Ted Kennedy to be succeeded by a toolbag

[Guest Speed Racer]

Seeing as how he isn't submitting any legislation to back this up

 

Now it's my turn to ask you about the reading comprehension problem: I linked to an announcement that he is going to announce this at the State of the Union. Can you give the guy, like, five minutes?

[Good Old Neon]

Now it's my turn to ask you about the reading comprehension problem: I linked to an announcement that he is going to announce this at the State of the Union. Can you give the guy, like, five minutes?

 

No, but I’d be willing to bet he was willing to give the previous administration 8 years.

[Guest Speed Racer]

Yup he’s mad as hell and isn’t going to take it anymore! At that rate, not accounting for inflation, it will take roughly 73 years to balance the budget. And that’s change we can believe in?

 

Let's check out this here graph charting the federal deficit over history from 1980 through 2009:

 

 

The dude's making a solid effort, which as you can see (btw, it's, like, way easy to cite sources), not every president has done.

[JohnO]

I don't understand: you are angry that the government could not anticipate the exact date of her death?

Stop acting like CNN. I'm no more angry than you. The point is if you were paying for this service out of your own pocket you would not make the same choice. That is what's driving up the cost curve in health care!

 

Correct, but presuming your employer is not a jackass, if your place of work were not paying for these healthcare costs it would presumably have more money to pay its employees in salary.

It's still an expense for the employer and I'm willing to bet that only a fraction would find it's way into salaries.

 

No, this is just a simple misunderstanding: I'm saying that you will not have to pay your Blue Cross (or whomever) fees on top of your new health care costs in conjunction with universal care. Yes, if you're paying $10 now you'll likely have to pay $13 later, so the total sum will be higher, but you will not be paying for a health care plan on top of a health care plan.

Hmmm and you know that how? The people I know that have lived under universal coverage all had private insurance as well because the government plan s*%$ed! With the private plan coverage they went to the front of the queue because the doctors and hospitals knew they would be paid equitably for their services versus the pittance offered by the government plan. Just listen to what our doctors say about Medicare payments.

 

Messiah's yap is not equal to "law;" a refresher.

So you disagree with what came out of his yap?

[Guest Speed Racer]

Stop acting like CNN. I'm no more angry than you. The point is if you were paying for this service out of your own pocket you would not make the same choice. That is what's driving up the cost curve in health care!

 

How do you know what you or I would or would not do in that position? And, once more, who exactly knew the outcome of the situation at the time the decision was made? Would you like a healthcare provider - any provider - to refuse care because of a likelihood of possible death some time within the fiscal year? Month? Quarter? Decade?

 

It's still an expense for the employer and I'm willing to bet that only a fraction would find it's way into salaries.

 

Is a fraction not more than zero? I'm glad we can at least agree on something!

 

So you disagree with what came out of his yap?

 

I said that what Obama said is not yet law. Is that or is that not a true statement? (Pssst, check out your post earlier today where you said that the president's spending freeze would likely amount to nothing, because it wasn't a law yet. Or does that only apply when the statement would not favor your argument?)

 

ETA: "Acting like CNN?" I sure hope you're not referring to the fact that I'm quoting my sources, because I would wonder what the hell kind of news you read/watch/listen to that doesn't cite the sources for its assertions.

[Good Old Neon]

Hmmm and you know that how? The people I know that have lived under universal coverage all had private insurance as well because the government plan s*%$ed! With the private plan coverage they went to the front of the queue because the doctors and hospitals knew they would be paid equitably for their services versus the pittance offered by the government plan. Just listen to what our doctors say about Medicare payments.

 

 

 

 

Really? Private supplemental insurance is available in both Canada and the UK, and only a small percentage of citizens have enrolled – why? Because the vast majority rate the care they receive from the public plans as excellent, more than adequate, and in no way sucky.

 

These people you know, are they real, or are they sort of like those figures you quoted, you know, the ones you’re not willing or able to back up?

[Guest Speed Racer]

These people you know, are they real, or are they sort of like those figures you quoted, you know, the one’s you’re not willing or able to back up?

 

Stop acting like Judge Judy.

