you MUST have insurance.

And in large parts of the country, you effectively MUST have a car if you want access to decent jobs. The US ain't Europe, good public transit is limited to a few cities.

Given that you are forced to buy it and given how useful a car is, it's a mandate and the analogy is close enough. The fact that they're different types of insurance is irrelevant to the point.

Agreed on buying it with gas. I believe one state tried that, and was sued by the insurers.

If I cough in your face and you get sick, you can't do shit about it. There is no equivalent to liablity in health insurance. If I (or my bank) wants to protect my (their) investment in the car, then I buy collision, but that is not a mandate.

Driving is a privelege. Requiring liability is reasonable. Are you saying that living is a privelege?

They are opposite types of insurance, so the analogy fails.

The universe doesn't owe you anything... accept it.

Societies form to care for their sick because doing so makes the society stronger. If caring for the sick made a society weaker, then regimes like Sparta would conquer weaker regimes like Athens...

...hey wait a minute...

Seriously, tho... single payer has its downsides. I like the Singapore "single-payer" model best: everybody gets $1500 per year for health care from the government. More than that they have to pay out of pocket. In the event of major surgery, your medical account is drained first, then government subsidies kick in. But, if you're a hypochondriac who wants a CAT scan every month, guess what? You're paying, bud... You can also buy supplemental insurance, but its less common and much less expensive.

If you live a long healthy life, you'll have $100,000 in the bank to leave to your kids... but other than that, you can never touch that money. Ever ever ever.

--
http://bexhuff.com
Of COURSE you can trust the US Government! Just ask the Indians.

...that it takes no time to go through $1500 for legitimate reasons. Most of us pay a minimum of $2500 a year in premiums alone.

I believe Americans spend more per person on medical insurance paperwork than Canadians do for medical care.

Plus, that's $1500 per person, including your children. Most people would spend less than $500 per year, so by the time they hit 50 and might need an expensive surgery, they have $50k to play with.

--
http://bexhuff.com
Of COURSE you can trust the US Government! Just ask the Indians.

...than $1500 a year in monthly premiums for just myself and fifty is still quite a ways off for me. Healthcare is beaucoup expensive in the States, and that's kinda the way insurance companies want it.

Then so is liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Thanks, I was a little unclear on that point.

...are too proud to do anything the way they do it in "Commie Denmark."

I really think if we want a solution to this problem, we need to focus on what the people can stomach, like laws that restrict the conditions in which companies can deny claims. Breaking the AMA and allowing colleges to open new medical schools would help too.

...was kind of slow, but they're not really on the wrong side anymore. These days, they're lobbying against legislation that passed for their apparent benefit, but with no success. The benefit actually accrued to the HMOs and insurance companies. There's still a fight with "doctor-owned" hospitals (like Kaiser) and the AMA is losing clout among doctors as a result.

There is no other country. Only the USA. I think Canada is a state?

Forget it, Jake - it's AmnesiaTown

...I would actually call myself a social democrat, and I'm quite anti-capitalist on some issues, but I accept the facts of American society, and the key fact is we are individualistic. For many of us, the ability to choose our own doctor is a more basic right than the surety of coverage. It may not be what's best for us, but don't go around pretending the log-cabin mentality is an integral part of the American psyche.

"the ability to choose our own doctor"

What makes you believe you loose this choice under, universal, single payer? I've been in two, UK & Belgium, and I chose my doctor, always. My wife lived in Canada for many years, and she chose her own doctor. In medicare you choose your own doctor.

I though of writing something stronger, instead I'm really curious from where you get this strange belief?

Another is that you'll spend half your lifetime waiting for authorization to perform a life-saving procedure. Or that waiting times in hospital emergency rooms will be interminable. Or that life-saving drugs won't be approved by "official" channels.

I have an alcoholic friend in Denmark whose doctor visits him at home. In the good old USA, he'd be uninsurable and probably dead.

