Bush's 4th veto of his presidency is a good one

[ymu]

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I am furious about it, and I do think investment is important. I am just furious at the people who have the power and abuse it rather than the people who buy access to that power. Get rid of the first lot and the second lot won't be able to operate.

[/ QUOTE ]But the first lot only do what they do because the second lot demand it. Big business has disenfranchised the voter - globally, that is, but nowhere moreso than in the US. Big business pays them to bring in the policies big business wants; the politicians job is to propagandise that to the extent that folk like pvn actually seem to equate a national health service with the soviet union...

Any system which relies on good honest people in positions of power is fundamentally flawed; the kind of people who seek power are the last people who should be allowed to have it. Big business is about making money and it will always do that by whatever means necessary. Politicians are supposed to be there to make things run how the people want things to run, but that'll only happen if the voters actually demand it. Right now, they just stay at home in defeat. It's increasingly the same elsewhere, just not quite as extreme yet. It ain't democracy, and it ain't got anything to do with freedom.

[tomdemaine]

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Any system which relies on good honest people in positions of power is fundamentally flawed; the kind of people who seek power are the last people who should be allowed to have it.

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So why is your solution to give these people more power?

[ymu]

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Any system which relies on good honest people in positions of power is fundamentally flawed; the kind of people who seek power are the last people who should be allowed to have it.

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So why is your solution to give these people more power?

[/ QUOTE ]Huh? I don't think business should have any political power at all. I think politicians should be forced to represent the people who are actually entitled to vote for them - ie the rules governing the political system must make it in their best interests to do so. In the UK, for example, if we had the power to force a bye-election whenever a local MP disregarded the wishes of their electorate in parliament, Blair could never have taken us to war or introduced a whole raft of disastrously stupid and expensive legislation or sell off state assets to the lowest [censored] bidder at a huge loss to the treasury.

The NHS in the UK was introduced by a right wing government at a time of huge national debt. It would be political suicide for a UK politician to openly attempt to dismantle it. One of the few independents ever to win a parliamentary seat won on a single issue - stopping the local hospital from being closed down. US attitudes to expenditure on health (and education) seem incredibly bizarre from here.

[BuddyQ]

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US attitudes to expenditure on health (and education) seem incredibly bizarre from here.

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The argument against socialized medicine doesn't seem that hard to grasp. Try harder. You may not agree with the arguments, but calling them 'bizarre' is just demagoguery.

BTW, stop with the stereotypical British patronizing by constantly referring to 'Americans' thinking this or that, and 'American attitudes' on this or that. It should be obvious to you that there is a broad and fluid spectrum of opinion on the subject here.

[RR]

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I can't see how any sane person could argue that it makes more sense to pay $4,500/year on average for healthcare instead of $1,500/year on average extra tax. You like the idea of being sold expensive snake oil by largely unregulated salesmen? The first bank run for decades - something previously thought impossible in today's economic system - has just happened because of irresponsible lending to US consumers, and US consumers still want less regulation?

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In your system who do you suppose would do research to find new medicines. I hate repeating something that was said earlier in the thread, but I just can't believe that someone can be this oblivious to what drives research and development.

[TomCollins]

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I can't see how any sane person could argue that it makes more sense to pay $30 for a filet minioninstead of $1 for ramen noodles

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[ymu]

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I can't see how any sane person could argue that it makes more sense to pay $4,500/year on average for healthcare instead of $1,500/year on average extra tax. You like the idea of being sold expensive snake oil by largely unregulated salesmen? The first bank run for decades - something previously thought impossible in today's economic system - has just happened because of irresponsible lending to US consumers, and US consumers still want less regulation?

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In your system who do you suppose would do research to find new medicines. I hate repeating something that was said earlier in the thread, but I just can't believe that someone can be this oblivious to what drives research and development.

[/ QUOTE ]Firstly, I haven't advocated nationalising them. I've suggested that they shouldn't be allowed to sell obscenely expensive and largely useless poisons to an unsuspecting public.

Secondly, I'm advocating sane collective purchasing of health care instead of allowing a bunch of insurance companies in to take a massive cut of the money spent. Drug costs are also only a small proportion of spending on health, cutting them in half often doesn't make a substantial impact on the output of economic models. The US system also provides perverse incentives to doctors to over-treat, sometimes leading to worse health outcomes as a result. High dose chemotherapy for breast cancer is a good example - it took years to prove that it was shortening lives because doctors, mostly in the US, were such vociferous advocates of it. No drug company made money out of that, but the doctors did.

Finally, your faith in the fundamental goodness of a multi-billion dollar industry is touching, but what do you think the universities and public sector research bodies do? We don't need a bazillion me too drugs and armies of reps swamping medics with misleading information and billions wasted on advertising. Public sector medical research is far more valuable and a lot cheaper. The major medical journals won't even publish industry funded "research" any more unless the authors had certain contractual arrangements in place to safeguard the scientific integrity (rare to date). It's ridiculous to suggest that they don't lie, cheat and put peoples' lives at risk because they demonstrably do. That's why most countries are putting better systems in place to catch them at it and examine the true value of treatments instead of relying on information the companies stick on the advertising leaflets.

[RR]

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That's why most countries are putting better systems in place to catch them at it and examine the true value of treatments instead of relying on information the companies stick on the advertising leaflets.


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Please name a life saving drug that came from one of these companies. It is clear you still don't understand the people have to be rewarded for their work or they won't do it.

What kind of work do you do? Perhaps you need to be regulated and paid less. I am certain based on your posts above that you would work for whatever the government feels is fair rather than taking competing bids from private firms.

[ymu]

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I can't see how any sane person could argue that it makes more sense to pay $30 for a filet minioninstead of $1 for ramen noodles

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ROFL. And so we come full circle. I'll continue paying $15 for my steak and you can carry on paying the same and adding a $30 tip for a guy to take your check to the waiter for you. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

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The willingness of people in the US to pay more to a middleman than purchase directly is bemusing. Why do US voters willingly spend so much for so little?

This is the top 30 countries in the world ranked by life expectancy with spending on health care plotted over it (year 2000). You're spending 3 times as much on average to come 27th. And you mostly seem happy about it. Huh?


From: http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/spend.php

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[pvn]

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I can't see how any sane person could argue that it makes more sense to pay $30 for a filet minioninstead of $1 for ramen noodles

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Heh, I was just about to post the same FYP using a mercedes and a yugo.