I'm not sure what the point of this thread is?
The Personal Cost of Health Care, then listings of financial statistics of other countires, then the USA with question marks?
If paying a little extra to enable the less fortunate to received adequete Medical care is a big issue to you then I can only summise you're an uncarring and greedy fool.

I was baiting psychoak, not trying to reassure anyone. I suspect he understands that I'm in part more 'conservative' than many ditto-heads. For example, I don't care nearly as much about which party controls the White House as I do about the fact that the 20th century saw a slow, steady shift of power from the legislature to the executive, which I believe to be antithetical to both our historical rhetoric about our Revolution and our current claims to be 'leader of the free world.'

I voted for Obama, but I have not spent much time watching presidents on TV since Bush 41. We are not a monarchy. Our chief executive is simply the senior bureaucrat unless we are formally at war, which hasn't happened since the middle of the last century, mainly on account of our sackless national legislature being unable either to rein in the imperial presidency or put their cards on the table and declare war.

@Aroddo: apologies for more or less aiding the threadjacking. I can only say that I've had an unpleasant relationship to cost-benefit analysis since I learned you could specialize in it, mainly on account of important abstract things like love, liberty, honor, and morality being effectively immune to mathematical tools. For some of us in this debate, part of the "personal cost" comes from things like empathizing with an un- or under-insured person, classical 'liberal guilt,' and anger at having witnessed one of those unfortunate instances when a 'wallet biopsy' did indeed provide the deciding factor in a triage decision.

America has been on borrowed time with health for a long time. Its one of the detractors of a purely capitalist society. Balance is the key, not blind greed.

I had a doctor tell me recently that a lot of people thought doctors are useless and don't need to exist. He said "you know most things just fix themselves" that is to say if people are willing to lose weight and change habits.

I disagree somewhat.... but think if you look back in time that even though life expectancy was shorter, unless their was a plague health was not so bad. They worked themselves to death but had a healthy life for the most part.

Its the big problems like bullet wounds and specialist help that we need doctors for..

Hey if someone has the energy you could do the numbers of Finland.

At least i would be interested to see that

I said I was baiting you, and I don't give Obama "a pass on every dumb shit thing he's said," although we doubtless have many disagreements on what particular utterances are dumb shit. And my conviction that Ms. Palin is perhaps irreparably under-educated isn't the point behind me poking your ribs here. I was just hoping to see if you might lay down a screed on the evils of the imperial presidency from a 'conservative' point of view.

Sure I, I like that, but it's because I believe that the 'leadership' of both major parties is a toadies' train wreck spawned by our structurally dysfunctional 'two party system.' I'm just not a fan of damning entire classes of people unless they actually all share the class-defining trait, e.g. child molesters. As a lapsed anarchist who cut his political teeth during the Reagan era, I'm completely and utterly tired of gov't-is-the-problem arguments. Food causes problems also, but we can't do without it either, at least until we pass some technological or evolutionary milestone. Check back with me when you've figured out a way to stop making people form groups that use violence as a political and/or economic tool, and then maybe we can talk about life without gov't.

That sincere rant aside, yes, I really do like watching the idiocy of the beautifully balkanized 'national' GOP pour money down that fiscal conservative sinkhole. It's almost as amusing as watching Democrats try to explain why they had no idea that some Acorn crews were ripe for a RICO indictment. (As a partisan, my only consolation there is to join Jon Stewart in mocking the not-so-investigative 'journalists' we have around today. Really, where the fuck were they? Waiting on Matt Drudge? No, wait, it took some preppy in bad pimp drag and a bimbo to do it...)

Somehow I figured this thread would be about what the US should do with the health system. Oh well, head above the parapet.

I develop medical software for hospitals in the UK (not anything to do with the national program for IT/connecting for health, before people start throwing fruit...), and I have to say the National Health System here really does meet all the bureaucratic stereotypes. Everything is slow moving and tied in red tape and paperwork, and you frequently have to deal with useless people on one hand and empire builders on the other.

But, I don't think I know of anyone who would get rid of it. Some want to run it using competitive market principles to some extent, but there is basically no political opposition to continued free healthcare for all. Now I'm certainly not saying a monolith like the NHS is the right solution, but government involvement in providing healthcare is definitely a good thing.

You prove my point.  Beaurocracy comes with size.  The bigger it is, the more layers it needs.  The cure for beaurocracy is obviously smaller, not larger.  Our solution is instead to take a few hundred insurance companies and condense them into one?  Unless you're one of the idiots that really thinks a tax payer subsidized public option is going to compete, and not kill private insurance, that has to be the end result you're expecting.

