You have broken it down then. When people's health and lives are at the expense of cost-benifit analysis, you know we have a bad system. In universal health care she would have been treated because in such a system profit is not a priority. Her only crime was that she was an American and not British, French, or Norwegian.

Despite your (perhaps understandable) contempt for the state, the example of a nation like Norway and France are evidence that universal government health care works. Of course you are able to point to issues (just as you may with any non-perfect system), but at least people don't die because someone wants to widen their profit margins.

In actuality, the private system in the United States is very inefficient, consisting of up to 30% of expenditures going to overhead. Socialized medicine on the other hand (let us use Canada as an example) runs around 1-2% overhead (yes, the scary government red-tape and bureaucracy, 1%!).

So I ask you, why experiment with savings accounts and perverted versions of privatized health care when we can just implement something that has been observed to work?

WOW, the so-called gov't run system in this country has allowed sex-change operations and other cosmetic procedures, so that is not the case. Again this all goes to the whole system of third party pay. By putting the financial responsiblity in some one elses hands we all have lost the control of what treatment costs.

As a healthcare worker my concern over a universal system is a price and wage control. In my field, laboratory, there is a shortage of workers, as a result I am able to obtain a higher salary than normal, supply and demand is at work here. With a government mandated system I would lose that advantage, and would also lose that pay increase I now get to stay put. So yes, I have a vested interest in how the system works, so I will fight against it. But remember this famous little maxim, YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

dmk

I don't know what your salary compares to that of someone in an equivalent position in a state-run system, so I guess I am not able to comment directly on this issue. But as far as I have seen, doctors in state systems like Britain's NHS are provided for quite well, enough to live comfortably in million-dollar homes in the nice part of London. However, I don't doubt that surgeons and doctors here in the United States are compensated much more liberally.

This, however, is exactly the reason why the governments of France and Norway (and perhaps others) hire government ethicists (yes, official state philosophers ). I think the philosophy behind a functioning society should put the basics before the luxuries. I find it very unethical that hospitals should be opening with marble floors, giant flat-screen televisions lining the walls, and doctors living in multi-million dollar homes while millions of Americans still go without the basics. It is very unethical that we should value profit margins at the consequence of the fact that 18,000 people die every year because they don't have health insurance, and more because they have health insurance that chooses not to cover their care, and even more that find themselves bankrupt because they had successive heart attacks.

Some people see it as 'unfair' that someone should pay (in taxes) for someone else's care. But I think what is more unfair is that people should be punished for getting sick. It is not unfair that your taxes should go to a universal health care system, because that same health care is there when you need it. Everyone gets sick.

This paragraph struck me as odd...You say it's fair to tax someone heavily to pay for another person's health care who may or may not have paid into the system because not to do so is "punishing" them for being sick. But you don't think that cutting into the income of those that are taxed heaviest isn't punishing them for working hard? I'd be more willing to reward the hard worker than those that didn't pay into the system.

My last encounter with the US healthcare system showed me that a system of price control is already in place. The hospital bill was almost 40,000 USD, but my private insurance paid the providers less than 5,000 USD as per a contract between all the various medical providers and the insurance company. Your idea that your pay and position are somehow threatened by a government insurance program is an illusion. The private insurance providers have already installed a system of price controls, and are based on profits. Stockholders, corporate executives, and accountants are in control of this process. Your raise is dependent upon in part to the profit that insurance providers demand from the hospital you work for.

It is far from as simple as you paint it, fx. The vast majority of the people suffering from this system are the workers, while those who continue to benifit are the bourgeoisie. Not paying for someone's care isn't what I was referring to as punishment, the punishment inherent in the system is that a retired middle-class couple who worked hard their entire lives have to go bankrupt, move in with their sons or daughters, and come out of retirement to work at some lousy supermarket just to be able to afford medicine and hospital visits, all punishment for the fact that one of them happened to have successive heart-attacks. Or, in the extreme example (albeit very numerous, unfortunately), someone has to die because their insurance wont cover the costs of their treatment, or they don't have insurance at all.

What you are expressing represents the true problem with health care in America. It isn't just an institutional problem, but a problem with the entire philosophy. It is a basic philosophy of a functioning and civilized society that taking care of the whole is equally important to taking care of the individual. In that, countries like Canada and Britain see it as a given that society should provide something as basic as health care to its citizens. Unfortunately, in America, as you express, the consumer now takes precedent over the citizen. You'd rather thousands of people die, and millions suffer, simply so that you don't suffer the horrible thought of taxes. Incidentally, like our health care system, our tax system favors unequally the rich over the middle class and poor; reform that and we can still pay for health care with actually a smaller tax burden on the middle-class.

Well the answer to that IMHO can be solved by a program like the FDIC and a system of controls that makes sure an insurance comapny can't drop or increase the premiums on a sick beneficiary. Every insurance company pays into the system to make sure that if an insurance company goes under the people will still have some coverage or another company can pick them up at the same or better coverage level. That way nothing is given away and everyone if still protected.
Did you read my plan that I thunk up?

We can all complain, but coming up with a workable solution is the hard part.

http://www.defendingthetruth.com/hea...tml#post148797 (Ideas on how to fix health care...)

I'm open to suggestions criticisms.