Quote:
Originally Posted by Kaioshin Sama
Somebody likes their two treatises on government. 
Don't worry, I'm with you on the right of revolution within reason as well. Hopefully it never has to come to that in the first world though. The worst we get are the hysterical town hall meetings with lunatics parroting what Glen Beck told them about "death panels". Funny that whole "death panel" thing, because that's kind of what I think of whenever I hear of a poor worker being denied their health care insurance because of a "pre-exisiting condition", thus dooming them to death if it's a terminal condition they are suffering from.
Let me just speak for the Canadian health care system a little and what Ted Kennedy was fighting for before his passing. From personal experience right this month my dad has been undergoing pre-op treatments and meetings quite regularly. You see he had a gallbladder attack a while back and so we had to take him to a hospital. The wait was less than 15 minutes before he got to see a doctor and they treated him quickly and he was already feeling a better in a little over an hour or two, but instead of sending him home they did some more tests for a few hours to make sure everything had really settled down and then set him up with a pre-op meeting to see if he needed surgery. The nurses and doctor were all very pleasant by the way and looked after him with the same respect a commission doctor in the U.S would if not more so (speaking from memory again I remember the doctors who treated my Grandmothers heartattack down there seemed purely business and not very comforting) since hospitals have no obligation to send a patient home in order to get the next one in and make more money. I don't recall any "death panels" either, all I recall is my dad being treated for what was wrong with him and being referred for further treatment.
So indeed as I've already mentioned he did need the surgery and the pre-op doctor told my mother who told me that if my dad was an American citizen then we would have had to re-mortgage our house just to pay for the operation and it almost certainly wouldn't have been covered under any affordable insurance plan since of course it could be easily identified as a "pre-existing condition". I just really don't get that whole idea of denying people the right to life and affordable public health care.
Somewhere along the line the hippocratic oath got lost in that labrynthine health insurance system down south and it honestly kind of scares the hell out of me from ever wanting to visit there too often. What if I get sick, what if something happens to me and I have to go to the hospital for serious treatment? How could I afford it? I really hope Obama's health care reform bill gets passed. |
Unfortunately, what will probably end up passing will be a thin ghost of what the other industrial nations we compete with economically do. Our businesses simply won't be able to compete globally unless it changes (or those that can will continue to simply relocate out of the country). Frankly, if my wife could easily transfer her pharmacy license to Canada, we'd have probably moved there 5 or 6 years ago.
You do not want to be against healthcare reform in her presence or any of her professional colleagues -- she gets to daily watch people bankrupted, get coverage dropped, valid claims denied, decide to stop taking treatment to keep their family from being economically ravaged... you name it. She came home in a blue funk on hearing of Kennedy passing.