# Devil's advocate: saving America from socialized medicine. **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 26, 2009, 7:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032 "2009-01-26T07:39:12Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![MichaelQReilly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@MichaelQReilly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MichaelQReilly)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2009, 11:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032/121 "2009-01-28T23:28:15Z")
> [@curlcoat](#): > > Why would you be unable to believe that I have actually talked to the doctors offices that I go to about this, and that you are wrong? I worked in insurance for over 25 years, and at one time dabbled with the idea that I would start up a home business handling insurance for small doctors offices. It wasn’t needed. > > Where do you get the idea that doctors (or their staff) have to spend hours and hours every week on insurance claims anyway? The big companies are mostly electronic these days and the ones that aren’t usually have a PPO or HMO sort of relationship with the doctors, so they bill weekly/monthly/whatever the contract says. I just don’t get this belief that doctors and their staffs have to spend all this time on insurance issues. Because I have multiple family members involved in this business. Because of the existence of the careers medical biller and medical coder and the many 3rd party billing companies. How do you think the billing information gets entered into the computer for the electronic claims? What happens when the claims forms change, as they do periodically, but some of the insurance companies aren’t set up to handle them yet? What happens when you get a provider that you aren’t set up for electronic billing with? What happens when insurance companies kick back a code that they previously paid on or under-pay for it? What happens when each provider uses a slightly different code for payment? Someone needs to deal with all of these issues and many more that I haven’t listed. Again, it’s possible that a small doctors offices has an office manager who handles these things. But any midsized practice, and every surgery center or hospital has many people doing this kind of job. ---
**Author:** ![MichaelQReilly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@MichaelQReilly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MichaelQReilly)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2009, 11:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032/122 "2009-01-28T23:32:36Z")
Or what **foxy40** said. I’m sorry **curlcoat** but your ignorance on this issue is obvious. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2009, 11:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032/123 "2009-01-28T23:33:19Z")
> [@curlcoat](#): > > I regularly drive all over the US east of the Rockies and have frequently gone further east than that. It is the extremely rare area that is as lightly populated as northern Canada was (and probably still is) 40 years ago. I’ll see your Northern Canada and raise you Alaska. 🙂 A Canadian can correct me, but I very much doubt the needs of the Yukon and northern Canadians drove the adoption of UHC in Canada. They don’t have a lot of votes, for one thing. > [@](#): > > What would make that meaningful is you could tell me if those people all went bankrupt despite having been responsible. In other words, did they all go bankrupt despite having had savings, insurance, good health practices? I didn’t click on the link because I am on dial-up and need to leave soon, but I am assuming that it is like all the others I’ve seen - so and so got cancer and the treatment has bankrupt him, but no mention of what led up to it other than “medical bills”. > > See, my father-in-law and mother-in-law both died of cancer, but left no bills because they were both responsible enough to have insurance and assets that covered their treatments. My grandmother died in a nursing home - again, no bills. If the guy across the street gets cancer he is going to be up shit creek because he bought more house than he can afford and they had three kids, a pool and two mid range SUVs by the time they were in their 30’s. > > It seems that every time I turn around, someone has some plan to help save irresponsible people from themselves, using my money. I can’t afford to subsidize these people any more! Do you have a cite on how many older people irresponsibly reject health insurance? I don’t have a choice at my company - I can choose the high or low option, but I have to have it. How many people going bankrupt due to insurance have 3 SUVs vs being working poor with no or inadequate insurance? How many had savings that were used up in the first bout of illness? How much money and education does a person have to have to be worth something in your eyes? Is the nice woman who cleans the bathrooms at work, and who probably doesn’t get health insurance, irresponsible because I doubt she’d be very good at computer design? I was lucky enough to be born with some modicum of intelligence and into a family that both supported it and could send me to college. That does not make me a better person than her, and does not give me the right to be able to go to the doctor than she has. When my older daughter got out of college and was looking for a job, we paid for her health insurance, which was miserable and expensive. She didn’t need it, thank Og. My younger daughter is in Germany for the year, and is paying something like 65 Euros a month for excellent insurance. Why do the Germans deserve better than Americans? ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2009, 11:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032/124 "2009-01-28T23:37:31Z")