[Good Old Neon]

Stop acting like Judge Judy.

 

 

Read my lips - no!

[ikol]

Forget most divisive President, who was the most prolific President in history?

[Guest Speed Racer]

Forget most divisive President, who was the most prolific President in history?

 

[caliber66]

How do you know what you or I would or would not do in that position? And, once more, who exactly knew the outcome of the situation at the time the decision was made? Would you like a healthcare provider - any provider - to refuse care because of a likelihood of possible death some time within the fiscal year? Month? Quarter? Decade?

Sounds kinda like a death panel to me.

[Guest Speed Racer]

Sounds kinda like a death panel to me.

 

JohnO is a SOCIALIST!!!

[Winston Legthigh]

Forget most divisive President, who was the most prolific President in history?

prolific slave boffer: Jefferson

prolific souse: Grant

prolific philanderer: Kennedy

prolific eater: Taft

[JohnO]

Really? Private supplemental insurance is available in both Canada and the UK, and only a small percentage of citizens have enrolled – why? Because the vast majority rate the care they receive from the public plans as excellent, more than adequate, and in no way sucky.

And the vast majority of Americans rate their health coverage as excellent. The people I'm talking about are ex-pats that worked over sees for a number of years. They unlike you have a valid point of comparison.

 

"Britain has only one-fourth as many CT scanners per capita as the U.S., and one-third as many MRI scanners. The rate at which the British provide coronary-bypass surgery or angioplasty to heart patients is only one-fourth the U.S. rate, and hip replacements are only two-thirds the U.S. rate. The rate for treating kidney failure (dialysis or transplant) is five times higher in the U.S. for patients between the ages of 45 and 84, and nine times higher for patients 85 years or older.

 

Overall, nearly 1.8 million Britons are waiting for hospital or outpatient treatments at any given time. In 2002-2004, dialysis patients waited an average of 16 days for permanent blood-vessel access in the U.S., 20 days in Europe, and 62 days in Canada. In 2000, Norwegian patients waited an average of 133 days for hip replacement, 63 days for cataract surgery, 160 days for a knee replacement, and 46 days for bypass surgery after being approved for treatment. Short waits for cataract surgery produce better outcomes, prompt coronary-artery bypass reduces mortality, and rapid hip replacement reduces disability and death. Studies show that only 5 percent of Americans wait more than four months for surgery, compared with 23 percent of Australians, 26 percent of New Zealanders, 27 percent of Canadians, and 36 percent of Britons."

 

here's the source for all you deniers. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_9_61/ai_n31875118/

[Good Old Neon]

And the vast majority of Americans rate their health coverage as excellent. The people I'm talking about are ex-pats that worked over sees for a number of years. They unlike you have a valid point of comparison.

 

"Britain has only one-fourth as many CT scanners per capita as the U.S., and one-third as many MRI scanners. The rate at which the British provide coronary-bypass surgery or angioplasty to heart patients is only one-fourth the U.S. rate, and hip replacements are only two-thirds the U.S. rate. The rate for treating kidney failure (dialysis or transplant) is five times higher in the U.S. for patients between the ages of 45 and 84, and nine times higher for patients 85 years or older.

 

Overall, nearly 1.8 million Britons are waiting for hospital or outpatient treatments at any given time. In 2002-2004, dialysis patients waited an average of 16 days for permanent blood-vessel access in the U.S., 20 days in Europe, and 62 days in Canada. In 2000, Norwegian patients waited an average of 133 days for hip replacement, 63 days for cataract surgery, 160 days for a knee replacement, and 46 days for bypass surgery after being approved for treatment. Short waits for cataract surgery produce better outcomes, prompt coronary-artery bypass reduces mortality, and rapid hip replacement reduces disability and death. Studies show that only 5 percent of Americans wait more than four months for surgery, compared with 23 percent of Australians, 26 percent of New Zealanders, 27 percent of Canadians, and 36 percent of Britons."

 

here's the source for all you deniers. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_9_61/ai_n31875118/

 

Wow – I want to thank you for posting an article from an unbiased source, the archconservative National Review.

