Putting it Simply

That's all very well but it doesn't provide any opportunities for the insanely greedy mega-rich to get even richer, does it? Isn't that, after all, the whole point of living and why we're all here?

Your health care has =already= deteriorated well beyond the state of the post office, and that's without government interference.

When I took my mother to the emergency room for what turned out to be her final illness, she was 92, emaciated, and unable to walk. She had insurance with the hospital to which I took her. It =still= took 11 hours to get her admitted to the hospital, and that's because she jumped the line ahead others who had been waiting for =two days.=

When I went to the emergency room complaining of appendicitis, it took 12.5 hours to get into the operating room, by which time my appendix had burst and I was at death's door.

I was saved by, basically, a miracle, not by the Genius of Capitalism.

Besides, who do you think pays for the medical care of poor people now? The taxpayer. The elderly? The taxpayer. The disabled? The taxpayer.

They get their care, but in a hideously inefficient and mangled way that kills— what is it?— 22,000 per year? All unnecessarily? How many 9/11s is that every single year?

What I'd like to see is a medical system that runs with the efficiency of our army. Our army kills people so efficiently that we can conquer a medium-sized country in 10 days.

Except that we =care= about the army, and put effort into making it run well. If only we cared that much about saving lives.

Ron, while I feel your pain (having been the victim of misdiagnosis myself), I don't see how government-run medicine could have been any worse than what actually happened to you.

In countries with government-run health care, there isn't a man with a gun telling you that you can't get a second opinion. Or a third.

Likewise, most countries with government health care also have private insurance, so there would be nothing against your private insurance company paying for a Mayo Clinic visit if the government did not.

You're much more likely to see private insurance refuse to cover an expensive procedure than, say, Medicare.

Your cancer survival rate depends strongly on which cancer and which country. White Americans have the highest survival rate for prostate and breast cancers, in large part because it's normal for Americans to be regularly scanned for these problems. (Black Americans don't fare nearly so well. Nor do white Americans in poor, rual parts of the country.)

But Evil Socialist Japan does better than the US with men's colorectal cancers, and Evil Socialist France did better among women.

For the state, see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7510121.stm, or http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/healthday/2008/07/17/cancer-survival-depends-on-where-you-live.html

The UK doesn't do nearly so well as other First World countries with cancer, but that has less to do with government-run health care than with British medical culture. British MDs just don't seem to consider cancer worth fighting— or a lot of anything else.

I had a Brit doctor once, and it was amazing how many things he wouldn't treat me for. "They're normal," he said. "Not for me," I said, and got a new doctor (which was difficult, by the way, because I live in poor, rural New Mexico, and doctors were abandoning the state in droves, all for good capitalist reasons).

Cancer aside, longetivity statistics show that other countries— =all= of them with government-run health are— are doing better by their citizens than we are. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longevity.

(This leaves out very small countries like Andorra, Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore, all of which also have higher longevity stats than the US. Statistically speaking, if you want a long life, you want to get born in a city-state.)

Likewise, if you're a baby who wants to survive to see your first birthday, it's better to be born in Portugal, Anguilla, Slovenia, or Cuba than in the USA. See https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2091rank.html