Comments about ‘U.S. trails rest of world in health care’

I call baloney on this entire article! For anyone who believes it, I suggest you go to Mexico, or Cuba for your next doctor visit! Go to Canada if you don't mind waiting in line! I don't have any idea where the US ranks but it sure isn't anywhere close to where this article says! Baloney galore!

All the costs for these proposals have to come from somewhere. We are in a phase of spend now, find money later. It is high time that the lawmakers find ways to pay for all these grandiose schemes before throwing trillions of dollars at problems they don't even understand.

Before spending more moeny, something else must happen first. Nothing can change with the healthcare industry until the health insurers lobby is reined in. They are extremely well financed and their incentive is to maintain the status quo, because they are making money hand over fist right now.

It is not the doctors driving up costs, it is health insurance executives that receive obscene salary and benefits packages. Insurers must be taken out of a position where they can exercise undue influence over lawmakers.

Also, doctors are leaving primary care in droves (up to 50% of family physicians want to quit or retire in the next ten years because of rising work loads and falling salaries).

Absolutely no proposals can work if there are not primary care doctors around in sufficient quantities to see all of these uninsured patients who will get coverage. This must be fixed ASAP!

Baloney doesn't want to accept facts or do his own research. Obviously he has been fed too much balogne!

To baloney:
You're the guy who's putting his fingers in his ears, shouting "I can't hear you! I can't hear you!"
I haven't been to Mexico or Canada for healthcare. I do know that in Germany, you get quality care quickly and cheaply.
Something needs to change in the US. Healthcare costs continue to rise, and calling other people liars won't help things.
You're two steps away from losing healthcare. First, you develop a disease. Maybe you just have a mini-stroke. Second, you lose your job and can't find another one that offers healthcare benefits. No private insurance company will take you because of your medical history. Now all it takes is for you to get sick, and there goes your house, your life savings, and everything else.

Single payer health coverage eliminates unnecessary, greedy, amoral middlemen and utilizes efficiencies of scale. Everyone in one plan with one set of rules (instead of divided and conquered as we are now in myriads of plans where no one knows who is paying how much for what and we're all paying vastly disparate amounts) would create transparency and SAVE at least $370 Billion/year in wasted bureaucratic overhead alone, plus millions of innocent and currently devastated lives. Public health coverage utilizing private care providers would be the best economic stimulous we could possibly engineer, and wins all moral and fiscal arguments. Plus finally we could see any licensed provider if we were all united for our best interests. We pay for uninsured now, only too much.

With one out of every four Americans trapped in our private unsurance system currently rationed to zero with wait times until after it's too late, we win all the booby prizes for both rationing and wait times by FAR (especially in our emergency rooms where wait times are most critical).

Everyone who has done their homework as well as every civilized nation on Earth but ours knows this.

America spends a lot MORE than other industrialized countries on health care, and yet gets a lot LESS health in return.

The current system is bankrupting our economy. Companies are spending more on health insurance for their employees than they are doing the thing they're actually in business to do. Case in point, GM spends more per car sold on employee health care insurance than it does on the steel in the car.

Employees are not participating in the job market to seek work that best suites their abilities because they can't obtain health insurance because fewer and fewer employers, especially startups, are able to provide it.

There's no such thing as "free market" principles in health care, so can we please drop the inane arguments about "socialized" medicine?

We need national, single-payer health care NOW.

The U.S. system is very inefficient and does a poor job in distributing health care. The need is off the charts. Take, for example, the weekend free health care clinics offered last year in Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. People would could not afford or otherwise obtain health insurance were flooding to these clinics. The stories were heartbreaking. There is a great need. And those who denigrate other countries, I would rather wait for a non-emergency procedure than never have it for lack of insurance. Bureaucrats in insurance companies make medical decisions now, some of which defy the doctors. No, our system needs serious reform. For a change, let's put the needs of those who are not well off ahead of corporate profits. That is really what the debate is all about.

We already have "socialized" highways, parks, libraries, schools, fire/police/military/child protection, health coverage for everyone over 65, and lots of other things that were never mentioned in the Constitution (anything we work together on for the Good of the Whole), and we're not a "socialized" nation yet. Nor would we become one if we created health care justice and eliminated legal discriination against sick people in America.
Our health unsurance system profits by price gouging healthy Americans, denying desperately needed medical care to sick ones, and is unnecessarily and obscenely expensive as well as ANTI-SOCIAL. It pits doctors against patients, small businesses against larger ones, employers against employees, and everyone against everyone. If we all united, chipped in together to make sure medical bills are paid, eliminated unnecessary middlemen (like Medicare and Amish do here now), we would not have to continuously sue each other over who pays medical bills, save hundreds of billions of dollars and millions of innocent wasted lives.