 

Edit: And, like yourself – I do have several friends living in the UK, one of which married a Brit she met in the states. She has a condition that requires expensive treatment and medication – they had a choice, he could have moved to the states, or she could move to the UK and take advantage of their coverage – they chose to move to the UK, and couldn’t be happier – with the exception of Haggis.

 

I can do that too – from The New Republic:

 

What We Can Learn From the Europeans

By Jonathan Cohn

 

Claude Le Pen is an economist at a top French university and one of his country’s leading experts on health care. When I sat down with him a few months ago, as part of a research project on European health care systems, he started off by listing some of the strains his country is facing. Care is constantly getting more expensive, he told me, and it’s straining government budgets. Meanwhile, quality isn’t nearly as good as it could be: The system pays a lot for treatments of dubious clinical value.

 

It was not what I had expected to hear. The French health care system has a reputation for being one of the world’s best, but clearly it has plenty of problems. So, I asked, was there talk of moving more toward a scheme with less government and more reliance on the private sector—in other words, something like we have here in the U.S.? Le Pen laughed: Things aren’t that bad. “When you want to insult your opponent in a debate, you accuse them of trying to impose the American system in France,” he told me. “Nobody wants that.”

 

The data bear him out. In a recent survey across six different countries conducted by Harris Interactive, no country’s citizens seem entirely satisfied with the health care they are getting. But the French are by far the happiest—or, to be more accurate, the least dissatisfied. After that come, in order, Spain, Germany, Italy and England. The U.S. finishes dead last, with more than 80 percent of respondents saying the system either required “fundamental change” or “needed to be completely rebuilt.”

 

And while public opinion isn’t necessarily the best barometer of a health care system’s true value, harder data tell a similar story. The U.S. consistently ranks poorly on such measures as “mortality amenable to health care,” a statistic specifically designed to measure how well a health care system works. In a recent study of seven nations by the New York–based Commonwealth Fund, the U.S. finished last or second-to-last on quality, access, efficiency, equity and healthy lives.

 

Not only was the U.S. the only country where tens of millions of people have no insurance, it was also lagging when it came to coordinating care among doctors and nurses, as well as applying the latest information technology—by, for example, creating universal electronic medical records. As any medical expert can tell you, coordinating care and better use of IT are probably the two most essential steps toward eliminating potentially deadly medication errors and, more broadly, providing the most effective medical treatments.

 

Of course, if you listen to American conservatives talk about health care, they’ll tell you a very different story. From right-wing journalists like ABC’s John Stossel to conservative experts like Sally Pipes (see accompanying piece), they will tell you how superior our system really is—how, in all those other countries, people have to wait in long lines for services, put up with second-rate treatments, and labor under the strain of crushing taxes to support unsustainable levels of health care spending. “Go to European countries that have government-run health care systems,” John McCain has said. “My friends, they don’t work.”

 

It’s easy to understand why these conservatives might want to think this way. As more and more Americans struggle to pay their medical bills, either because they’ve lost their health insurance or their insurance doesn’t meet their needs, the idea of creating a universal health care system here is gaining popularity. If conservatives could show that France and all the other countries with universal coverage have other, more severe problems (“You’ll wait eight months to get treatment! You’ll die of treatable cancer!”) the enthusiasm for reforming the American system would surely die down.

 

The argument has worked many times before; in the late 1940s, when Harry Truman tried to create national health insurance, the American Medical Association and other opponents warned about horror stories abroad. Truman’s plan never passed.

There’s no question that, in some countries with universal health care, the horror stories have at least some basis in reality. Probably the most obvious, and notorious, example is England. The British National Health System provides free health care to all citizens. But while it gets high marks for the basic preventative care it provides, it’s also legendary for restricting access to the most advanced forms of medical treatment, whether it’s diagnostic testing, surgery or even cancer treatments.

 

The result is frequently long waits for specialty care and, in some instances, no access to experimental therapies. One result is that, on the whole, Britain’s cancer survival rate is low relative to the rate in the United States—a point critics of universal coverage never fail to make.

 

But there is a very simple reason that British health care works that way: They spend about half of what we do on health care as a percentage of GDP. At those spending levels, there’s less money to pay for hospital beds, medical staff, drugs and equipment.

