TIL: There’s a Duluth in Georgia. Who knew?!
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The older guy lost his shit 
oh man
As the younger guy said though, give people the option, let the people tax themselves that would go to a system to what would be a universal healthcare plan eventually when the private insurance companies will then have to opporate on the same level
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It’s not far from me, either. Very much a commuter suburb, though like all suburbs now, it’s trying to become something of a destination in and of itself.
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Shortly after I moved to England (for the 2nd time), my son came down with a slight fever. I phoned the doctor, and his office sent a nurse to our house within a couple of hours. I think of this whenever people on the right bring up “facts” about how bad the NHS is.
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You mean there’s another Duluth?
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And from a surprising wide ideological background:
Health Care is one of those things where if you’ve never experienced it, you don’t think you need better. But once you have, you don’t want to give it up.
Every now and then some right-leaning politician floats the idea of a more privatised “two-tier” system. One or two things (usually diagnostics or treatments that aren’t already covered) get a foothold, but generally said politician gets a cold reminder that “we put you there and we can remove you”.
For those confused by Canadian Health Care: the provinces administer the programs and decide what is and isn’t covered, but they are required by the Feds to HAVE a program and the Feds supply some of the money to fund it (the province must find the rest on it’s own). Which is why vision care might be covered in one province and not another. You can get “Extended Medical” either through an employer or by purchasing from a private insurer to help cover what the province doesn’t.
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Using my parents as an example. They have this image of the government handing benefits to illegals and this would in their eyes be an extesnion of that.
I can’t fight that perception.
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Stepping into that mindset for a second, isn’t that problem already addressed in other single payer countries by requiring proof of citizenship / some criteria for coverage? Don’t we already do that for Medicare? I really hate this, but arguably this system would be able to aid in catching undocumented immigrants.
Meanwhile your parents and other hard working citizens stop getting fleeced by a rent-seeking middleman trying to dictate which doctors you see and who you can work for, and who has no problem reneging on contracts by denying coverage. And if anything goes wrong, you have a government that you can actually call to yell at or vote out whereas insurance companies are nearly immune to accountability and smug about it.
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Incidentally, that argument is bullshit.
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The only problems with the NHS is the massive amount of underfunding that has gone on for years, and the PFI schemes that end up costing the taxpayer more money than they saved.
OK, I could go into organisational issues, but that won’t take away the ability to have a “free at the point of delivery” healthcare system.
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I’m going to wade in here from Germany. We don’t have a single payer system- we have something far more complicated because it’s Germany and if you know anything about the tax code here you would know what I mean- but I digress. We do have a mandated universal coverage system here that happens to be in some financial difficulty at the moment. However, the output for healthcare in Germany is still lower that in the US. I don’t think “single payer” is the magic bullet answer, though it’s certainly the beginning. In Germany, as in most of Europe there is mostly a consensus that there are certain things that no progessive society can charge its’ citizens for, healthcare and education being among them. It hasn’t been sold to the general public here as a system that holds people back. They call it leveling the playing field. Ok, so where is the downside? Well, greed. Corporations and companies have gotten greedy here as well and long for the sort of situation that exists in the states where they can happily spend their days thinking up new ways of fleecing the general public. So even when you set the public up to finally believe that X situation benefits them in the long run- and in Europe they really believe- as soon as you turn your back Big Business is cranking up the propaganda bedtime stories machine with a proved mix of fairy tales that appeal to people’s base instincts. Here’s my question; considering how long we have been pushing the survival of the fittest philosophy in the US, is it really possible to get people behind this? And if so, for how long?
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Wait so were not the only ones with a byzantine tax code that makes no sense to anyone except a handful of special professionals? It’s good to have company, I suppose.
a well-known* urban legend claims that 70 % of all tax laws and literature are of German origin.
someone with the scientific method in mind tested this hypothesis and counted shelf space in the IBFD, an institute/library with an exhaustive collection of world-wide tax literature: “only”** about 200 meter of the 2 km shelf space are from Germany
* in Germany, that is
** 10 % for a rather smallish country is still a lot…
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2 km of shelf space on tax literature sounds like my worst nightmare, holy hell.
I work ::cough cough:: informally, so most years I file as a business. I gave up years ago on trying to understand the whole thing, and decided to treat it like a video game instead. I’m not sure if this strategy has saved me any money at all, but it does make the time pass by more pleasantly.
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I wouldn’t hazard a guess of country by country breakdown, but there’s definitely countries with UHC that treat foreigners/tourists free of charge. Even still, when they do charge it’s generally much less expensive on a per-treatment basis.
A friend of mine is looking into getting gold caps for a few of her teeth, and her research led her to choose Singapore. Apparently, for the same cost stateside, she can have it done in Singapore and still have enough money left over to spend a week on vacation.
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Yes, please.
How much of that can be attributed to the relative length of the average German word, though?
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Go Bernie Go!
Al Franken/Jill Stein 2020!
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