Insurance companies measuring policy holders in the tens of thousands instead of millions would be just fine.  That's more than enough of a cross section to spread out catastrophic coverage, and actually small enough to manage efficiently without the guy at the top losing his hair over it.  All we need to do is get Uncle-Fuck-Me-in-the-Ass to take down the entry barriers it put up to protect the existing, horribly broken framework that it created.

Our big companies need to go away, instead of getting bailouts and forming cabals, conveniently ignored by Uncle, to stay alive.

Necessary evils, restricted to the bare necessities.  A government run health care industry is not a necessary evil, it's just damning outselves to do it.

What's not to understand?  The politicians retire into consultation positions where they get paid millions to do nothing after they leave office.  I'm sure there will be plenty of current White House officials and congressmen that end up working for GE.  They fixed the lightbulb game for them, are giving them all kinds of goodies in the stimulus and environmental bills, and have so far ignored the illegal activities they are obviously up to with retain chains.  All those stores that have isle after isle of nothing but GE products aren't just unable to find competing brands.  Only part of that will be payback for the media coverage they got for the last election cycle.

To play that game with small businesses, you have to line the pockets of a whole bunch of them, there's more risk of things like jail.

By the less derogatory definition, yes I would be broad-brushing.  By the secondary, I'll take one from the numerous agencies they've set up and assume guilt until they prove their innocence.  I don't consider everyone that runs for office to be a politician, but you can't find a single one of them in a leadership position that isn't dirty.  The only problem we have is our media never reports on it.  Hastert, that fucking putz, was as dirty as it got, and we never heard a word of it till after he left.  It's common practice to buy land and then put a road through it in the highway bill.  It's so common practice that he made millions doing just that and no one cares.

The primary, older definition, is anyone experienced in government or doing the business of government.  The secondary, less politically correct definition, is any dirtbag that decides politics is a good profession to be in, as opposed to the actual job they're elected to.  You can look at any dictionary worth a damn and find both.

People in political office, while not being politicians, would be those contrarian bastards that break the mold by not promoting themselves instead of their constituents.  Palin may be one of those depending on just how stupid she is.  I'm at a loss for whether her actions are at all intelligent or just the workings of a broken mind.  It's possible she's a brilliant politician, it's possible she actually means what she says, and it's possible, perhaps in combination with the previous, that she's the stereotypical valley girl.  Her work in Alaska was spot on for avoiding the label of politician, she hung her own party out to dry, and rammed through legislation that cost her quite a bit personally when the shitstorm of nuissance suits hit upon her rise to the national stage.  Cheney might be at this point, but he definitely started out as a politician, he's rubbing too many people the wrong way to be concerned about a career. I'm pretty sure Bush wasn't a politician as well, just too fucking stupid for the job, but he should have known how bad he was hosing the country with that last bit of nonsense so I doubt my original conclusion at this point.  Despite my pessimism, believing someone to be that stupid just isn't working.

The guy that votes no against every bill with an earmark in it is not a politician, that's the only sure one I can think of at the national level.  When I dedided I'd rather just kill the lot of them than try sorting through things, I stopped paying attention to who was and wasn't sane in congress.  There are plenty of them, but only an idiot or a masochist like me would willingly go to D.C. without being a dirtbag at this point, so finding them past the state level will take effort.

Just so I don't get accused of what would be obvious were I a party line republican, I don't agree with anyone I listed.  The guy that votes no all the time sticks his nose into moral affairs the federal government has zero business being in, I never can remember his name.  Palin is a wishy washy moderate that went on record wanting to expand the equally unconstitutional federal programs for developmentally challenged children, something I could live with if she continued to get dirty republicans thrown in jail.  Cheney is a hard line big government type, typical of the core establishment in the republican party, an attribute I loath above all but corruption.  If it weren't simply present in larger quantities among the democratic party, I'd have somewhere to run to besides the slightly crazy libertarians.  As it is I identify as a republican purely because the alternative sucks more.  I'd rather vote for Satan's little brother than waste my vote on a third stringer aiming for 2% of the electorate and help elect the big cheese himself.

When I find more than one or two politicians a decade that I don't want to personally castrate with a dull butter knife after just a couple years in office, I'll join in your optimism.

I've yet to come up with a solution for the female politicians, especially since my traditional upbringing is severely reinforced by my own sexist views and I can't imagine hitting one...

How is all that hope and change anyway?