...an HMO, like most Americans nowadays. To get any service whatsoever, you must go to your "gatekeeper" physician first, and they will decide--on the company's behalf-- whether you really need this service.

Sure, you can "choose" who this is: from a list of about a half a dozen doctors.

freedom to choose my doctor than many Americans. I can go to ANY doctor who's accepting new patients and he or she will take me. ANY doctor. Not just doctors who accept my insurance plan, or if I'm on an HMO, an HMO doctor.

This is a pure MYTH.

...but I don't live in Canada like you. I know the American mood and mein. I have these conversations with conservative friends all the time. They won't hear any proposal that doesn't allow them to "own" their insurance. Anything that is percieved as limiting freedom--at least in economic terms--is DOA in the public square. All I said above is that any health care reform needs to contain elements that are politically palatable to the people who live in the country. Our values are different from the rest of ther industrialized world; there's no use hiding from reality. Universal coverage is not a near-off reality; we need to focus on what can actually get done.

The specter of losing choice under universal health insurance in America is almost palpable here. Telling people what it's really like in your country is not going to change that.

it is a FACT that you have more choice in physicians in Canada and almost every other single payer system. It's a FACT. If Americans are so brainwashed that they won't listen to FACTs then I don't know what to do, but I will say this: I'm not going to stop telling them the FACTs. Perhaps if more people told other Americans the FACTs, Americans would know the FACTs.

This is the key problem with US discourse--that Americans live in a fantasy world where Saddamn was behind 9/11, Iran has a nuclear program, single payer is more expensive, single payer has less choice, the US has more income mobility than other nations (it has the least of all western nations) and so on.

You can't make good decisions when you don't have the FACTs. So instead of saying "Americans won't ever believe the FACTs" we should concentrate on getting the facts out.

And full universal healthcare was very close a couple times in the US - both in the 30's and the early 70's.

When conservatives see a popular program they hate, they campaign against it till the public perception changes. In the 70's it would have been impossible to repeal Glass-Steagall, for example, by the 90's it was easy. Likewise if they want policies enacted that wouldn't be possible, they campaign for them.

Democrats and progressives, they just say "oh well, the polls are against us, so lets give up."

But even progressives are fooling themselves and believing myths, because polls aren't that against single payer, in fact some even show majority support for it some polls even show majority support for single payer.

- Question 50 shows 57% say they would support this program even "if it limited your own choice of doctors" (which doesn't necessarily have to be a side-effect of a single-payer system).

- Similarly, question 51 shows 62% say they would support this program even "if it meant there were waiting lists for some non-emergency treatments" (again, not necessarily a side-effect).

So, I simply don't agree with the choice BS. 1-you don't give up choice (even over what's covered, you can have top up insurance if you want) and b) there's some evidence that even if you did lose choice, Americans would still go for it.

...in 1993, and I sure as shit remember the rhetoric. I also remember the 1994 elections. I'd like to think I know what the American people are willing to go for. I'm sorry that our comfort threshold is a little closer in than most modern countries. But let's face facts: we are a market-oriented, pro-business society, that deeply believes in personal responsibility and bootstrappism. We absolutely do not believe in providing for someone else's needs. at least not when their not our relatives. As self-destructive as this can be, this is who we are.

Facts are good but fears cancel facts. We, as a people, will not accept anything that increases the government's role in our lives, raises our taxes, is percieved as impinging on our liberty, and is seen as destructive to the traditional American notion of self-reliance.

Just as you can't force Jeffersonian democracy on the Muslim world in one generation, you can't force universal care on a country with American attitudes.

...machine have spent the last 35 years convincing us that's who we are. We wouldn't have national parks, social security, a highway system or medicare if that's who we actually were.

...national parks were created during the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, Social Security was enacted under FDR, and Medicare became law under LBJ. Each administration served in unusually progressive times; times that were--if you read history--quite an aberration in America. The Interstate Highway system--initiated under Eisenhower--was touted for its usefulness in aiding national security. This is the only matter where most Americans feel collective action is desireble.

