Sally Redux

My son seems to keep having his ear bent by a super-republican student in his dorm. Apparently this boy's objection to such a system would be "no-one would bother to work." However this kid does not have a problem with taking financial aid to pay his tuition.

dlake02

Well, I am a socialist and proud of it. It's (supposedly) a free country. Yeah, right.

But, if you don't share my political views, I respect that. It's a Free Country !

And this for me was where the radio programme was SO interesting. Germany is a country with an equally Federal, right-wing, capitalist background. Yet it DOES have a social welfare system that is strongly supported by left, centre and right without question. They work around the public vs private issue by having non-profit private-but-regulated insurance schemes. Everyone is happy....

Now what was a shock for me was the statistics from Germany. Their health system has resulted in massive improvements in life-expectancy - the US has one of the lowest life expectancies in the Western world - infant mortality, etc.

And they have a 4Billion Euro SURPLUS from the health fund this year !!!

Giantaxe

Odd that the labour participation rate is higher in the UK than the US then, and that countries such as Germany seem to manage just fine economically even with universal healthcare.

janicedean164

Spot on Fella!

dlake02

Exactly. This is far more about "I've got what I want and s*d the rest of you" than a real debate about healthcare.

What makes me sick is when that same person that is telling me how "wrong" universal healthcare is turns out to be a preacher at a local church preaching forgiveness, compassion and care for each other - as long as they conform to his views.

Hipocrisy writ large.

janicedean164

And again absolutely the nail has been hit on the head!

Sally Redux

As Bill Maher puts it, they are 'inside the bubble'.

Giantaxe

Ditto for Switzerland.

It's actually even worse than that: effectively the US has stopped participating in increases in life expectancy being seen by other western countries and that trend is going to be difficult to reverse.

Giantaxe

What many of these people don't realize is that they are one serious illness from not having want they want and ending up on the other side of the equation.

Sally Redux

And what about their kids, relatives and friends, even if they don't care about the whole country?

I really don't get it.

Giantaxe

Part of it is there's a disconnect. If you look at polls, a majority support insurers not being able to exclude people with pre-existing conditions. But when you ask the same people whether they should be required to buy insurance, a majority are against it. They can't join the dots and realize that the former requires some form of the latter, be it through taxation or some other kind of "mandate".

And of course we also have all the crap about "socialism" and "death panels" etc.

dlake02

Personal infalibility ??? Ha ! We're all GOOD thanks !

Well, putting my capitalist head on for a moment, one aspect of not having any healthcare worth talking about seems to be a huge drain on industry as the workforce ages. I know I'm new to this place, but what has been a shock has been the number of what I can only call "older and sick" senior people that stay at work. It is obvious that they don't work as I do because they enjoy it - they work because they'd be stuffed with no healthcare if they didn't, and their conditions are not serious enough to get the long-term disability care provided by the company, but serious enough that it impacts their work.

That just makes NO business sense to me....

Sally Redux

Yes indeed. Coming back to this point as it's also something that interests me. At what point does the present system become unsustainable? We are not too far from that point I think.

Giantaxe

In addition, the healthcare access mess stops a lot of older people from starting their own business because they can't take the risk of losing their employer-provided insurance. Talk about perverse "incentives"! We always hear from Republicans about how small-business must be supported but they "conveniently" overlook this.

dlake02

And therein lies the issue. If you are a public employee, middle-class, white, in a well-paid job or some combination of all four, you probably only see it through your eyes, and you're fine.

For everyone else, the present system isn't becoming unsustainable - it already is, and has been there for years.

Until the middle-class think about someone other than themselves and their own, it'll remain a problem, IMHO.

There is a basic question - is this a society, or is this just a collection of individuals that happen to live on the same land-mass.....