Heathcare in the USA is terrible!

As others have pointed out, it is not limited except by cost.
We have the best health *technology* in the world, but too many people trying to make a fortune from it, including a lot of people who have nothing to do with the actual delivery of health care.The health insurance industry is largely to blame for our 'medicine for profit' system. They spend more of our insurance premiums trying to shift the burden of responsability onto others than they do actually paying doctors to heal people. This means they pay more for bloody clerks and lawyers than they do for doctors.The system is so deeply entrenched, with so many rich investors making fortunes off it, that it is a now a multi-headed monster that will not die no matter how mnay people want to kill it.As soon as you have someone proposing a 'not-for-profit, government-run system' (like the the Clintons did) you have a whole bunch of rich Repiglicans buying advertising to convince the masses they will be giving up control of their health care choices. A real pile of crap, but so many are so gullible in the US.The only way to keep a cap on profiteering from medicine is to have it run by the government, but it's not going to happen in the US anytime soon. There are too many rich people making money off managed care.

I know it would appear like that from over in Europe, but there is still a large core of serious scientific endeavor in the US that is aghast at all the recent developments. The current ridiculous parodies of science you hear about are just political ploys being used by power-hungry politicians to manipulate those blinded by religious dogma and completely ignorant of science. Unfortunately, there are far too many of them. Supposed challenges to evolutionary theory, ID in the schools, it's all about appeasing ignorance for sake of getting voted into positions of power.However, when those 2-faced politicians in power have real problem they need to solve (bird flu comes to mind) who do you think they have to turn to? It's just that we scientists as a group have never formed a politically powerful lobby group - something we should have done 50 years ago when science had a lot more respect from the public in this country than it does now.

Thanks. I have been so tied up with writing at work I haven't had the time to write for fun in a while.Yes, I agree with everything you say.
I have been observing all these unfortunate trends here that only seemed to really gather momentum over the past 5 years under the Bush administration. I have been a researcher working in the US since 1996 so I am actually one of those foreign scientists you speak of - if Canadian can be considered 'foreign'.What you say about private sector investment in the sciences is true, but only one side of the coin. There is a also lot of important science that will only get done if it is sponsored by the government because it doesn't lead to patents or anything you can profit from. This type of research is suffering even more from neglect. Our present government is gutting funding for basic research of the type that stands to most benefit the public.To tie this into the health care issue (and keep this all on topic), what we see in medical research is private sector investment in drug development to the point where that is now the predominant type of medical research. Who is going to develop preventive medicine if the government doesn't fund it? No money to be made off that, is there? Much more profitable to let big corporations sell people toxic processed foods and then charge them an arm and a leg for treatment when they get sick. Now that we have mostly doctors whose exclusive approach to healing is to prescribe drugs - the real beneficiary is big pharma - not the patients.You are also right that the government is really shooting itself in the foot by making it so difficult for foreign scientists to study and work here. I actually answered a survey from the NSF on what steps I thought could be taken to induce more American students into graduate science programs and among the alternatives to choose from was that we should make it more difficult for foreign students to study here (!!??). My response was, What are you guys trying to do - shut down my research program? I have never had more than 5% of applicants for an assistantship who were remotely qualified Americans. So yes, we appear to be neither providing the quality of public education, nor the appropriate incentives, for encouraging the production of home-grown scientists, while at the same time making it more difficult for international scientists to study here. It does not bode well for the future - and I am still a long way from retirement !Somehow we need to reawaken the public respect for science and scientists that the American public had back int he 50's. Now it seems science and all its public benefits are taken for granted by a very uninformed and uneducated general public. I am at a loss to understand why more people can't see that reliance on religious doctrine running counter to science is a slippery path backwards into the dark ages.