Whatcha gonna do with all of those folks who aren't quite poor enough to qualify for government assistance... yet can't afford private insurance either and need to be treated for cancer here though Hank?

I bet a lot of lower income folks would rather take their chances on a waiting list... than be told outright "You can't be treated because you don't have medical insurance"... like you Repugnicans would prefer to do.

Hankster: I can C&P all kinds of nonpartisan studies that show Canadians get better care than us, but previous posts were railing about their cost. Bottom line is thay pay considerably less than we do on a per person basis. So, the question is,if their system will bankpupt them and ours cost more per person than theirs, wouldn't it also bankrupt us to keep our system as it was?

FP... put down the Limbaugh Letter and step away from the keyboard.

Yeah, people will get emergency treatment and be billed... but cancer treatment is a very expensive, long-term deal and NO doctor or hospital is gonna treat you if you can't demonstrate an ability to pay.

AntiM... clueless as ever.

You get free health care and you continually want to deny it to others.

Centrist my ass... you're a farkin' wingnut... plain and simple.

Just to toss a few facts into the equation. Canada and the U.S. spend roughly the same percentage on administration. We are a bit higher at 38% Canada is at about 34%

I know one person well who has been forced to declare bankrupcy because of medical bills. She has worked full time since graduating high school. Has damn few luxuries and tried desperatly to pay her medical bills. Four major surgeries in six years simply overwhelmed her ability to pay.

Yeah, she is off the hook for the bills now, but not before the hospitals took all her savings. And no they woud NOT agree to a payment plan. They could see that owing $120,000 she would never be able to pay it off. She had numerous harassing phone calls both to her home and at work. Spent many nights in tears. Now her credit is ruined. Is that how the famous oath is supposed to work?

BTW I have many Canadian friends and have actually recieved care in Canada myself They are all happy with the care they recieve. (I was at a conference last month where many attendees were Canadian. I made a point to ask several how they liked thier system. They were happy, but felt it was underfunded.) I was very pleased with the care I recieved and the speed it was administered.

One good friend from Canada has some major health issues. He once told me,"If I ever get really sick while I am here, please drag my ass over the border as soon as possible.

She did not have a retirement account, as is often the case with folks at small firms. Her husband does have a small IRA and he did keep it. They live in an aprartment. They had a house and sold it, in part to free up money to pay her medical bills.The hospital indeed did take every penney in her personal saving account, money she had really scrimped to save for her son's college. It wasn't much, but it realy hurt to see it taken.

You apparently made several assumptions that were quite incorrect. Maybe you shouldn't assume so much.

Yeah, she got treatment in spite of not having insurance. (Although many of the bills came when she had inadequate insurance.) But that is most certainly not any way to run a health care system. People shouldn't have to declare bankrupcy just because they get sick.

She had been saving about $200 per month, by doing without many things a lot of us take for granted - movies, dining out etc. Health insurance before she got sick would have been more than $600 per month, after her disease became known she couldn't get insurance for any price. You know that preexisting condition thingy.

Like others you seem to assume things not in existence. My "friend" is my adult daughter. She has FAP - look it up if you care. She worked at a small CPA firm after Safeco closed her division in a cost saving move. The CPA firm had fair health insurance when she went to work there. Then, because it was too costly they dropped the insurance in favor of an employee medical savings plan. She contributed the maximum possible. That was more than wiped out by her first surgery.

I honestly can’t see what else she could do. She quit the CPA firm to take a job that paid $15,000 a year less, but had decent health insurance. By then she owed so much there was no way she could pay it. She tried to work out some sort of payment plan but the hospital wasn't interested and there were still surgeons, anesthesiologist and a bunch of other in line. She really did not want to declare bankruptcy, but saw no other option. To me that is a broken system.

I spend a fair amount of time in Canada and EVERY SINGLE Canadian over the age of 60 has said their system sucks. THEY HATE IT.

That is because for older folks they are losing their benefits. The most difficult thing for the older Canadian is their ability to come down here and stay for awhile is hampered not by Immigration, but by the cost of buying insurance to cover them out of the country. Not so bad for younger folks, but for those over 60 the cost is very expensive.

AM: I dont think I chided you. I'm pretty sure that if do you will know it.

I pointed out she was my daughter so folks would know that this is not a hypothetical and I really do know what happened.

I am not a big fan of Obama care, but now my daughter will get health care without facing bankruptcy. I wanted universal, single payer, coverage, but the big money interests killed that.

The old system was awful. The new may be no better. So what are we to do? I pointed out yesterday that our care on a per capita basis is still higher than Canada’s. Yes, I can prove that. So the question remains what is the solution.?Sure tort reform might help a bit, but no rational person can possibly think that’s all we need. What do we need to have affordable health care for our people without bankrupting us? If the only answer is rationing care, and it may well be, how do we do that. The old system did it by neglect and by accident. Is there a better way? What is it?

Any Canuck that says it sucks is because they've never had to pay out of pocket. They're suddenly being hit with co-pays and surcharges because of budget cuts. I've NEVER met ANYONE with government healthcare that would rather pay out of pocket.

...Only some wingnut asswipe teat-sucking parasites that don't want anyone else to enjoy the benefits they themselves enjoy, or professional couch-sitters enjoying the fruits of their SPOUSES military careers and now acting as internet experts on why gov't healthcare should be denied to OTHER fat lazy old women.