....when we're not? There are some instances of American exceptionalism but this idea that Americans are somehow wired differently than the rest of the world is bs/propaganda.

...that there are simple exceptions to a general rule.

...established a way of funding public education. The first public school in this country started in 1643. Both VA and MA are Commonwealths, which might give you an idea about what was on peoples' minds.

I do read history, which is why I don't buy the Marlboro Man theory (an image, BTW, that better suits Teddy Roosevelt than Grover Norquist).

Umm..he's my customer (google Myron Natwick), and he's liberal.

One is a guy who is an actor with a very long TV/movie resume. The other invented Betty Boop and recently died at 100.

Please continue on this topic. I am confused at the moment.

Forget it, Jake - it's AmnesiaTown

...there was a steady succession of Marlboro Men. I heard one drowned on a TV shoot in the '60's and another died of smoking related illnesses.

But that's all word-of-mouth.

Wikipedia:

Actor and author William Thourlby is said to have been the first Marlboro Man. The models who portrayed the Marlboro Man were New York Giants Quarterback Charley Conerly, New York Giants Defensive Back Jim Patton, Darrell Winfield, Dick Hammer, Brad Johnson, Bill Dutra, Dean Myers, Robert Norris, Wayne McLaren, David McLean, Buster Hobbs and Tom Mattox. Two of them, McLaren and McLean, died of lung cancer.

the majority in that poll wanted universal insurance. I really, really, really don't know what to say. I really don't.

Again--that poll showed majority support EVEN if it would lead to a reduction in choice. I have seen other polls in the high 40s and low 50s.

This fight isn't lost yet, in America. It's lost in the minds of progressives and liberals who have imbibed the beltway wisdom that the US is a fundamentally conservative country, when polling shows, consistently, that it isn't.

...speaking for others, not myself.

Medicare parts A and B were the competing plans to get it started. Then Congress decided that rather than fight over which one to use, they'd just pass them both. It wasn't until the Reagan Devolution that single-payer became a dirty word (Reagan's entire campaign was "The 9 most feared words in the English language: I'm from the gov't and I'm here to help".)

...says: social reform leads to socialism; socialism leads to communism; communism leads to Tiannamin(sp?) Square. So therefore, any government attemt to improve the lives of the average person leads to those same average people getting crushed by tanks.

Can watch it from this link.

Some wonderful stuff at booktv.org (and if you forget that name, you can get to it from cspan.org, too).

Not sure I'd recommend, say, Michael Gerson interviewed by Richard Viguerie, but, sometimes when you get them out of the yelling-over-the-token-liberal format used on "news" channels, conservatives can be quite amusing in a slapstick kind of way.

Sorry to take so long to reply, i needed to find time to watch it again. Thanks a lot. Interestingly, they began talking about Supply Side Economics,here's the "trailer"

[Jonathan Chait argues that regardless of what political party is in power the United States economic policy stands to the far right. In "The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics,"

Mr. Chait a senior editor at the New Republic contends that economic policy for the past three decades has been ill-conceived. Mr. Chait points to supply-side economics as an example of a what he deems a flawed policy that is championed by few. Jonathan Chait is interviewed by Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, an organization that is against higher taxes.]

and then they got into the philosophical distinctions between Libertarians and leftists and Chait did a beautiful job.

many organizations understand the numbers, such as the National Nurses Organizing Committee of which i am a member. However, they are not getting out.
the best democracy money can buy. When the grass roots finds out the truth, change will come, i am sure.

Again, Dennis Kucinich is the only candidate proposing one payor, not for profit health care. his day will come.

...who wish that Greenland would declare independence. Supporting Greenland and the Faeroe Islands is a big drain on the Danish economy.

It's a little smaller when you view it in a correct projection :)
Say, on a globe.

The Mercator Projection was designed to make navigation by sail, pre-chronograph, trigonometrically simple.

Forget it, Jake - it's AmnesiaTown