Okay, let's start with health care.
Sherry Glied, PhD
Associate Professor
and Head of the
Division of Health Policy and
Management
Columbia University
Sherry Glied served as a Senior Economist for health
care and labor market policy to the President's
Council of Economic Advisors, under both President
Bush and President Clinton in 1992-1993. She also was
a participant in President Clinton's Health Care Task
Force in 1993. She is studying the US employer-based
health system, and researching ways to expand health
insurance among uninsured Americans.
http://www.pbs.org/healthcarecrisis/Exprts_intrvw/s_glied.htm
Some interesting exerpts:
"Now Canada has a single payer system, which is very
attractive in many ways. It really reduces
administrative costs, but right now they've gone
through a period of extreme cut-backs in their health
care system. When you look at consumer satisfaction in
Canada, it's as low as consumer satisfaction in the
United States, which is extraordinary, given how high
it was in Canada ten years ago. It does cost a lot of
money to buy people health care. How are you going to
do that within a context of the government budget? How
are you going to deal with the fact that some people
would really like to spend a lot more money on health
care than the government does while others are too
poor to spend any more? So every one of these systems
faces problems and they're all sort of variants of the
same problem that we face."
and she goes on later to say this:
"One of the things that strikes me when I look at the
data is that uninsured people in this country actually
get a phenomenal amount of care. The average uninsured
person in the United States gets as much care as the
average Canadian in dollars. We spend a huge amount of
money on these people."
I think you can attribute the satisfaction rates in
America being as low as they are in Canada because
Americans like to complain and they're always looking
for something better. Especially if it's the current
hot topic, as health care is for us.
Of the other sources I reviewed briefly, they seem to
be mostly people complaining about their own systems,
because the majority are of the opinion that they're
all broken.
I like Dr. Glied's solution to the US's current woes,
which i'll let you read on the link under "What is
your proposal?" for brevity's sake. It's remarkably
like the current US tax system, which is a huge
advantage to American style democracy and economics:
The rich pay for most of it. It's the penalty we
extract from them for walking on our heads to get
where they are.. ;)
dean
--- Marc Erickson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> : What you call freedom ain't free. Shall we
> compare
> : how much of a given 'socialist' country's (your
> pick)
> : money gets eaten up in governmental red tape as
> : compared to where the money goes in the more
> heavily
> : private sector services provided in the US? How
> about
> : the quality and availability of those same
> services?
> :
> : dean
>
> OK, Dean, I'll bite. Here's my pick: Canada.
>
> Marc
>
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