Aunty M,
Your present coverage most likely was not earned. More likely you and your spouse earned the promise of health care, which we must now aborb at a much higher rate than anticipated. It is now left up to the younger generations to payoff the promises of their parents. I am not saying you do not deserve what you are getting, but to think that you earned it and the next generation earn their own too is just plain wrong. Not only are they stuck paying a deliberating sum for their own insurance, they are also burdened with paying a large percentage of the generation before them. Most people have no idea what health care really costs. I remember one year when the local teachers union was complaining about their insurance costs which went up $15.00 a month. Little did they know I had the same insurance and mine went up over $200 a month.

The problem is not THEM, it's US...

The problem is not SICK UNINSURED people, it's (surprisingly) HEALTHY RICH white people

Sure the politicians are corrupt, and tort reform would help a bit, but the heavy lifting of health-care spending is because people cannot deal with their own mortality. The real money saver is -- yup -- death panels. I'm entirely serious. Obnoxious and axe-grinding name aside, we all need to get to terms with the fact that there ain't none of us getting out of here alive... Just like oil drilling (which we've driven into way more technically demanding/costly locations), we now have incredibly expensive technically demanding remedies available to us, and we want every f'n one of them exhausted on our loved ones. That's understandable, but it's the problem. Just like our insatiable appetite for cheap gasoline.

And the real drain on healthcare $$$'s? Rich white people who live long lives. Everyone blames the poor/uninsured, but it's a great sound bite that misses the majority of the pie. The reality is the sick and high-health-risk lifestyle folks (obese, smoke 2 packs a day) cost us less, because they exit the system early. It's 30 extra years, all after retirement, of prescription drugs, costly tests, and exotic treatments which are the REAL expenses.

My point is that if you blame OTHERS, you are missing the point.

We have seen the problem, and it is US.

Yep folks there ya have it.

Just go ahead and off yourself,......it's best for the planet

So the question remains,......why not just speed up the process? Which one of ya is going to be first?

Better yet,.......why don't we just start sterilizing people? The European socialists thought it was a great idea in the 30's and 40's.

Wait a minute though,.......the ponzi schemes won't work.

Oh well,....back to the drawing board

To be clear, my point is that the solution lies in us changing our own habits, expectations and behaviors...

This is much harder than just voting out the politicians, and it's 1000x harder than just TALKING about voting out the politicians...

Like other things, we're addicted to our current life, and yet it's unsustainable. Healthcare, cheap gasoline/energy, cheap-wild-caught fish, you name it.

Aunty,
I think you missed my point. It's not that the insurance was not earned. It was. The problem is that the generation making the promises cut all the corners towards funding those promises. This same generation is the same one that benefited (noice that I am not blaming them for it, just saying they benifitted) from building dams, clear cutting our forests, polluting our waters, not building adequate infrastucture and schools and otherwise raping the world. Now as this generations ages they continue to look at the next generation and complain about how lazly they are and how they need to work harder to fix the problems. From impact fees to increased social security taxes, more and more of the burden is being passed on. In the history of the world, I do not think there had ever been a generation of people who have left their children with a future that is has less potential. Of course, they still think its their lazy childrens fault. I know someone of this generation that was raised in welfare and after working several years, was injured and moved onto SSI and other government programs. As a child she lived in a house with no running water and little food. Society and its programs now provide her with better medical than I can afford, a very nice apartment with a fireplace, community pool and club house, cable tv, a old but usable car, and enough food to easily survive. It is my beleif that all of the baby boomer generation had life style increases similar that were simply afforded by living during this time period. Now that it is time to pay the piper, they are all trying to find some way to pass the burden on to their children.

You may not want to live to 100,..... and I may not either,......that's not the point. The point is that it's utterly ridiculous to assume that in order to solve the problem of increasing medical expenses that we need a central authority to pass decisions on just how long an individual has the right to live. Such things are the policies of facsist and communist dictatorships. Especially when there are so many other viable alternatives,......most of them detailed very well by FishPrince.

Your family's decision to limit yourselves to one child is a personal choice. A personal reproductive choice that should also not be infringed upon by some monolithic central authority. I would note however,.......that to continue the ponzi scheme of the younger generations paying for the benfits of the older generations there must be enough tax paying workers. To simplify the equation, continuing equal population numbers from generation to generation would require each individual to reproduce another individiual, or each couple has 2 children. That, in a nut shell, describes the problem we see in this country with the enormous number of retiring Boomers and too few tax paying workers to keep the system afloat.

Growing population numbers are hardly something to be worried about IMO. To put it in perspective consider this;

In 2010 the world population is estimated to be around 6.8 billion people. The state of Texas covers roughly 268,601 square miles which equates to 171,604,950 acres. There are 43,560 square feet in an acre which means that Texas consists of 7,475,111,622,000 (trillion) square feet. This means that not only could the entirety of the world's population fit inside the state of Texas. It means that each individual in the entire world would have their very own 1,099 square foot patch of land within the state of Texas. Roughly a small apartment.

This shoud give this post a few more pages.

The reason the Canadian economy is doing better than ours is they have strong unions that assure workers a living wage, which in turn gives workers the buying power to keep the economy strong.

Maybe its the open boarders within the commonwealth that is bringing in foreigners with lots of money.

Ahhh the ole "living wage" argument.

Well,....by that reasoning why not just increase the national minimum wage to $20/hr.

Should do wonders for the unemployment numbers

That ain't it...

They don't have near as many brain-dead, hate-mongerin', teabaggin', Beck worshippin', racist, right-wing simpletons as we do... so there's no one for the rich corporatists to manipulate into consistently votin' against their own self-interest.