 

The story is very different in other European countries, where they spend more than the British. In France and Switzerland, access to care may actually be easier than it is in the U.S. Neither country has chronic waits for services, whether you’re talking about routine primary care or even high-tech specialty care. And in Paris, doctors still perform house calls. Both countries also make a point of making the latest cancer drugs available to their patients.

 

That shows up in the cancer survival rates, which are very close to the rates in the U.S. (Much of the remaining difference, which is small, reflects the difference in survival rates for one ailment: prostate cancer. And there’s increasing evidence American physicians simply over-treat the disease.) Naturally, neither of these countries has huge numbers of citizens foregoing recommended medical treatment—or going bankrupt—because they have no insurance. That’s a pretty huge improvement, too.

 

Admittedly, both the French and the Swiss fret that they are now spending too much on their health care systems, and that, absent some reforms, they will have to make painful choices between cutting back on their services or spending still more money. This is what was on Professor Le Pen’s mind when he was speaking with me.

 

But this is hardly an argument against using the French system, or any other system abroad, as a model for reform here in the United States. The French, like the Swiss, may spend more than the British do. But they still spend far less than we Americans do. Contrary to what you may have heard, we would actually be lucky to be facing the kind of financial “crisis” seen in these European countries, rather than the far more severe crisis we face here. In the U.S., the typical health insurance plan now costs a family around $12,000 a year. If U.S. health care spending were comparable to even the highest-spending European systems, the price would drop to around $10,000 a year.

 

It’s an axiom of conservative thought that government entitlements lead to uncontrolled spending. But with health care, the opposite seems to be true. Relative to the U.S., these other countries have far more ability to control spending in a humane and intelligent way. For starters, they squander far less money on administrative waste, marketing and insurance company profits. (When an insurance company spends more money on its patients, Wall Street rewards such behavior by shunning its stocks.)

 

No less important, these countries also have more power to use payments as a lever for controlling expenditures, whether it’s by negotiating lower prices with the drug industry or by tinkering with payment formulas to encourage more efficient care.

 

Here is where the British are actually proving themselves pioneers. Precisely because they spend so little money, they have to be far more careful about how they spend it. To do that, they have a special quasi-public organization, called the National Institutes for Clinical Excellence, whose job it is to scrutinize every new treatment and drug that comes down the pike and determine whether it’s cost-effective. If it’s not, the government generally won’t pay for it, except in limited circumstances. As a result, they’re less apt to provide wasteful care.

 

And if that sometimes means depriving people of long-shot therapies, funding the British system at higher levels—which, in effect, is what other European countries do—would make that less likely. (Whether that’s a good thing is another story.)

 

The caveat to all of this is that a country’s underlying medical culture, and not its insurance system, tends to be the most dominant factor in determining how health care works. The Dutch, for example, are also very happy with their health care system—even though they spend far less and get far less than, say, the French. But that’s because the Dutch, traditionally, are less enamored of medical care. Home births are still very common.

 

Americans have, more or less, the opposite perspective: Whether you’re talking about the people who provide health care (doctors) or the people who get it (patients), Americans are far more likely to favor aggressive medical treatment from the very beginnings of life to the very end. As a result, we will probably keep spending more—and treating more—than our counterparts abroad, no matter what kind of reforms we pass here.

 

But even if we’re unlikely to replicate the French, Swiss, British or Dutch health care systems here, we can still take some broad lessons from them. And by far the most important is that universal coverage, whatever form it takes, doesn’t have to mean putting up with less convenience or lower quality. On the contrary, universal coverage can actually make health care more convenient and promote higher quality, all while guaranteeing affordable access to everybody. That’s a pretty sweet deal. No wonder the Europeans wouldn’t give it up.

 

Jonathan Cohn is a senior editor at The New Republic and a senior fellow at Demos, a nonpartisan public policy center. He is the author of Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis—And the People Who Pay For It.

[Beltmann]

And the vast majority of Americans rate their health coverage as excellent.

Most Americans aren't catastrophically ill. There's no doubt that insurance companies do an excellent job providing for healthy, covered Americans.

