AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

2) Government interference. Instead of leaving insurance companies alone to work out the most competitive system and offer a variety of packages to pick and choose from, government has over regulated and dictated to insurance what they must cover and who they must cover. A lot of the increased cost points directly to that. (A lot--not all--of this is at the state level as well as the federal level.) In my opinion THAT is what makes insurance rise in cost more than the rate of inflation.

3) Government mandates that healthcare must be provided to the uninsured. That gives millions of Americans license to spend their money in other ways rather than buy insurance that they could afford. Just going back to the old system (before Medicare) in which there was no such thing as mandated healthcare would help enormously there. Yes, it throws the uninsured on the mercy of the system, but we always worked that out and people were not dying in the street for lack of emergency care any more than they are now. But those who could afford insurance bought it.

4) A society that has become more and more litigious which is a huge portion of the rising costs of healthcare both in unrealistic use of 'defensive medicine' and high costs of malpractice insurance. In none of the five healthcare outlines currently being debated is there any suggeston of tort reform which could help us out enormously.

And nobody has yet pointed me to a large government program that has not proved to be far more costly than its initial advertising, or that has provided better results than the private sector for the same money.

3) Government mandates that healthcare must be provided to the uninsured. That gives millions of Americans license to spend their money in other ways rather than buy insurance that they could afford. Just going back to the old system (before Medicare) in which there was no such thing as mandated healthcare would help enormously there. Yes, it throws the uninsured on the mercy of the system, but we always worked that out and people were not dying in the street for lack of emergency care any more than they are now. But those who could afford insurance bought it.

Why are so many of your doctors leaving there and coming here? In the clinic where my primary physician works, I was told that three of the twelve physicians are former Canadians.

Why is the survival rate for those diagnosed with cancer, heart disease, and other costly illnesses so much higher in the USA than it is in Canada?

In a report on worldwide cancer survival rates, Canada ranked near the top of the 31 countries studied with an estimate five-year survival rate of 82.5 per cent.

For breast cancer, Cuba had the highest survival rates -- another country with free health care. The United States was second, and Canada was third, with 82 per cent of women surviving at least five years.

In Canada, the five Canadian provinces included in the study had almost identical results.

"For those five provinces, the survival rate does not differ very greatly from one to the other," said British cancer researcher Prof. Michel Coleman. "That probably indicates the overall effectiveness of universal health care for setting a high standard."

The range of survival rates across the five provinces was quite narrow, from a low of 79.3 per cent in Nova Scotia to a high of 85.4 per cent in British Columbia.

The other provinces studied were Manitoba, Ontario and Saskatchewan.

However, the survival rate for the seventeen regions in the United States that were included in the study ranged from 78 per cent to 90 per cent.

The disparity in survival rates crossed racial lines in the U.S., as well, with white patients having a five-year survival rate of 84.7 per cent and black patients having a survival rate of 70.9 per cent.

Why is the survival rate for those diagnosed with cancer, heart disease, and other costly illnesses so much higher in the USA than it is in Canada?

why such a discrepancy?

So why are your doctors suggesting that Canadians are not receiving optimum healthcare?

According to this study, the US, Australia, Canada, France and Japan had the highest five-year survival rates among the 31 countries involved in that study.

Findings
Global variation in cancer survival was very wide. 5-year relative survival for breast, colorectal, and prostate cancer was generally higher in North America, Australia, Japan, and northern, western, and southern Europe, and lower in Algeria, Brazil, and eastern Europe. CONCORD has provided the first opportunity to estimate cancer survival in 11 states in USA covered by the National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR), and the study covers 42% of the US population, four-fold more than previously available. Cancer survival in black men and women was systematically and substantially lower than in white men and women in all 16 states and six metropolitan areas included. Relative survival for all ethnicities combined was 2"4% lower in states covered by NPCR than in areas covered by the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) Program. Age-standardised relative survival by use of the appropriate race-specific and state-specific life tables was up to 2% lower for breast cancer and up to 5% lower for prostate cancer than with the census-derived national life tables used by the SEER Program. These differences in population coverage and analytical method have both contributed to the survival deficit noted between Europe and the USA, from which only SEER data have been available until now.

but how many would vote to have it in the first place if they knew then what they know now?

Thomas Clement "Tommy" Douglas, PC, CC, SOM (20 October 1904 " 24 February 1986) was a Scottish-born Baptist minister who became a prominent Canadian social democratic politician. As leader of the Saskatchewan Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) from 1942 and the seventh Premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961, he led the first socialist government in North America and introduced universal public healthcare to Canada.

Quote:

why such a discrepancy?

Easy: money. Our system is set up to favor money, and Conservatives like it that way. They could care less that the survival rates for the poor in America are terrible, compared to countries with socialized medicine, because they don't care at all how OTHERS fare, just themselves.

Cycloptichorn

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Quote:

why such a discrepancy?

Easy: money. Our system is set up to favor money, and Conservatives like it that way. They could care less that the survival rates for the poor in America are terrible, compared to countries with socialized medicine, because they don't care at all how OTHERS fare, just themselves.

Cycloptichorn

You are, of course much more generous then they. You are quite willing to tax other people to provide the benefits you seek.

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georgeob1 wrote:

you are<snip blah blah blah>

Have you got a better explanation for discrepancies in cancer survival rates within the U.S. ?

The free market generally does work quite effectively, and a free market also translates to more freedom for the people to structure their lives in the way that is most beneficial and satisfying for them.

Comprehensive health care reform can no longer wait. Rapidly escalating health care costs are crushing family, business, and government budgets. Employer-sponsored health insurance premiums have doubled in the last 9 years, a rate 3 times faster than cumulative wage increases. This forces families to sit around the kitchen table to make impossible choices between paying rent or paying health premiums.

Foxfyre wrote:

The free market generally does work quite effectively, and a free market also translates to more freedom for the people to structure their lives in the way that is most beneficial and satisfying for them.

We don't have a "free market" in the United States. The federal government was explicitly granted the power to regulate the market (commerce) in order to protect the public welfare