[...]Socialized Health Care: The Communist Dream and the Soviet Reality | Foundation for Economic Education[...]…

Okay lets think of this orphan in Finland.
- the state pays his home and food and living = state loses money
After that the state pays his education.
- the state loses money.
After that he gets sick.
- the state pays and loses money.
He gets driven over by drunk driver
- the state pays and loses money.
Now in a good ( pretty average ) situation. The kids reads his way through high school which is paid by the state and with a good luck he ends up as for example. as a surgeon.
- the surgeon salaries here are about way over 6’000e for a month.
So lets think the doc gets that 6 000 and the taxes are about 35%-40% with that salary. So the state gets about 2’400e in a month.

The guy works for 40 years until retires . 2’400 x 12 x 40= 1’152’000.
So the state gets about over billion euros for saving this guys life.
As when what the state paid for all the things can get up to 500 000 ( I’m guessing haven’t checked ) but it’s pretty pocket change compared to 1’152’000.

Give me ONE instance where government meddling in business has made it better. Governments kill businesses – they don’t create businesses and they certainly don’t improve them.<<< //karl (copy=]

Give me ONE instance where government meddling in business has made it better. Governments kill businesses – they don’t create businesses and they certainly don’t improve them.

the reason for the US healthcare high cost is from too much government
regulation, mandates that insurance companies have to follow, high cost of malpractice insurance, having to cover the millions of illegal immigrants that use the emergency rooms and neverpay, etc…..

to put it plainly, socialism doesn’t work, never has worked, and will never work. if someone wants this kind of life and believes it works, then move to an already established socialist utopia and leave the perils of the capitalist, free market society and the freedom that this
brings, to those of us (majority) that think this is the greatest system and country in the world.

Absolutely ridiculous! Here in Canada they don’t even bother with the bed pan. Just put them in a diaper and tell them to go in their pants. NO JOKE! Of course not all nurses and doctors are bad. And I actually DO think there are some good things about publicly funded Canadian Health Care. But there are a LOT of bad sides to it too. My best friend’s grandma went into the hospital sick and never left. My friend, even many months later flatly states, “The hospital killed my grandma.”

At the hospital the nurses took away her beeper (or whatever those things are called to call a nurse) because she kept asking for help to go to the bathroom or for a bed pan. She had a stomach flu (the kind where everything goes right through you). The nurses had better things to do than help a sick grandma to the bathroom or clean up a bed pan. Before she got into the hospital, she could walk on her own, had no mental health issues to speak of, and was quite healthy. But a few weeks in our public funded hospitals and she could no longer walk. Not to mention she was in a group room with other sick people, so just when she’d start getting better, she’d get sick again.

They took her beeper away. So she shouted. It had been many hours since she’d gone and a number of hours since she NEEDED to go. Finally one of the nurses came, but instead of helping her to the bathroom or giving her a bed pan, she put the elderly woman in a diaper and told her to go in that, then walked away and didn’t come back the rest of the afternoon. My friend and her mother were horrified at the terrible treatment their mother/grandmother received. Having gone into the hospital with a bad stomach flu, two and a half weeks later, she DIED in her hospital bed. My friend and her mother said that after the first few days of being there, they watched their mother/grandmother completely lose her will to live, her dignity, her spirit, her self worth and hope. Even months later, my friend is adamant that the hospital literally killed her grandma with how poorly they treated her.

My dad is in his fifties and has bad knees. He’s needed two knee replacements for over 5 years now, but the doctors and government refuse because he’s too young. That means, “We don’t want to give you knee replacements until you’re more likely to die in another decade or two. That way we won’t have to give you new ones when they wear out.” And there’s no private care to speak of, so he’s screwed and left hobbling to work every day on crutches.

You wouldn’t believe the crazy tiny things people go into the hospital for. “My kid has the sniffles.” or “He has a fever!” or “He scraped his knee.” It’s insane, and REALLY bad if the parent is prone to blow everything out of proportion. But it doesn’t cost them anything, so they take the littlest things to the hospital ER. On good days, if it’s not life-threateningly serious (stopping someone from dying obviously and rightfully is more important than dealing with a broken bone), wait times can be as short as an hour or two. But more often it isn’t uncommon to be more like 6 hours. One of my friends passed out in the ER with her lips and hands blue because she was having a bad asthma attack, couldn’t breath, and was unable to find her inhaler (medicine). Obviously when she hit the floor and we called for help, THEN she got help.

Up here we have hospital beds in hallways because there aren’t enough rooms. We have high tech equipment sitting unused for days on end while there are hundreds of people waiting to be checked out with it. There’s no where NEAR enough nurses and doctors! Barely enough to cover serious emergencies let alone non-life threatening things. People in need of critical transplants and other “elective surgeries” (which means you’re not dying this second so you can wait). We’re talking waiting lists of 3+ years for all kinds of important surgery.

When my dad injured his somewhat-good knee by accident at a sports game, it was 5 months before he could even have an expert LOOK at it, never mind the extra 3 months to get a freakin X-ray.

Here in British Columbia, Canada, we pay 12% sales tax on everything we purchase. Doesn’t matter what it is. That’s on top of all the other hidden and not so hidden taxes we pay.

There are certainly some nice things about our health care. Like it’s nice not having to worry about paying for an ambulance when you call 9-1-1. And it’s nice not having to pay a bill every time you need to visit your family doctor. And prescription drugs don’t cost nearly as much up here as in the US. But even our government is now saying that our system is broken and looking south at the United States for ideas on how to improve it. “What’s this thing called private health care?…” Obviously since I live in Canada and haven’t experienced the US’s health care set up I can’t properly compare it to ours. But one thing is for sure. Just like public education, public health care is a never ending black hole for money. Sometimes you scratch your head and wonder how so much money can just disappear into the void.

Maybe if we had private health insurance or something for those that can afford it and public for those that can’t. Sounds like a good compromise, but there’s no doubt other problems like unfair competition. But it’s gotta be better than a monopoly where you get what you get and get no (or little) say in the matter.

I got through about half of it, before my brain became filled trying to link the reasoning of the author. If you are trying to compare health care or service, please look at the changes between pre-1917, Marxist Russia, and finally post-1990 (when democracy has taken over).

The biggest change between pre-1917 and Marxist Russia is the technology and understanding of medicine in this era. You comment on specialised services that are administered and controlled by hospitals such as mamograms, the technology for which did not exist in OLD RUSSIA as you comment. Particularly, it seems that you are trying to measure doctor based services with hospital based procedures of which you could make the same comparison and the same conclusions within the US system.

Your ill thought out, illogical argument serves as no use other than serve your own benefits.

For the record, since the beauty that is the US democratic system has arrived in Russia, their life expectancy rates are falling and are worse now than when they were in the Red Curtain era.
There is some truth and fact that you can argue.

If the current system truly looked more like a market with competitive firms, I would be outraged at the control being placed on the system. But it doesn’t, and hasn’t for almost a decade.