 

But how many sick Americans rate their health coverage as excellent? And how many aren't included in the poll because they have no coverage with which to be satisfied or unsatisfied?

[bjorn_skurj]

Wow – I want to thank you for posting an article from an unbiased source, the archconservative National Review.

 

Edit: And, like yourself – I do have several friends living in the UK, one of which married a Brit she met in the states. She has a condition that requires expensive treatment and medication – they had a choice, he could have moved to the states, or she could move to the UK and take advantage of their coverage – they chose to move to the UK, and couldn’t be happier – with the exception of Haggis.

 

I can do that too – from The New Republic:

 

What We Can Learn From the Europeans

By Jonathan Cohn

 

Claude Le Pen is an economist at a top French university and one of his country’s leading experts on health care. When I sat down with him a few months ago, as part of a research project on European health care systems, he started off by listing some of the strains his country is facing. Care is constantly getting more expensive, he told me, and it’s straining government budgets. Meanwhile, quality isn’t nearly as good as it could be: The system pays a lot for treatments of dubious clinical value.

 

It was not what I had expected to hear. The French health care system has a reputation for being one of the world’s best, but clearly it has plenty of problems. So, I asked, was there talk of moving more toward a scheme with less government and more reliance on the private sector—in other words, something like we have here in the U.S.? Le Pen laughed: Things aren’t that bad. “When you want to insult your opponent in a debate, you accuse them of trying to impose the American system in France,” he told me. “Nobody wants that.”

 

The data bear him out. In a recent survey across six different countries conducted by Harris Interactive, no country’s citizens seem entirely satisfied with the health care they are getting. But the French are by far the happiest—or, to be more accurate, the least dissatisfied. After that come, in order, Spain, Germany, Italy and England. The U.S. finishes dead last, with more than 80 percent of respondents saying the system either required “fundamental change” or “needed to be completely rebuilt.”

 

And while public opinion isn’t necessarily the best barometer of a health care system’s true value, harder data tell a similar story. The U.S. consistently ranks poorly on such measures as “mortality amenable to health care,” a statistic specifically designed to measure how well a health care system works. In a recent study of seven nations by the New York–based Commonwealth Fund, the U.S. finished last or second-to-last on quality, access, efficiency, equity and healthy lives.

 

Not only was the U.S. the only country where tens of millions of people have no insurance, it was also lagging when it came to coordinating care among doctors and nurses, as well as applying the latest information technology—by, for example, creating universal electronic medical records. As any medical expert can tell you, coordinating care and better use of IT are probably the two most essential steps toward eliminating potentially deadly medication errors and, more broadly, providing the most effective medical treatments.

 

Of course, if you listen to American conservatives talk about health care, they’ll tell you a very different story. From right-wing journalists like ABC’s John Stossel to conservative experts like Sally Pipes (see accompanying piece), they will tell you how superior our system really is—how, in all those other countries, people have to wait in long lines for services, put up with second-rate treatments, and labor under the strain of crushing taxes to support unsustainable levels of health care spending. “Go to European countries that have government-run health care systems,” John McCain has said. “My friends, they don’t work.”

 

It’s easy to understand why these conservatives might want to think this way. As more and more Americans struggle to pay their medical bills, either because they’ve lost their health insurance or their insurance doesn’t meet their needs, the idea of creating a universal health care system here is gaining popularity. If conservatives could show that France and all the other countries with universal coverage have other, more severe problems (“You’ll wait eight months to get treatment! You’ll die of treatable cancer!”) the enthusiasm for reforming the American system would surely die down.

 

The argument has worked many times before; in the late 1940s, when Harry Truman tried to create national health insurance, the American Medical Association and other opponents warned about horror stories abroad. Truman’s plan never passed.

There’s no question that, in some countries with universal health care, the horror stories have at least some basis in reality. Probably the most obvious, and notorious, example is England. The British National Health System provides free health care to all citizens. But while it gets high marks for the basic preventative care it provides, it’s also legendary for restricting access to the most advanced forms of medical treatment, whether it’s diagnostic testing, surgery or even cancer treatments.

