Lexin wrote:
Funny, that. Both here and on livejournal I have come across
several
people in the US who won't go to their doctor - if they have one -
for

"HealthNutz" wrote:
"Several" people? A whole several out of close to 300 million. Damn!
I
guess we'll have to just become socialists in order to care for those
last
two folks...

The fact that there is *anyone* in an advanced and wealthy country like
the US claiming that they can't afford basic medical care is worrying,
at least to my mind. And one of those was working, but at a job which
didn't include medical insurance as a benefit and which was so low paid
she couldn't afford hit herself. Not didn't want to pay, but couldn't.
I felt that, really, in a country such as the US, her employers should
pay for the insurance, but apparently they couldn't afford it or
wouldn't.

When "the government" does it for you, it ALWAYS includes the unfought
inefficiencies of any bureaucracy.

And when the service is provided by private industry it includes the
inefficiencies of private bureaucracy. Administration of medical care
and insurance services is unavoidable and expensive, it makes little
difference whether it's private or public - except that when it's
private you get many more bureaucrats, because each private company has
to have their own. This even spreads as far as having their own company
lawyers. I do know that in the UK (for example) all legal services for
the whole of three government departments, one of them being health, is
provided by about the same number as can be employed by one very much
smaller private company. And legal services ain't cheap.

I once had the pleasure of having dinner with a top NHS executive (a
Chief Executive of a major city hospital, and a very pleasant and funny
bloke) and a selection of other executives, including ones from private
companies involved in support services. In response to questioning from
a group of students they had to admit that privatisation of hospital
services such as cleaning and catering probably hadn't saved the UK
taxpayer a single penny. And, IMO, those services in hospitals now are
worse than they were when they were publicly provided, the staff
providing them are paid less, and have poorer job security. The theory
that private companies could provide these services cheaper and better
because they had an eye to the bottom line - which was what we were
told - simply hasn't been borne out by experience. Which was what the
public service unions said at the time, only the government of the day
didn't want to listen.

Just like American social security. For
each $1 that goes in the top, about $0.26 is dispensed to the
recipients.
That's ALWAYS how unaccountable bureaucracies work.

Where do you get these figures from? I wonder because social
security - in both the US usage of the term and the different European
usage - is something I happen to know a great deal about (social
security systems and how they compare across countries was the subject
of my masters degree) and I don't recall seeing those figures before.

There are other reasons for the high-cost of medical care; fear (of
being
sued) and others. But it's the freeloaders on society that impose the
high
price on all of us.

More likely it's the multiplicity of service providers in the form of
insurers which all have separate bureaucracies in the form of
administration.

I pay for my family and my own medical insurance,

So do I, only it comes out of my wages in the form of taxes and national
insurance. Besides, how is someone very elderly supposed to pay for
medical insurance? It's fine for someone young, who's working and can
take care of themselves in the way you espouse but I wonder what you'd
think if your parents were elderly and in poor health - they have
medicaid and the like, and thus would be among those 'freeloaders' you
castigate. By the time people are elderly and in poor health and need
medical services, their insurance premiums have long gone into some
company executive's house in the country.

That's not freedom for me, that's enforced, indentured servitude.

Well, yes. But they so is working for an employer as soon as you have a
mortgage or a car loan. It's life, live with it.

I'm delighted that they've been captured and are now down there.

Even the ones who haven't done anything?
Of course.

And that, guilty or not, consulates attached to their home countries are
having difficulties gaining access to them and organising legal
representation - the plight of three of the detainees who have British
citizenship made the news the other day. As far as representation is
concerned, they're entitled to it whether guilty or not because without
that decent representation we can never know whether they're guilty or
not.

In the face of atrocity (in this case an IRA bomb which killed several
people) public hysteria and the understandable desperation of law
enforcers to have something to show for their efforts led to the
miscarriages of justice known as the "Guildford Four" and the
"Birmingham Six" - people who spent several years in prison for
something they hadn't done. In the case of the Birmingham Six, had we
had the death penalty they would have died so strong was public opinion
against them. I wouldn't want that kind of thing to happen again in my
country, and I don't want to see it happen in anyone else's.

If we don't go in; and we're
uncaring, clueless, unfeeling assholes. If we go in; and it's to
rape,
plunder, murder innocent (gun-toting) citizens, and grab all the oil &
mineral rights as we wrap up yet another imperial conquest. As the
saying
goes, we can't win for losin'...

That's the price you pay for being the most powerful country in the
world. Like a parent, you can never be right, and it's something you
have to learn to live with.

--
Lexin
www.redrosepress.co.uk
www.livejournal.com/~lexin
LC since 9 June 2003
(300/263/182)