Republican Healthcare Plan

Hang on. Are you telling me that an insurance plan costs over 20,000 a year? I thought it was supposed to be cheaper over there?

"Could", but not. You're arguing semantics. My benefits do not affect my paycheck like my taxes do. It could be different, yes, but that is what is it. I've been in ~100 hospitals all across the country. The VA hospitals are the worst. It's not just me saying this stuff:From VA review finds 'significant and chronic' failures:

quote:

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In a scathing appraisal, a review ordered by President Barack Obama of the troubled Veterans Affairs health care system concludes that medical care for veterans is beset by "significant and chronic system failures," substantially verifying problems raised by whistleblowers and internal and congressional investigators.

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A summary of the review by deputy White House chief of staff Rob Nabors says the Veterans Health Administration must be restructured and that a "corrosive culture" has hurt morale and affected the timeliness of health care.

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Rep. Jeff Miller, the Republican chairman of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, said the report was a late but welcome response from the White House and vowed to work with the administration to fix the system.

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"It appears the White House has finally come to terms with the serious and systemic VA health care problems we've been investigating and documenting for years," he said in a statement.

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I'm having trouble getting a good source for the report, but here's a pdf download that I unfortunately cannot copy and paste from. Neither.

I'm sure if a True Christian^TM came here saying they were against gay marriage because they thought it was a bad idea, y'all would accept that as a good excuse and not berate them for their intolerance.You guys are too much!

I dunno, sounds like Mod is saying an insurance plan in the UK costs over 20k.

Not like my taxes do. More high tech, more drug use, leading medical research, etc. No, it's just not the be-all-end-all.

I'm collapsing the last two responses to stop cross-posting.From Message 126: No, 'could be' is not 'is'. But I'm done arguing semantics. See Message 80. Maybe, depends on what you're paying for. I'm certainly willing to pay more money for better healthcare.From Message 124: So, I did respond to that chart in Message 80. But this one is a different image and has a reference to the source in it.Here's a link to download the pdf it came from if anyone is interested.Here's the terms for that chart in particular:

quote:

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Definition and comparability

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Total expenditure on health measures the final consumption
of health goods and services (i.e. current
health expenditure) plus capital investment in health
care infrastructure. This includes spending by both
public and private sources on medical services and
goods, public health and prevention programmes and
administration.

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To compare spending levels between countries, per
capita health expenditures are converted to a common
currency (US dollar) and adjusted to take
account of the different purchasing power of the
national currencies, in order to compare spending
levels. Economy-wide (GDP) PPPs are used as the most
available and reliable conversion rates.

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To compare spending over time, figures are deflated
using the economy-wide GDP implicit deflator for
each country. In the case of Chile, the Consumer Price
Index (CPI) is preferred since it is considered more
representative of price changes in the health sector in
recent years.

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So that's data on what countries spend on goods and services, including capital investments in infrastructure, and is not what people spend on healthcare insurance. So that's really not a reply to what I was saying about the cost of insurance.Anyways, since the U.S. does pay for more healthcare stuff than other countries, you cannot use that chart to put the sole blame on our system being for-profit rather than being socialized. Nor can you say that socializing our system would bring our expenditures down to where other countries are.If you look on page 159 in the pdf I linked to, you can see that the U.S. spends their money quite differently too. We spend a smaller fraction on inpatient care and a larger fraction on outpatient care, and also spend the largest fraction on collective services (such as public health and prevention services and administration).Page 161 shows that we're almost off the chart on our expenditures on pharmaceuticals.I'd like to see how our expenditures on infrastructure differ, maybe we're building a lot more new hospitals than the UK.So, there's a lot more to this than: "Look, this large one's for-profit and these other smaller ones are socialized, ergo if the U.S. was socialized we'd be like the small ones."

I hear you, I'm not thrilled by the for-profit nature of our healthcare system. But going socialized is not the only way to stop being for-profit.