Private health insurance is to Health Care Justice as Al Qaeda is to National Security or KKK is to Civil Rights. Its interests are perverse and contrary to ours.

It's an interesting dilemma,we want healthcare to be available to all. We also want the best healthcare possible. Usually, one or the other has to give. The UK has a 50% survival rate with prostate cancer. The US has a 85% survival rate. The technology is available to both countries but due to cost cutting, one does not take advantage.

Personally, I'm afraid of what will happen to both our pharmaceutical and medical advances once the only nation in the world to actually invest in that type of R&D goes to a model where those who invest will never recoup their costs.

I'm not a fan of equal access to healthcare that never gets better. Perhaps the richest nation in the world should continue to help everyone else in this arena. We fund so many advances that are now available here and in many other countries. No one else will spend the money to improve healthcare. I guess it's up to us.

How pleased are all of you with DMV, SSI, HUD, HEW,
DEPT. AG, IRS, ATF, DEA, Dept Energy, BLM, DOT. etc,
etc, etc. If you think that placing the complexity of the doctor/patient relationship, will improve,controlled by a faceless, bean counting bureacrat, in WA.D.C. I do believe you are delusional.

Private health insurance companies & pharmaceutical companies have too much power, thanks to their lobbyists and big contributions to members of Congress. We'll see if Congress has the courage to do the right thing and rein them in.

Cosmo and Baloney don't seem to understand and their 'see no evil' mentality is something they will never get over -- until they are without health insurance and need medical care. That is what happened to my Bush-loving "socialized medicine' former military brother-in-law. He got two cancers at once, then got laid off, then couldn't afford COBRA. All of a sudden, he is very much in favor of Medicare For All. The lesson here: Selfish motives trump all ideology. I doubt anyone will ever convince Cosmo or Baloney with facts. The only delusional people in this thread are those who, like Cosmo and Baloney, are unable to see facts until they are personally hit in the face with them.

I have a right to the very best life.

Freedom from all bad things, mishaps, and misfortune.

Please...protect me from pain and trial.

Do not allow me to fail (or succeed)

This is my right...my entitlement.

Enslave me and keep me safe.

Take all I have or don't have but keep me fed.

Amen

If you think keeping an opaque unsurance non-system that puts profits before people and money before morality in between us and our doctors is working, then you are delusional. Now we are at the mercy of a faceless, bean-counting, money-grubbing bureaucrat that has NONE. I'll take someone whose allegiance is supposed to be to the people in place of one who is only loyal to profits any time.

Yea Chris Doherty.

The right to health care is the same as the right to life, not the very best life but rather life or death. It's extremely ironic for anyone who professes to care about lives that are not yet born to not give a crap about those very same lives once they are out of a womb.

And if you think we're not paying for the uninsured now, only paying far more than by any rights we should be because they end up far sicker than by any rights they should, you would be wrong again.

Baloney is right. Our leaders are in the process, they have been for decades, to nationalize our health care system. when the job is complete we will see how the smug leftists like what they have created. The govt. fails at every thing they try, with few exceptions. there is virtually nothing the private sector can't do more efficiently and better. The government will ruin our wonderful health care system, we should pray for better personal health going forward.

"Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions." - John Locke, whose writings helped inspire a portion of the Declaration of Independence

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." - Thomas Jefferson, and others, in the Declaration of Independence

18,314 American LIVES are lost each year at the hands of corrupt/greedy health insurance providers. (Institute of Medicine statistic) Don't stand for this in America. America is better than that.

Every time I hear someone claim that health care is a right I cringe. Rights don't cost money, and you don't need other people to provide them for you. Health care is a service that must be paid for somehow. We can argue about different models to pay for it, but don't call it a right.

The argument is really about how to ration health care. Should we have government beaurocrats decide if we can get care or is it better to have insurance executives decide? Do we want to wait our turn for care, or should we let those who can pay the most jump to the front of the line?

The advantage of a free market is when you introduce profit motive everyone benefits. For example, the Canadian government makes you wait in line (days, months?) for an MRI because those things are expensive. In the US, if people will pay lots of money for an MRI scan, then smart entrepreneurs will figure out cheaper ways to build and utilize them. It's a win-win: the entrepreneur profits, and more people have access to MRI.

Chris is right. Our health care system is utterly unbelievable. My wife recently sat with my ailing mother-in-law in a doctor's office for 2 hours waiting for His Majesty to deign to see them for 5 minutes while he did business with his golf buddies over his cell phone. It was audible.