need for natioal health care

[dfiant]

What is Medicare Australia?

Medicare Australia website

[Blue]

Better than our Medicaid, or medicare which is as close as we have to that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid

[GossamerMoon]

Just a thought...

What if we modeled universal health care similar to how we have taxes fund emergency services, education, and transportation? I say "similar", not "just like" for obvious reasons. Start from scratch, and go from there. I know people argue this notion as "socialized" health care, but for crying out loud, what the heck are your taxes *supposed* to do? Serve the common good, right? If we pay for the police/fire/EMS to come to our houses out of taxpayer funds, why not shift health care to an improved model thereof.

If that is not okay, then why is it okay to fund said services from taxpayer money. You don't get a choice, and you use those services. Sure, there are issues with them, and sure you can have private alternatives (like private vs. public schools, etc.), but it seems to me that this is not so different.

Look at what's working and not working abroad and to the north, and find answers to those *before* implementing a system. Thoughts?

[Rainbowmum]

Thank the stars I am part of the Commonwealth.

[Pix]

This book describes how the small biz of hospitals became big biz under the control of Wall Street (VERY short & sweet, Carter started to socialize it like Canada and then Reagan privatized it by selling it to Wall Street investors who weren't doctors instead of returning it to the status quo, which worked about as well as when the Soviet Union collapsed and sold off many of its government services to the wealthy to sell to the rest of the public) and that it created the mess we have now and the book has some excellent research and interviews with people at all levels of US healthcare. Unfortunately IMO (and I can give a detailed review as I already did) he didn't think his conclusions out very well well at all so I wasn't convinced by his promotion of UHC. And I also wished he'd have examined the UHC in other countries more closely (I'm also curious about Thailand which is said to lack any sort of health scheme yet be so good and cheap that sometimes even Americans pay to make a trip there for their medical care, and no I'm not just talking about for GRS, though I do wonder if their economy and social values are so different from ours that such a system would be impossible to implement in the USA).

And Wall Street having taken it over is why what Ron Paul says should happen can't. I believe him when he talks about how it worked when he was a lad, but that was a different world than today. But get Wall Street out of medicine again and maybe then his romanticized view might work again.

Personally, I think if the government is gonna do anything but bare basic law enforcement and national defense (NOT to be confused with the global police state our government has been pursuing for many decades now) then it should provide UHC (NOT to be confused with Obama/Romneycare) for many reasons, certainly before putting more of our citizens in prison for petty crimes than any other country in the world, policing the world, sending out expensive drones with high collateral damage at absolutely unacceptable targets (George Washington would understand, he refused to burn a city to the ground just in the hopes of killing a certain British officer, but that kind of ethics is beyond the likes of Bush, Obama, and Romney), destroying homes and lives in a war on "some drugs" and preventing even cancer patients from using marijuana when approved by their state (which also contributes to higher medical expense, btw, as does how the DEA cracks down on the prescribing of pain killers to a ridiculous degree), and...sorry, this is gonna turn into a TLDR if I let it.

So let me instead just say if the multi-billion dollar on the failed war on some drugs were canceled (with drugs being treated as a health issue instead of criminal one, decriminalized as in Portugal), the ATF (an organization as unacceptable, corrupt, and counterproductive as the DEA, IMO) disbanded with the laws they enforce either decriminalized or taken over by the FBI or local law enforcement, our police demilitarized (and the expensive drones used ONLY in emergencies and to find the lost in the wilderness) and cut back, military budget slashed to equal what most of the rest of the civilized world pays (and even then I read a book once that showed nearly every country in the world spent more to at least be ready to bust heads than anything else), then actual UHC should be easy to fund, especially as the need for it drops as more keep up with early detections and the like that most Americans can't currently afford (even with insurance who doesn't make their profits by paying for too much preventive care).

Of course this would be such a departure from America's continual march to totalitarianism that I can see many American balking at such suggestions. But you should've seen me when I was younger and advocated for things like health co-ops in an anarchist society.