My search for non-ideological healthcare information may be futile.

beez

One of the big problems, IMHO, is how BO and the Clever Dems decided that just the middle class or the rich should pay for health care for the 47 million uninsured! Why?

That is why this is doomed. Why should my taxes go up and my husband’s salary down (if they are going to tax his health benefits) and why should my doctor take a cut in pay just for those 47 million? This should have been a BENEFIT for EVERYONE–just like social security and medicare–then I think it would have had a better chance of gaining support because there’s a real need for reform.

But remember–Obama has always been against universal health care. He spent at least $6 million blasing Hillary just on this one topic.

And if he makes backroom deals with Billy Tauzin, that’s change you can believe in….

Doctors in Canada can decide whether to take patients covered by the public system and get paid the public rate, or take patients privately and get no remuneration from the public system. Doctors are forbidden, by law, from double dipping. In other words, they can’t take the payment from medicare and then ask their patients to pay a surcharge or extra billing. There are some private clinics for relatively low risk surgeries and cosmetic surgeries. Unfortunately, these clinics are subsidized anyway,because in the event of post operative complications, the patients most likely get dumped back into the public system.

Almost all doctors in Canada operate as private individuals who bill Medicare. Very few have decided to go outside the system, because the system gives them the ability to treat anyone who walks through the door without having to check their abilitly to pay, and without have the difficulty of collecting fees. This way, doctors can concentrate on helping patients, and refusing poor people and chasing others for payment.

The French system is a hodge-podge, with a bureaucracy worthy of the French, and I certainly wouldn’t suggest it become the American model. Which is precisely why investors.com chose for their discussion about universal healthcare. Investors.com was using the straw man argument technique, and attacking all the weakness in the French system, without dealing in any serious way with the weaknesses in the American system. Even when the investors.com article deals with specifics, such as infant mortality rates in France and America, it implies that if the French would gather their statistics the same way America does, that America and France would have similar rates of infant mortality, but this is not so. Changing the way the data is calculated would not raise the French rate to anywhere near the American one.

Investors.com could have talked about how Americans spend much more on healthcare than other OECD countries, including France. According to the OECD, America spends more than any other OECD country per person.

- UNITED STATES, per person, in 2007, $7,290.00
- FRANCE, per person, in 2007, $3,601.00

France provides excellent healthcare for all its citizens for about half of what America spends to leave 44 million people uninsured.

Here is the OECD website address for the 2007 figures.
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/2/38980580.pdf

The French system is a hodge-podge, with a bureaucracy worthy of the French, and I certainly wouldn’t suggest it become the American model. Which is precisely why investors.com chose for their discussion about universal healthcare. Investors.com was using the straw man argument technique, and attacking all the weakness in the French system, without dealing in any serious way with the weaknesses in the American system. Even when the investors.com article deals with specifics, such as infant mortality rates in France and America, it implies that if the French would gather their statistics the same way America does, that America and France would have similar rates of infant mortality, but this is not so. Changing the way the data is calculated would not raise the French rate to anywhere near the American one.

Investors.com could have talked about how Americans spend much more on healthcare than other OECD countries, including France. According to the OECD, America spends more than any other OECD country per person.

- UNITED STATES, per person, in 2007, $7,290.00
- FRANCE, per person, in 2007, $3,601.00

France provides excellent healthcare for all its citizens for about half of what America spends to leave 44 million people uninsured.

Here is the OECD website address for the 2007 figures.
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/2/38980580.pdf

And regarding your last thought about gun shot injuries–I don’t see that mentioned anywhere when people discuss “end of life” issues. In fact Rahm Emanual’s bro thinks that x number of teens = one old person. But what about the teenage gang banger with 6 gun shot wounds who takes $75 thousand to get patched up? A lefty paper (East Bay Express) out of Berkeley did a bug study last year that these gang bangers are bankrupting Highland hospital in Oakland.

This is a BIG issue that needs to be planned not cobbled together by congress people beholden to their lobbyists.

Here is an overview of the French system (which I do not think would be a good American model – I think either a single payer system like Canada has, or a regulated insurance system like Switzerland has would be better).
http://www.frenchentree.com/fe-health/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=197