 

The result is frequently long waits for specialty care and, in some instances, no access to experimental therapies. One result is that, on the whole, Britain’s cancer survival rate is low relative to the rate in the United States—a point critics of universal coverage never fail to make.

 

But there is a very simple reason that British health care works that way: They spend about half of what we do on health care as a percentage of GDP. At those spending levels, there’s less money to pay for hospital beds, medical staff, drugs and equipment.

 

The story is very different in other European countries, where they spend more than the British. In France and Switzerland, access to care may actually be easier than it is in the U.S. Neither country has chronic waits for services, whether you’re talking about routine primary care or even high-tech specialty care. And in Paris, doctors still perform house calls. Both countries also make a point of making the latest cancer drugs available to their patients.

 

That shows up in the cancer survival rates, which are very close to the rates in the U.S. (Much of the remaining difference, which is small, reflects the difference in survival rates for one ailment: prostate cancer. And there’s increasing evidence American physicians simply over-treat the disease.) Naturally, neither of these countries has huge numbers of citizens foregoing recommended medical treatment—or going bankrupt—because they have no insurance. That’s a pretty huge improvement, too.

 

Admittedly, both the French and the Swiss fret that they are now spending too much on their health care systems, and that, absent some reforms, they will have to make painful choices between cutting back on their services or spending still more money. This is what was on Professor Le Pen’s mind when he was speaking with me.

 

But this is hardly an argument against using the French system, or any other system abroad, as a model for reform here in the United States. The French, like the Swiss, may spend more than the British do. But they still spend far less than we Americans do. Contrary to what you may have heard, we would actually be lucky to be facing the kind of financial “crisis” seen in these European countries, rather than the far more severe crisis we face here. In the U.S., the typical health insurance plan now costs a family around $12,000 a year. If U.S. health care spending were comparable to even the highest-spending European systems, the price would drop to around $10,000 a year.

 

It’s an axiom of conservative thought that government entitlements lead to uncontrolled spending. But with health care, the opposite seems to be true. Relative to the U.S., these other countries have far more ability to control spending in a humane and intelligent way. For starters, they squander far less money on administrative waste, marketing and insurance company profits. (When an insurance company spends more money on its patients, Wall Street rewards such behavior by shunning its stocks.)

 

No less important, these countries also have more power to use payments as a lever for controlling expenditures, whether it’s by negotiating lower prices with the drug industry or by tinkering with payment formulas to encourage more efficient care.

 

Here is where the British are actually proving themselves pioneers. Precisely because they spend so little money, they have to be far more careful about how they spend it. To do that, they have a special quasi-public organization, called the National Institutes for Clinical Excellence, whose job it is to scrutinize every new treatment and drug that comes down the pike and determine whether it’s cost-effective. If it’s not, the government generally won’t pay for it, except in limited circumstances. As a result, they’re less apt to provide wasteful care.

 

And if that sometimes means depriving people of long-shot therapies, funding the British system at higher levels—which, in effect, is what other European countries do—would make that less likely. (Whether that’s a good thing is another story.)

 

The caveat to all of this is that a country’s underlying medical culture, and not its insurance system, tends to be the most dominant factor in determining how health care works. The Dutch, for example, are also very happy with their health care system—even though they spend far less and get far less than, say, the French. But that’s because the Dutch, traditionally, are less enamored of medical care. Home births are still very common.

 

Americans have, more or less, the opposite perspective: Whether you’re talking about the people who provide health care (doctors) or the people who get it (patients), Americans are far more likely to favor aggressive medical treatment from the very beginnings of life to the very end. As a result, we will probably keep spending more—and treating more—than our counterparts abroad, no matter what kind of reforms we pass here.

 

But even if we’re unlikely to replicate the French, Swiss, British or Dutch health care systems here, we can still take some broad lessons from them. And by far the most important is that universal coverage, whatever form it takes, doesn’t have to mean putting up with less convenience or lower quality. On the contrary, universal coverage can actually make health care more convenient and promote higher quality, all while guaranteeing affordable access to everybody. That’s a pretty sweet deal. No wonder the Europeans wouldn’t give it up.

 

Jonathan Cohn is a senior editor at The New Republic and a senior fellow at Demos, a nonpartisan public policy center. He is the author of Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis—And the People Who Pay For It.

