Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/11/20/john-birch-compassion.html
…
7 Likes
.Well yes, but most Americans – especially temporarily embarrassed Captains of Industry who spout and listen to Libertarian nonsense – don’t understand the value of concepts like standards-based efficiencies, economies of scale, preventative measures, and the like. Throw in narrow-minded and nationalism-tinged provincialism for good measure.
This is what comes of four decades of cynical propaganda that, per Wilde, emphasises the price of everything and the value of nothing.
23 Likes
Hell yeah! We’re #1! We’re #1!
14 Likes
The Cult of the Rugged Individualist was the greatest invention that the capitalist could ever create for their own benefit.
20 Likes
Profit motive considered harmful in market segments critical for human well being.
7 Likes
28 Likes
EnkWife is Canadian and I have been to the dreaded socialized medicine of our toque up top. It was just like visiting any American doctor, you call, you wait a few minutes (it wasn’t urgent care) and the doc sees you, takes your vitals, listens, prescribes. $30 please. I got better.
Maybe if we took away the whole ‘insurance’ profit motive thing we could cover everyone, but as it is certain politicians constantly use the wedge of ‘handouts to THOSE people!’ I’d love single payer or even just a public option (everyone can buy into medicare and every doctor must see a % of Medicare2.0 or you are fined or license removed).
10 Likes
I wouldn’t bank on Universal Healthcare not having end dates.
Interested parties are always at work to privatize it, simply because they are not affected by the lack of it and because they are perfectly willing to cause millions financial and physical harm.
Which wouldn’t be so bad if people couldn’t be so easily goaded into spite-voting. I have no trouble whatsoever imaging a wealthy, well off nation voting public health care away, because, like vaccinating the benefits aren’t obviously visibly when you grew up with it.
Though it helps that we hear about the American horror stories, so by all means: Please don’t institute universal healthcare in the States, we need you as a bad example.
By the way, I wanted to use a saying in this comment.
“Wenn es dem Esel zu gut geht, geht er auf’s Eis.“
Literally: “When the donkey feels too well, he steps on ice.” (Frozen lake is implied here.)
Is there a more catchy translation that “Complacency makes one reckless.”?
Edit: Most aptly, there is an addendum to that saying. The full form is „… steps on ice. (And breaks a leg.)“
5 Likes
The start date for Germany is wrong btw - see: Otto von Bismarck’s Sickness Insurance Law of 1883
5 Likes
I’m English and lived with National Health till I was 14 and we moved to the US. My mother would not have lived as long as she did under the US system. I think the US should grow up and implement a national system.
Now, that said, it is maddening when arguments, such as in this article, are made that are just nonsense. Providers do not spend all their time filling out forms for insurance companies. I work at a BCBS and some 90% of claims are electronic. And we’re begging for more participation!
If the author is so lazy with facts, why should anyone agree with anything he writes?
3 Likes
What still amazes me is they could flood the airwaves with lies about Canadian healthcare. Guys, Canada is right there. Most of your viewers know a Canadian.
9 Likes
I have the best example of this, from… oh 20 years ago now I suppose.
While visiting my evangelical right aunt and family with my centrist republican (remember, 20 years ago, one of my parents is no longer any kind of republican… not sure about the other who was at least for a while a Limbaugh listener and thus quite possibly still enthralled) healthcare came up. I said something along the lines of how we ought to do more what Canada does.
This circle of republicans said that that would lead to rationing and terrible healthcare. You see, my grandmother had died the year before of cancer. They thought she had been diagnosed too late by her HMO. This, they told me, is what would happen under socialism. Things like that. Too late diagnosis. As shown by this example. Of something that happened in the US. On private insurance.
They just free associate whatever they have into the narrative they require. and don’t even notice that they are using the policy they support as evidence that the policy they don’t support would be horrible.
11 Likes
Pretty sure Russia, and some other former communist nations have universal healthcare end dates.
But looking a little deeper into those examples would not go against the point you are trying to make.
1 Like
I’m waiting for a NAFTA poison pill that Canada has to allow US private health companies.
No.
3 Likes
One Canadian physican I know put it succinctly from the point of view of the doctor. He said that in contrast to the American system, his system allows him to spend a lot more time practising medicine and a lot less time running a business.
He told me that when he puts it this way to American doctors most of them really like the idea. Cuts right past the whole “road to serfdom/death panels” nonsense pushed by acolytes of the “free” market (blessed be its name).
13 Likes
BTW:
Xenazine is the US trade name for Tetrabenazine.
$38.80 per 112 pill bottle for me. If I were on any sort of government support, it’d be $6.30/bottle. The government pays the drug company $338.60/bottle.
In the USA:
20 Likes
No, Russia still has universal healthcare.
The country went from dysfunctional communist dystopia to dysfunctional kleptocratic pseudo-democratic dystopia - but they were never crazy enough to end universal healthcare.
18 Likes
I blame the libertarians who’ve done major historical revisionism on Adam Smith’s own work. They make it out as if they it out as if Smith’s position on the “invisible hand” was a blank check to justify capitalism. If anything Adam Smith (like Ricardo) distrusted capitalism, but the ideology of the “invisible hand” lingers on despite its ahistorical basis.
13 Likes
It’s a real mess. Since 1989 and “the end of history”, they’ve turned the “invisible hand” into that of a deity, presiding over the praxis of the “natural and default” (and, in an appropriately semi-religious turn, unnamable) economic philosophy of neoliberalism.
6 Likes
