On Feb 11, 2009, at 9:18 AM, Patrick Coskren wrote: > On Feb 11, 2009, at 1:35 AM, David Cake wrote: >> >> PS yeah, Chuck, you are just completely, objectively, wrong on the >> whole US vs UK thing. Admit it like a man.
I wasn't saying that the US is better I'm simply saying that the UK is not what we should be holding up as the way to go. >> The UK is regarded as a >> disaster by people comparing it to other nations with free national There absolutely is no such thing as free health care. Prepaid perhaps, but never free unless you tink that Dr.s work for nothing. >> >> health care systems, but the US is still worse than all of those. Indeed, the US has problems in it's cost structure. Back in the Clinton days one of his (valid) arguments was that 1/3 of the health care dollars go to administration. I find it impossible to believe that adding a government layer to that is going to help. >> > > Personally, I didn't bother reading far into the original article > Chuck posted, since it was obviously nonsense, but I happened across > these rebuttals/analyses, and others may find them of interest Read Dashel's book. That is who Obama wanted Daschle to run things and the source of a lot of the worries. Daschle says that doctors will have to “learn to operate less like solo practitioners” and be willing to accept mandatory government controls and guidelines. Page 196 of Daschle’s book says that the next President should “slip this into a spending bill” to get it passed. Isn't that EXACTLY what is going on? All of this begs a simple question WTF is this doing buried 400 pages into a stimulus package if not following the Daschle plan? Perhaps they know that they couldn't sneak it past us on it's own? Actually, it's anti-stimulus no? IF you go completely electronic, you will fire all those filing clerks that you no longer need. Sure you hire the computer guy to set it up, but that's a one off expense. > > The unfortunately titled commentary... > <http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/zombie-lies-and-puke-funnel-return-of.html > > > > <http://mediamatters.org/items/200902100031?f=h_latest> You can pull the waiting list stats up at the UK gov site for yourself but do a google on the UK's stories on how broken the NHS is. A few that stand out. The NHS is *trying* to reduce the waiting time to 18 weeks from recommended treatment at hospital <http://www.healthdirect.co.uk/2008/06/nhs-waiting-list-promise-likely-to-be.html > "February, 3 per cent – almost 9,000 – had been waiting more than a year and 62,000 had been waiting more than 6 months." It's by no means perfect but a patient on medicaid <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid > gets in the same queue as I do if they see a doc and he decides that they need an operation or other hospitalization. Personal example. I had an arthroscope of my knee a couple of weeks ago. From the time of the injury happened. 1 week to see a sports medicine specialist and schedule the surgery. 6 days later I had it done. 13 days start to finish. It could have been done a lot faster if I didn't choose a sports medicine specialist and had a local surgeon do it. If I was on Medicaid I would have had to use the local doc so my wait time would have been less. How about your basic dentist. <Good news: In need of an NHS dentist? Bad news: Join the achingly long queue of 6,836 and wait for five years> <http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P2-16256436.html> Of course you could go private.. You just will have to wait longer since you will be shoved down the queue. (as if 5 years isn't long enough..) "Desperate North-east dental patients could be bumped down the NHS waiting list if they go private. Nhs Grampian has now admitted it has a policy of pushing people down the waiting list if they discover the person has signed up for private care." <http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P2-14482273.html> So you get punished for deciding that the problem you have is urgent enough to require going private. AND you still get to pay for a service you can't use. Last one.. University interventions aim to help heal a 'broken' NHS "Although universities' biomedical research is world class, he said, institutions are pushed away by a "Stalinist" NHS. "The consequence is that while we are second only to the US in biomedicine and have four of the top universities in the world in this area, we are way down the table when it comes to clinical outcomes." <http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=402252> Clinical outcomes? Isn't that doctor talk for RESULTS? =c= =========================================== "Vegetables aren't food. Vegetables are what food eats! I get my veggies by eating vegetarians..." _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
