[Vwdiesel] Gas/diesel prices

[Kneale Brownson]

Get the lawyers out of the doctors' offices and hospitals and our health care costs would diminish drastically.

Patrick Dolan <pmdolan at sasktel.net> wrote:  I have worked with that question (sick care systems) quite a bit, and have to point out that in the US, something like 60+% of people ARE covered by government sick care (medicare, medicaid, VA, etc). The problem with the US system is not one of a medical nature, it is one of culture. It is the "legal liability lottery" and the "creed of greed" that more than double the costs associated.

Don't asume everything is rosy here in the Great White North. You could sit on a waiting list until you die, or you could get decent service - the luck of the draw. Same story in the UK. The reason France is fairly good (I would hardly consider Michael Moore any kind of credible source, but i this case, it is somewhat true) is that govenment does NOT monopolize service delivery, which they DO in both the UK and Canada (based on the UK system).

Government has a role to play in health care, but not sick care. To explain: the old saw "you get what you pay for" could never be more true. With almost ALL systems today - government or private - the medical profession doesn't make any serious money until you are sick or injured. As a result, they are "inteventionists" featuring drug pushing as a door to instant reward. What government CAN do is mandate insurance, provide a competitive environment for service delivery (from either state-owned OR private sources, as is done in most of Europe). By mandating and regulating, insurance providers should either step up to the plate or lose their industry to government as a last resort - threaten that and they will come to heal immediately. Even in the incredibly flawed US system, you can get the best sick care in the world. The problem is that there is NOT a "free market" but that all business exists inside of a regulatory framework. You can blame the mess of the US syste
m on government and its ineptitude at setting a workable regulatory and taxation platform.

Health care is a matter of nutrition and lifestyle, and can be accomplished from an accurate basis of information distribution (and maybe tax-based dissincentives - sin tax, fat tax, etc.). This SHOULD be the function of government - to be a credible and reliable source of such information and policies. What we DO do better than most in Canada is health care information, but it suffers horribly by living in the shadow of the US.

----- Original Message -----
From: William J Toensing 
Date: Friday, May 30, 2008 3:48 am
Subject: [Vwdiesel] Gas/diesel prices

> Dave Cook asks the question, what can government do better than 
> private industry. In Michael Moore's movie "SicKo", France has the 
> best medical care delivery system. In my opinion, western European 
> & Canadian "socialized medicine" are superior to ours which is the 
> most costly in the world & still privately run with 40% overhead, 
> much of which is devoted to seeing how many medical claims they 
> can deny along with paying 7 figure salaries to CEOs to see how 
> much profit they can reap from human misery. We should extend 
> Medicare to everyone.
> Social Security only has a 3% overhead. No private insurance 
> company can come close. OASI, Old Age & Survivors Insurance 
> commonly known as Social Security covers much more than a pension 
> for retirement, so to compare it to other pension plans is like 
> comparing apples with oranges.
> Our current administration is trying its best to prove government 
> can't function efficiently. That doesn't mean government can't do 
> things efficiently. I would sure hate to replace our government 
> no toll road system with a toll road system like they have around 
> Chicago & the eastern part of the USA. I can think of many things 
> government does better as well as it does worse, but time doesn't 
> permit. I just don't agree with the assumption that government is 
> ALWAYS more inefficient than private enterprise.
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