in, and because of that, he cannot get treatment for his knee, it's a Catch 22 situation. That's part of the reason the NHS was formed, because you can't earn the money to repair a problem if the problem prevents you from working.

It all just leads to people not reaching their potential because of a non-related problem, hardly the act of a country that allegedly supports bringing out the best in everyone.

Edit: I'm straight, white and Christened, though it'd be a stretch to say I match up to what many people would define as a 'Christian'.

[BlueFlames]

He didn't win by much last time around.

Sure.  Only an eight-point margin.  Barrack Obama only managed a seven-point margin over McCain in the Presidential election, and McCain literally got his primary and general election strategies reversed.  Add to this the historical precedent of the President's party (whoever the President may be) losing seats in mid-term elections, the low voter turnout in mid-term elections, and the ridiculous 90+% incumbency rate in the House (especially in mid-term elections), and this whole event, in terms of electoral politics, is a nonevent.

I don't like Joe Wilson.  I'm not defending his actions, but there's a reality here that you just need to deal with:  This is not the act that will unseat him, full-frakking-stop.

Oh, and classy endorsement of internment camps.  The Japanese-Americans of the '40's loved 'em, so why won't Whitey, right?

[McCall]

It just doesn't make sense, a healthy populace is a productive populace, someone who cannot work because he has, for example, a dislocated kneecap, but is not 'at risk' because of it is screwed, he cannot be productive and earn income for the country he lives in, and because of that, he cannot get treatment for his knee, it's a Catch 22 situation. That's part of the reason the NHS was formed, because you can't earn the money to repair a problem if the problem prevents you from working.

Don't get too excited about our NHS. They put people of working age who are temporarily incapacitated on several-month waiting lists, so they can't work that whole time. They put people with a few months to live without surgery on waiting lists longer than their life expectancy. They made a young guy who suddenly went blind wait for hours just to get checked by a doctor. They took the extra money the taxpayer stumped up and gave themselves back-dated payrises.

I'm not grabbing that stuff from the news, by the way. That's just friends, family and personal experience.

Socialised healthcare isn't peachy. Don't get your hopes high.

[Rian]

I guarantee it's still better than what we've got.

[Flipside]

Agreed, it isn't perfect, but then in my personal experience, my father was saved from a heart attack by the NHS (and, being retired, gets his blood thinning medication for free), my Uncle received a lot of treatment for Motor Neuron Disease before he died, and my partner had a damaged foetus aborted under the NHS. If there's a problem with the NHS it's not that it is too intrusive, it's that it is under-funded and under-staffed, and that's mainly bought about by bureaucracy. What is needed is more commitment and less waste, but that's not the fault of NHS alone.

[General Battuta]

Statistically NHS works far better than the US system. Statistics>anecdotes!

[Flipside]

Exactly, it's like when someone is going in for an operation, there's always a horror story of one that went wrong, but people tend to focus on that one, and forget the tens of thousands of times the operation has been performed perfectly well.

[McCall]

Agreed, it isn't perfect, but then in my personal experience, my father was saved from a heart attack by the NHS (and, being retired, gets his blood thinning medication for free), my Uncle received a lot of treatment for Motor Neuron Disease before he died, and my partner had a damaged foetus aborted under the NHS. If there's a problem with the NHS it's not that it is too intrusive, it's that it is under-funded and under-staffed, and that's mainly bought about by bureaucracy. What is needed is more commitment and less waste, but that's not the fault of NHS alone.

Under-funded and under-staffed? It's got a £100 billion budget and is the third largest employer in the world. It is pretty well resourced, unfortunately it is inefficient and the clients (us) take the piss. Actually, people really badly abuse the NHS, using ambulances as taxies, elective surgery, sueing, that kind of crap. It doesn't help.

As for anecdotes<stats... you can sit at the other side of the pond looking at numbers all you like; some of us have that little thing called experience. Beats the crap out of book-learning any day. Ask any honest statistician (that has left college).

One last point: the NHS isn't free. A chunk of the population gets their wages confiscated to pay for it. The rights and wrongs of that are another story, but please don't anyone pretend it's free.

[Flipside]

Consdering half of the US is complaining about having to pay for their own health system, I think it would be kind of hard to forget that it's paid for in the UK with taxes. And no, I don't think that's wrong, and I'm happy to pay.

Yes, people abuse the system, but as for the funding, I disagree, a LOT of that money goes into the wages of people who perform no medical function in the NHS whatsoever, the funding isn't going to medical causes to nearly the degree it should be, it's going in administration and management which is growing to the point of becoming excess baggage.