> [@MichaelQReilly](#): > > Or what **foxy40** said. I’m sorry **curlcoat** but your ignorance on this issue is obvious. My thanks to you and **foxy40** for your information. That’s what I like about this place, there is always someone who knows. I only know that the insurance people I talk to aren’t figments of my imagination, but you know a lot more. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2009, 11:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032/125 "2009-01-28T23:42:13Z")
> [@Strassia](#): > > You do realize that we are all subsidizing the medical care of CEO’s and other high earners as well as those that have no insurance right now? The only ones not on the grave train are those that make too much for assistance, but don’t get insured through an employer. That means that the current structure, regardless of its efficiency, puts pressure on potential entrepreneurs. Say my wife and I have a great idea for a new business. We have saved enough money to start the business and we ready to go, but if we both quite or jobs, our health insurance costs triple. The current setup basically uses federal money to discourage competition. > Jonathan Another set of people who are getting hurt are young people, starting out, maybe trying to put themselves through community college. A bunch of my daughter’s friends work retail, and for the most part they are given 30 hours a week so the employer doesn’t have to give them benefits, primarily insurance. A good UHC plan would let them work as much as they want to, since there would be no savings on insurance costs for the employer. And I’m not talking WalMart here, btw. ---
**Author:** ![jackdavinci](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackdavinci/32/3259_2.png) [@jackdavinci](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jackdavinci)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2009, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032/126 "2009-01-28T23:47:15Z")
> [@curlcoat](#): > > Oh goody. I get to pay more in taxes to subsidize insurance for the nation and pay premiums to a private company? That isn’t really relevant to the point I was making. But I suspect that whatever we pay in taxes will be comparable to whatever a person with insurance is already paying in premiums or reduction of pay. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2009, 12:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032/127 "2009-01-29T00:59:58Z")
> [@curlcoat](#): > > Logically, a low populated area is not going to be profitable enough to support more than one GP doctor, if that. So the only way the government can assure that people living in the NW Territories or the plains got at least basic health care would be to subsidize it. And, yes, because that would cost a lot, the next logical step is to make it nationwide to spread out the cost. You don’t understand how the system works. The federal government doesn’t exercise control over doctors or hospitals, and in fact doesn’t even really control ANYTHING directly. Our system is a health insurance system, not direct government control of medical services. The federal government gives money to the provinces only on the most basic of conditions. Provinces can incentivize doctors to move to rural areas if they want, but that doesn’t cross provincial borders. The administration of funding is done by provincial and territorial governments. Nova Scotia doesn’t give a fig that Saskatchewan’s more spread out. The system would, in fact, work better if Canada was geographically far smaller than it is, for the obvious reason that distance increases cost. I’m also curious as to the fact that you seem to believe the United States is densely populated. You do realize it’s not, right? In any case, the fact that northern Canada is lightly populated has very little to do with the fact that almost all of them live in a number of very big cities along the southern band of the country. Canadians are not quite as spread out as you seem to think, and Americans are more spread out than you suggest, in large part because the USA really has more _practical_ space in which to live. Canada’s a tiny bit bigger but a lot of our land, no person would ever want to live in. ---
**Author:** ![gaffa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e68b1a/32.png) [@gaffa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gaffa)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2009, 1:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032/128 "2009-01-29T01:28:51Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > Canada’s a tiny bit bigger but a lot of our land, no person would ever want to live in. Oh, come on, Windsor is not _that_ bad. ---
**Author:** ![curlcoat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ea5d25/32.png) [@curlcoat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/curlcoat)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2009, 1:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032/129 "2009-01-29T01:33:53Z")
> [@Strassia](#): > > It depends on why it fails. For example, if it fails because a large number of people from all over the Northeast move to Mass when they lose their insurance, artificially increasing the number of non-tax payers using the system, then yes it would be logical to do it on a national scale. What would be logical would be to not allow people to