While The Republicans Are Stating That Canadians, Etc Are Running To The Us For Health Care Due To Their?
“socialized programs” are they forgetting that the seniors in the US are busing to Mexico and Canada for prescriptions for a 10th of the cost? And people are flying to different countries to get surgery done for a 10th of the cost? (i.e.-hip replacement, etc.) Is there something wrong with the fact that our citizens cannot afford health care (middle class) but an illegal alien gets the best maternity care? To all opposed to making any health care reforms-can you honestly say that we should not make any changes at all? Or are you rich and just don’t care?
Seniors are busing to Mexico and Canada for cheaper prescriptions. That is a problem. But people from Canada will come here to get tests that they can’t get in Canada without waiting. Women in England can’t get medication for breast cancer. We need health care reform. We need to stop giving free medical to illegal aliens when we have people in this country who can’t get free care. I think that the government should be looking into healthcare but from a different perspective. Let’s audit the health insurance companies. Let’s cap malpratice lawsuits.
I live in Massachusetts where we have to have health insurance or we will be fined. But the cost to the state has more than doubled since being put into place a few years ago.
Bottom line is that no health insurance is going to be perfect. And even with Obama’s health care there will still be people who are not insured. We need the government to step in and not allow insurance companies to cancel a policy or not give a policy if they have a preexisting condition. But if our government can’t run the Post Office how are they going to run healthcare? Not to mention all the jobs that will eventually be lost when all the insurance companies go under because they can’t compete with the government.
We should make changes, but we can do so without having to resort to socialized, universal health care. Which would you rather have:
- Quantity, not quality.
or
- Quality, not quantity.
Health care should be more affordable but we don’t need these socialized programs that will turn out to be as bad as Canada or the UK.
I don’t know any elderly people who could afford to fly to another nation for a hip replacement ! The cost of it would hardly save you anything by the time you fly there and stay until you could come back !
Getting medicine from Canada and Mexico is risky, they don’t have the same standards we do! You get what you pay for often time !
You failed to mention Canadians are coming to America to get to see a doctor when they need one.
so what. Yes, prescriptions are too expensive but is that a reason to make our health care system as bad as Canada’s? I don’t think so.
And just how much do Canada and Mexico spend on their National Defense budget?
A little louder please.
Canada is getting ready to initialize mandatory flu shots against the Swine Flu.
I woulnd’t run their for health care.
My father is a retired physician. When he was still practicing medicine he would get calls from some his golfing buddies from Bermuda and Canada asking him id he could use his connection to get them an appointment with this or that specialist in Boston, Mass. General is a perennial favorite for foreigners, or in New York.
These guys could never ever wait in line for anything but a tee time. They had lots of money and they weren’t shy about buying a second opinion from an American expert and either getting treatment in the US, for which they would pay cash (and, by the way, cash opens a lot of doors in America that patients with private health insurance couldn’t easily pry open) for all minor procedures and sometimes for the major ones too.
But this is an option for well-to-do foreigners only, and not for the average Bermudan or Canadian. So why would anyone consider that evidence of broad-based dissatisfaction of their respective health systems when it is manifestly not. If we were to adopt a single payer universal health care system in the US, then wealthy Americans would pay for concierge medical services because they have the money and they don’t like waiting for line. So why would the response of wealthy Americans to a national health care system be given any weight at all? It has nothing at all to do with the pros and cons of a single payer system.
You correctly note that the US decided decades ago to become the world’s policeman. We invest vast quantities of US tax dollars into that role and the whole industrialized world benefits. Why shouldn’t France and Italy and Spain et al be required to share in the costs of that military effort? They don’t. We subsidize the world’s security and, as a result of that and of the neocon fantasy of building outposts for the American empire in the Middle East, we don’t have the money to properly fund Social Security and Medicare and higher education in this country never mind afford a high quality single payer health care system.
For the amount of money we spend each year on total health care expenditures in the United States, about $4.2 trillion, we could have a high quality single payer insurance system for about $2 trillion per year, pay $2 trillion against the principal of the $14 national debt and pay it all off in 11 years, and have $200 billion per year left over to fund higher education.
Why can’t we do that? It doesn’t even touch the military budget. We could be well protected, well educated and enjoy high quality universal health care for not one penny more than we are spending today!
Let’s demand that our political representatives get this done immediately. Let’s solve the health care crisis, let’s solve the crushing burden of paying a $14 trillion national debt instead of bequeathing it to our kids and grand kids, and let’s fund higher education so that we can turn out mechanical and electrical engineers and research chemists and biologists and neurosurgeons and primary care physicians and economists and mathematicians and criminologists and accountants and historians and film makers and child psychologists and law enforcement personnel and all the other highly educated people to keep a society as complex as ours growing and moving forward into the 21st century.
Why not?