I swear I heard Barack Obama say this 100 times last year, he derided "the failed policies that got us in this mess in the first place."
During the question and answer session, someone brought up health care, which led Obama to declare, "We spend more on health care than any other nation, but we don't get better results."
Complete crap. America has the best health care in world.
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7 comments:
"America has the best healthcare in the world."
Are you high?! We have the most expensive but ours is far from the most effective.
Take a look at Canada or Britain, where health care is rationed.
Take a look at Japan where it's not rationed but 1/6th the cost of the US with much better outcomes.
So how do we get there, Phil?
By nationalizing the system and rewarding our cronies and supporters from Chicago and elsewhere?
What we have now is far better than what we'll have when the democrats finish with us.
National health expenditures rose from about 1 trillion Yen in 1965 to nearly 20 trillion Yen in 1989, or from slightly more than 5% to more than 6% of Japan's national income. In addition to cost-control problems, the system was troubled with excessive paperwork, long waits to see physicians, assembly-line care for out-patients (because few facilities made appointments), over medication, and abuse of the system because of low out-of-pocket costs to patients. Another problem is an uneven distribution of health personnel, with cities favored over rural areas.
Health care in Japan
Very true, John but if you looked beyond 19 years ago you'll notice that they left the expensive model based on the American system and went to a universal risk pool model where everyone gets health insurance and insurance companies can't rate you based on needing care. The cost of American health care is based on the fact that if you NEED the care, your rates will increase at a far greater rate than the cost of the care unless you're part of a larger risk pool (i.e. employer insurance.)
Here's an example. 37 year old male working for a small startup gets diagnosed with cancer. Health care costs for the 12 person company will triple if said 37 year old is still with the company when the contract is renegotiated.
If there were one risk pool for the whole country it wouldn't matter how big the company is the risk is averaged over the entire country so the insurance companies are competing on service and price rather than on who can cherry pick only the healthy people and drop people who need care.
Averaged over the entire population the insurance companies would know with near perfect certainty that they will make a profit even if there are people who find out they have cancer. Preventing risk pools from spanning state lines is one way our government has split up the risk population making things more expensive for us and more risky for insurance companies.
Sort of like insuring million dollar homes on the gulf coast as opposed to insuring bungalows in St. Joseph, MO if that makes sense with the exception that you can move away from the gulf coast, you can't move out of a body that just happens to have cancer.
America DOES have the best health care in the world. Fact.
America, however, may not have the best health care SYSTEM in the world.
There's a difference.
An easy way to find where people are on this issue:
If you were diagnosed with a disease and had a choice of countries in which to be treated, where would you go?
Each and every Canadian doctor I know has had the same answer, and it ain't Canada, or Cuba.
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