There is so DAMNED much misinformation in this thread it boggles the mind, but I'll just take this one post for an example, not to pick on the poster:
1. The United States ranking on Life expectancy is so low entirely because of two factors - murders and automobiles.
If you filter out auto deaths and murders from the stats, the U.S. has essentially the exact same life expectancy rate as Norway which is a nation at the very top of the list.
The population of most nations are far less mobile and have far fewer private cars per-capita. further, if you get killed in a car wreck, it says nothing about the health care system at all. Same with murder.
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2. the U.S. ranks where it does in terms of infant mortality entirely because of two factors - early births and counting methodology.
The U.S. far and away leads the world in very pre-term live births, and they are all counted towards infant mortality rates even though most of the ones in the low to mid 20's (weeks of gestation) don't survive. i forget the specific number but a huge percentage of the mortality rate is made up of pre-30 week births.
Furthermore, most of the other nations don't count such early term babies as live births unless they survive for (I believe) one full year after birth. That seriously skews the percentages.
As with life expectancy, if you control the list for full term births (356 weeks or after) the U.S. ranks at or near the top of the list worldwide.
It is BECAUSE we have such innovative and highly advanced medical care options that we have the opportunity to try to save those very-early babies.
Even the U.N. organization which compiles infant mortality rates cautions in the report that because of the different methodologies and criteria for counting live births, comparisons between nations are not valid.
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Another caveat on these numbers - governments lie. One example:
The U.S., with all the technology available to it, takes 2 years or more to compile and verify statistics like infant mortality. if you go look it up the latest available stats are likely from 2006.
By contrast, Cuba issued a glowing report on it's laudable infant mortality rates for 2008 on January 2, 2009!
How?
'Cause the report is made up bullshit, of the sort communist countries are legendary for.
And yet, those two statistics are two of the major tentpoles used to prop up the idea of socialized medicine, despite the fact that the reality is wildly at odds with the claims being made for them.
And it's exactly that sort of bullshit which corrupts every political argument on the table. (and it comes from both sides of the aisle, by the way)
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I say this not as a Republican (you know, the guys who saddled us with Medicare Part D just a few years ago) or a Democrat but as a "small l" libertarian:
The government fucks up every thing it touches and it WILL fuck up our health care system, no matter which bill passes. The more they try to do (i.e. the Democrat bill) the bigger the fuck up.
There are already solid free market solutions just beginning to catch fire, and which illustrate the power of unrestrained capitalism to solve economic problems. but they will be snuffed out by government meddling. the problems we already have in health care are not a result of free-market forces but a result of government meddling and more meddling is NOT the answer.
Want an example? Wal-Mart's $4 prescription program has gone a long way to revolutionizing private access to common medication. It has been wildly popular and has been emulated by various competitors. Why? Because these stores know that while you are there to get your meds you will likely spend other money in their store.
So in their "cooperate greed" WalMart and the others have saved individual patients BILLIONS of dollars - all with out one centilla of government intervention.
THAT is the model of innovation that we SHOULD be following, instead of going 180 degrees in the opposite direction because we've all been brainwashed into the "government has to DO SOMETHING!" mentality for the last 80 years.
Here's what you need to know - it's probably too late anyway. The odds are very strong that we are already doomed, and make no mistake when we go down we'll pull down the rest of the world's economy and the worlds major governments will be in danger of collapsing. It's just a matter of time.
And this will happen not because we are a free nation with a (mostly) capitalistic system, but because we are running headlong towards the same mistakes made by other Western nations before us. AWAY from freedom and away from capitalism.
To this point, they have gotten away with there foolishness because the U.S. was the economic engine that drove the world's economy. Our inovation and our productivity covered for a lot of stupidity around the world (for instance, Canada can afford to cap the price of prescription drugs because drug companies are still free to make enough profit to motivate them to innovate by charging more to Americans - get ready to see a collapse of new drug research if we cap prescription drug costs here).
But when our spending and debt crushes us, as it almost certainly WILL (barring a change in governing philosophy so remarkable that I don't believe it's still possible) then the tentpole collapses as we all will have a third world economy.
But then, that's what socialism really wants after all, not to elevate the needy to wealth, but to drag the wealthy down to poverty.
The sad thing is that those ignorant of history will insist it was capitalism that killed us, despite the fact we've been walking away from free-market capitalism for over a century.
It might be a couple of years, or a couple of decades - but you remember where you read it: the clock is ticking. And the current health care bill will do nothing but hasten the day.
