That is just inaccurate.  I went to the ER with a broken hand and foot (after a martial arts tournament), I had x-rays, pain meds, and taken of and the actual bill was way less a thousand dollars. 

 

Yeah, but they'll have a great tan from their med school training!

Some resources:

Great website with short documentaries, lots of research, and numerous links regarding the Canadian healthcare system and its many problems.


Man needs brain surgery for malignant tumor, ~8 month wait in Canada (free + lifetime of taxes), 4 weeks in US ($28,000).


Research on single-payer healthcare.


Man has fist-size hole in skull after car crash. Waits one year for skull reconstruction (Toronto Star).


From 1974 to 2003, 462,000 Scots have died from lack of "timely and effective health care." Scotland has one of the highest avoidable death rates in western Europe.


Don't have much else to add at the moment, but thought some people might enjoy looking some of that over.

Exactly!

 

One way to control costs, for sure. And I would dare say that it is a problem with the system.

Unless you are poor and struggling to make ends meet. I would argue that WalMart has done more for our poorest families than any Government programs.

And you blame WalMart for that? Ask the average lower-middle class mother of 3 or 4 kids whether that bothers her. I find that WalMart's biggest critics are people who wouldn't (and don't) set foot in the place.

Far as I know, WalMart didn't write the rules. And if that is to be the standard, businesses should hire noone who receives government assistance of any kind (wouldn't want to subsidize profits, would we?), which would narrow the pool of workers just a tad, say by half.

The phrase "instead of" is where you fall into the pit of false assumptions. The information about government assistance is not in lieu of compensation. WalMart pays what people are willing to work for. If there were no government assistance programs, WalMart would still pay what people are willing to work for. Sounds like government assistance is the problem, not WalMart. They at least are helping their employees learn about their "rights." You'd rather they not do that?

I wouldn't use the word blame. I would use the word credit. Kudos to Walmart for setting up such a structure in the first place.

Should the government have to subsidize Walmart employees? Not at all.  But that's the problem with liberals - they operate on emotion and never seem to figure out the unintended consequences of their policies. 

Even now, liberals are screaming for universal healthcare without any seeming grasp of the logical conclusion should they get their way - lowered costs to businesses. A massive corporate subsidy.

Get rid of government aid to low income families and WalMart would be forced to pay higher. 

Last time I checked Loca, nobody has to work at Wal-Mart.  Like most jobs in the U.S. you are free to work where you want.  Why do you always have to blame someone else?

I agree that it is not fair but it is part of our social obligation to help those that can not help themselves. If a citizen is ill or injured and can not afford the health care needed to mend then we as good citizens should pick up the tab. My gripe is that we are doing it for ever Tom Dick and Harry that is not a citizen which is one of the reasons why things are so expensive.

It was Senator Kennedy that brought about health insurance for the masses in the form of HMO’s, this was THE THING to save us all from high health costs. Twenty years later Senator Kennedy cried that the HMO’s were taking advantage of people and we need a new system to save all of us from high health costs. Translation: his fix did not work so he has a new fix that won’t work. Because the insurance companies are not fully entrenched in the health care industry costs have done nothing but go up. If we socialize medicine and medical care the costs will drop like a rock but we will be back where we were before the HMO’s got involved. We will see people turned away because the government can’t pay for the procedure, examples would be Japan, Canada, and Great Briton with Japan being in the best shape but they charge a 40% tax on your income in order to provide free health care. This in a country where a melon cost 75 dollars and a cup of coffee costs you five dollars if you get the cheap kind. I am basing this off of when I lived in Japan in the magical 80’s before their economy collapsed again.

My point is that if the free market continues to be managed by politics rather than free market forces we will continue to have rising health care costs. When the market place is left on its own prices stabilize to an affordable level. When the government gets its hands in the mix the price goes up dramatically.

How do we fix this? Bite the bullet and costs will go down. The first things to eliminate are the lawsuits. If a doctor is bad get him out of the profession. The malpractice insurance will drop like a rock and sixty percent of the cost of health care with it. Two grand a day to stay in a hospital is outrageous I can get a hotel room for three hundred dollars a day and get ill and the concierge will have a doctor in my room within the hour who will treat me for a minor illness and they will add a hundred bucks to my bill. But when a hospital has to spend eighteen million a year on insurance you better believe they are going to charge two grand a day plus fifty dollars for an aspirin and twenty dollars for a plastic cup to drink water from. The actual cost for a patient in a hospital is roughly 150 to 200 a day, insurance for the hospital, and a separate policy for the doctor and one for the nurse kick up the cost. Then you have tests that have to be done to protect the doctor that rack up a hefty fee. Tests you don’t need, tests the doctor knows you don’t need but he needs to protect himself from trial lawyers that will ask if he had done this test might the patient not been injured? The doctor will have to answer yes and lose the case and his profession because no insurance company will touch him again. The hospital will get sued if they don’t have the most up to date equipment to run these tests even if last years model does the same thing as this years model only three minutes faster.

A doctor just out of med school makes between 95 and 150 an hour, between his malpractice insurance and his student loans, he makes enough to afford a used car for the first 8 to eight years and not live in the best of areas. My girlfriend is an ICU nurse which is how I got the information.

The next thing we have to do is reduce the cost of education. Charging 50 grand a year to go to school for 7 years racks up a huge debt on the student. It is not so much the cost to education it is the cost of the classes you have to take that mean nothing to your chosen profession. They did away with ethics but make you take humanities and a host of classes no one needs but they don’t cost much to the school and they charge a premium price. Now days everyone is demanding a college degree for even the simplest of professions. A prison guard needs a college degree. All he has to do is count the inmates and report when the numbers don’t match. For this he has to have two years of college just to get the job and promise to get his bachelors degree within five years. And since he as a degree he needs more money to pay for it and his salary goes up and then your taxes go up.
If you are a doctor, or an engineer a college degree is a good thing. Case in point look at all the people saved by medicine, oh wait, most of the medical advances are made by high school drop outs, well we have engineers, oh wait, the titanic was designed by college graduates and Microsoft was created by a college drop out. Anyway a college degree is a good thing. My son has several of them to prove it.

My point is we demand so much education that we price ourselves out of business.