move into the test area and skew the results. > [@](#): > > You do realize that we are all subsidizing the medical care of CEO’s and other high earners as well as those that have no insurance right now? The only ones not on the grave train are those that make too much for assistance, but don’t get insured through an employer. That means that the current structure, regardless of its efficiency, puts pressure on potential entrepreneurs. Say my wife and I have a great idea for a new business. We have saved enough money to start the business and we ready to go, but if we both quite or jobs, our health insurance costs triple. The current setup basically uses federal money to discourage competition. No it doesn’t, it just means that you might have to - gasp! - put off the gratification of working for yourself until you have enough saved to pay for a private policy. Or, only one of you quits the job with group coverage. If the only thing keeping you from starting this business is the triple cost of insurance, what are you going to do if your great idea doesn’t bring in money quickly, or even semi-quickly? It doesn’t sound like this has been thought thru, tho it is a great example of how too many people think these days. Apparently, it’s ok to take all kinds of risks because the government will tax the non-risk takers and save your butt. Unfortunately, it seems that the non-risk takers are getting more and more rare. As for subsidizing CEOs, two wrongs don’t make a right. If it is true that there are folks makin money for no work, deal with that. Without creating more government waste. ---
**Author:** ![curlcoat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ea5d25/32.png) [@curlcoat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/curlcoat)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2009, 1:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032/130 "2009-01-29T01:46:18Z")
> [@Foxy40](#): > > I am sorry but I must pipe in here. As a member of the MGMA, ([http://mgma.com/](http://mgma.com/)) I can tell you that you are very wrong. Outsourced billing isn’t needed because it is less expensive to do in house. Many claims are paid electronically but it takes a staff to enter the charges, codes and follow up when they are often denied for one reason or another. In addition, depending on the state, many liability claims are not accepted electronic and must be send with the office notes. (Workers compensation, auto accidents, slip and fall). It is the very small practice indeed that can have one staff member to do this. An average orthopedic office with three clinicians requires two to three billers to make sure the claims are submitted and paid correctly. (We are talking only medical insurance here, and I know diddly about workers comp, auto and liability.) The facts are - I was told that the doctors offices that I polled did not need any help because “Sally” did the billing, and “Sally” was also one of the receptionists. I specifically asked about dealing with denials, Medicare in particular, and was told that they didn’t get enough of those to make it worthwhile to even have me do them on a percentage basis. Now, that was about 10 years ago, but that was also back when _everything_ was done on paper - almost all doctors visits had to be written up on the particular form that each insurance company used, precerts were on paper, etc. > [@](#): > > Doctors, particularly surgeons spend hours trying to get surgeries precertified. Insurance companies seem to look for any way to get out of approving and once they do, they will reject a claim for every mistakenly dotted i. If this is happening somewhere, you should hope that the state has an elected insurance commisioner and that person should be contacted. It is illegal for an insurance company to not pay for something that is in the policy. OTOH, surgeries that are outside the bounds of the policy can sometimes be approved given a lot of time and energy from the doctors - _those_ would take hours. > [@](#): > > So staff required is a precertification specialist, a billing code entry staff member and people to submit the claims and make sure they are paid correctly. In essence, offices, particularly specialists, utilitize enormous staff resources on insurance. Good lord. I see three specialists and none of them have those things. No, strike that, I don’t know about the orthopedist but he is in a very large office so he may have some folks that just do billing, due to the size of the practice. The others, no. If nothing else, they simply don’t see enough patients to be able to afford three people who do nothing but insurance! ---
**Author:** ![curlcoat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ea5d25/32.png) [@curlcoat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/curlcoat)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2009, 1:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032/131 "2009-01-29T01:47:43Z")
> [@Euphonious\_Polemic](#): > > And yet the data says that despite the areas of low population density in Canada, we spend less per capita and less per GDP than the United States does. Why is this? As I said way back someplace upthread, I personally think it is because Canadians tend to be more responsible and less entitlement minded than those in the US. ---