Anecdotes are the realm of the Daily Mirror, not proper analysis of the system.

[The E]

As for anecdotes<stats... you can sit at the other side of the pond looking at numbers all you like; some of us have that little thing called experience. Beats the crap out of book-learning any day. Ask any honest statistician (that has left college).

Hmm. So, my Grandmother, who has lived through some serious **** in her time and survived it with not so much as a scratch, and thus has some experience living, is a better source of medical advice (or advice on anything, really) just because of her experience?

Sorry, but facts (cold and hard ones, backed by statistics and studies and book learning and all that) beat personal experience any time.

[IceFire]

Basically I see it this way...and this is one of the few issues where I really cannot see the other side (so I do apologise to those who strongly feel the other way).  The US system as is, from what I know and have seen of it, is basically immoral from the standpoint of preserving life and ensuring that everyone gets reasonable access to healthcare.  They have made it into an industry that requires potentially huge sums of money from people who can scarcely afford it.  On top of that, statistically, the system is no more efficient and in many cases spends far more money per capita than the systems in the UK and Canada.  When the goal is to make money then every effort will be to make money and consequently its not nearly as much about the actual people involved.

A national health care system, such as the system in Canada or the system in the UK (both of which are different), largely ensures that people are taken care of which is the whole point.  Neither are perfect and people slip through the cracks and believe me I know that there are major improvements still needed.  But comparing the two...there is no question in my mind which is right and fair for people.

I still think its bizarre that people could possibly be upset with paying taxes but then are just as happy to shell out loads of cash for health insurance to a private corporation.  Neither are optimal really...but I find the attitude to be difficult to comprehend.  I can only assume that in the US the reaction to the word "taxes" is programmed in at an early age to cause instant revulsion.

[Akalabeth Angel]

I still think its bizarre that people could possibly be upset with paying taxes but then are just as happy to shell out loads of cash for health insurance to a private corporation.  Neither are optimal really...but I find the attitude to be difficult to comprehend.  I can only assume that in the US the reaction to the word "taxes" is programmed in at an early age to cause instant revulsion.

Taxes = Socialism = Communism = the Devil Incarnate.

Or at least that's my take on the US mentality.
God knows what they're thinking.

I'll pay my 60 bucks a month for universal health care thankyou.

[SpardaSon21]

I'm going to come out and say that the problems McCall described with NHS are problems all government programs tend to develop.  The bureaucracy bloats, spending rises to meet the needs of the bureaucracy, and in hard times services are cut so administrators can keep their cushy jobs.  My state, California, spends over $9,000 per pupil in school spending and almost none of it reaches the classroom.  There is also little incentive to keep costs down since more money can always be had from the taxpayers.

[General Battuta]

Agreed, it isn't perfect, but then in my personal experience, my father was saved from a heart attack by the NHS (and, being retired, gets his blood thinning medication for free), my Uncle received a lot of treatment for Motor Neuron Disease before he died, and my partner had a damaged foetus aborted under the NHS. If there's a problem with the NHS it's not that it is too intrusive, it's that it is under-funded and under-staffed, and that's mainly bought about by bureaucracy. What is needed is more commitment and less waste, but that's not the fault of NHS alone.

Under-funded and under-staffed? It's got a £100 billion budget and is the third largest employer in the world. It is pretty well resourced, unfortunately it is inefficient and the clients (us) take the piss. Actually, people really badly abuse the NHS, using ambulances as taxies, elective surgery, sueing, that kind of crap. It doesn't help.

As for anecdotes<stats... you can sit at the other side of the pond looking at numbers all you like; some of us have that little thing called experience. Beats the crap out of book-learning any day. Ask any honest statistician (that has left college).

Statistics are collections of lots of anecdotes, the precise opposite of book learning. Enough anecdotes to actually mean something.

Any honest statistician would agree.

I'm going to come out and say that the problems McCall described with NHS are problems all government programs tend to develop.  The bureaucracy bloats, spending rises to meet the needs of the bureaucracy, and in hard times services are cut so administrators can keep their cushy jobs.  My state, California, spends over $9,000 per pupil in school spending and almost none of it reaches the classroom.  There is also little incentive to keep costs down since more money can always be had from the taxpayers.

And yet the European system is still demonstrably more effective.

Moreover the above described problems don't seem any different from the way corporations work.