This. Again, all we are proving by standing on some sort of American exceptionalism in health care is proving that we are just exceptionally stupid.

[JohnO]

 

What We Can Learn From the Europeans

By Jonathan Cohn

 

The result is frequently long waits for specialty care and, in some instances, no access to experimental therapies. One result is that, on the whole, Britain’s cancer survival rate is low relative to the rate in the United States—a point critics of universal coverage never fail to make.

 

That shows up in the cancer survival rates, which are very close to the rates in the U.S.

 

And if that sometimes means depriving people of long-shot therapies, funding the British system at higher levels—which, in effect, is what other European countries do—would make that less likely. (Whether that’s a good thing is another story.)

 

Americans have, more or less, the opposite perspective: Whether you’re talking about the people who provide health care (doctors) or the people who get it (patients), Americans are far more likely to favor aggressive medical treatment from the very beginnings of life to the very end. As a result, we will probably keep spending more—and treating more—than our counterparts abroad, no matter what kind of reforms we pass here.

 

But even if we’re unlikely to replicate the French, Swiss, British or Dutch health care systems here, we can still take some broad lessons from them. And by far the most important is that universal coverage, whatever form it takes, doesn’t have to mean putting up with less convenience or lower quality. On the contrary, universal coverage can actually make health care more convenient and promote higher quality, all while guaranteeing affordable access to everybody. That’s a pretty sweet deal. No wonder the Europeans wouldn’t give it up.

I read all perspectives on a subject that interests me. Your source actually supports some of my contentions. It also completely ignores two significant differences that impact healthcare delivery, population density and geography. Not to mention the cultural differences and expectations. There's a reason our ancestors left Europe and I don't see many of us signing up to immigrate back to that hell hole.

[Good Old Neon]

I read all perspectives on a subject that interests me. Your source actually supports some of my contentions. It also completely ignores two significant differences that impact healthcare delivery, population density and geography. Not to mention the cultural differences and expectations. There's a reason our ancestors left Europe and I don't see many of us signing up to immigrate back to that hell hole.

 

Translation – USA #1 – everyone else, #10 or 11. But seriously, Europe is a hell hole?

 

Anyways, in other news, Paul Krugman is none too impressed with Obama’s spending freeze proposal (which, as Speed Racer has pointed out, we haven’t even seen the details yet).

 

January 26, 2010, 9:01 am

 

Obama Liquidates Himself

 

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

 

It’s appalling on every level.

 

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

 

It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.

And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”

 

Now, I still cling to a fantasy: maybe, just possibly, Obama is going to tie his spending freeze to something that would actually help the economy, like an employment tax credit. (No, trivial tax breaks don’t count). There has, however, been no hint of anything like that in the reports so far. Right now, this looks like pure disaster.

[Guest Speed Racer]

There's a reason our ancestors left Europe

 

I had no idea health care costs had been on the rise since the 1620s!

[Doug C]

There's a reason our ancestors left Europe and I don't see many of us signing up to immigrate back to that hell hole.

I am certain that, well, I certainly hope, the above is hyperbole. That doesn't make it any less of a ridiculous statement. Do you really expect to be taken seriously after making such a pronouncement?

[bjorn_skurj]

There's a reason our ancestors left Europe and I don't see many of us signing up to immigrate back to that hell hole.

Are you high? Have you ever BEEN to Europe? They have made some real improvements since 1945!

[Good Old Neon]

I had no idea health care costs had been on the rise since the 1620s!

 

Yeah, it's a little known yet important fact that the American leeches were not only much more beneficial than the half-assed European variety, but also more cost effective - which is the real reason our great great great great great great grandparents emigrated to these United States.

[Guest Speed Racer]

And to think, all this time I thought my grandparents left Poland on account of political turmoil, war, and abject poverty!

[Winston Legthigh]

It's better in a

Hell hole!

You know where you stand in a

Hell hole!

Folks lend a hand in a

Hell hole!

Girl get me back to my

Hell hole!

 

My ancestors left Europe because they were kicked off their land on the Isle of Skye by landlords.