**Author:** ![curlcoat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ea5d25/32.png) [@curlcoat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/curlcoat)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2009, 1:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032/132 "2009-01-29T01:49:32Z")
> [@MichaelQReilly](#): > > Or what **foxy40** said. I’m sorry **curlcoat** but your ignorance on this issue is obvious. Hardly. I was in the business until Sept 2007. This sounds more like you are assuming that all doctor’s offices are the same as the ones that you go to. All I said was it isn’t true that _every_ doctor has to hire people to just do insurance. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2009, 1:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032/133 "2009-01-29T01:53:25Z")
> [@gaffa](#): > > Oh, come on, Windsor is not _that_ bad. Well played, sir. It is, though. ---
**Author:** ![MichaelQReilly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@MichaelQReilly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MichaelQReilly)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2009, 2:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032/134 "2009-01-29T02:04:49Z")
> [@curlcoat](#): > > Hardly. I was in the business until Sept 2007. This sounds more like you are assuming that all doctor’s offices are the same as the ones that you go to. All I said was it isn’t true that _every_ doctor has to hire people to just do insurance. No, as I said in my first post in this thread, and as others who have done more than talk to a receptionist have explained, unless it is a very small practice there is almost certainly one or more people who’s sole job is to do billing. ---
**Author:** ![curlcoat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ea5d25/32.png) [@curlcoat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/curlcoat)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2009, 2:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032/135 "2009-01-29T02:23:05Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > I’ll see your Northern Canada and raise you Alaska. 🙂 A Canadian can correct me, but I very much doubt the needs of the Yukon and northern Canadians drove the adoption of UHC in Canada. They don’t have a lot of votes, for one thing. Oh, yeah, Alaska… 😃 Does anyone actually live all that far outside of the cities up there? I don’t think that northern Canada is why UHC got started up there, but I think it is why it ended up being nationwide. If I remember correctly from what I read, it started in BC and then another provinence (I think Ontario) and then more or less ended up nationwide. > [@](#): > > Do you have a cite on how many older people irresponsibly reject health insurance? Not reject it, don’t have the option due to their own irresponsibility. Such as not finishing high school (we have a lot of that out here) so they never end up in a job that offers group plans, and they are so underemployed they cannot afford a private policy. Yet they still feel they “deserve” a new car, a nice stereo, 2.3 kids (or whatever the average is these days) and a bigger home. They go out and buy all of that on time and then, whoops!, Dad is killed in a car wreck and everyone says that “thru no fault of their own”, the family is on the ropes. > [@](#): > > I don’t have a choice at my company - I can choose the high or low option, but I have to have it. They force you to buy medical insurance??? > [@](#): > > How many people going bankrupt due to insurance have 3 SUVs vs being working poor with no or inadequate insurance? That’s what I would want to know, and also the definition of working poor. Take the people across the street. 5 - 6 years ago a couple in their late 20’s bought that house with their two kids, and then had another baby within a year. They cannot afford the mortgage anymore because it ballooned or whatever it is that happens when your monthly payment goes way up, so they moved another couple and their two kids in. There are now four adults and five children living in a three bedroom house, two of the adults drive mid range SUVs and one drives a Hummer. They have an in ground pool, pay to have it maintained and pay a gardener to do their lawn. All four adults work, tho the mother from the original couple either starts really early or only works part time as she picks up the school aged kids and I guess baby goes to daycare or something. Now, how much saving do you think is going on over there? How much more responsible would it have been to have waited to buy a house until they could actually afford it? One without a pool? To not have kid number three knowing that their mortgage was going to go up? How responsible is it to buy $50,000+ worth of vehicle, and pay to insure it and pay to put gas in it when you are living like that? This is what I want to know - are these the sorts of people that are going bankrupt due to some serious illness? I doubt they are called working poor given the house they live in, but maybe they are? > [@](#): > > How much money and education does a person have to have to be worth something in your eyes? That has zero to do with it. People who have disasters despite their best efforts deserve to be helped. Those who blow their money, ignore education opportunities, buy what they want when they want it whether they have the money or not - those are the ones I am tired of bailing out. > [@](#): > > Why do the Germans deserve better than Americans? Perhaps the Germans don’t sit around waiting for someone else to take care of them. Bottom line: the more you tell people that they “deserve” this and “deserve” that without them actually having done anything to actually deserve it, the more the real live responsible people have to pay to make up for it. Eventually, you are going to run out of responsible people. ---
**Author:** ![curlcoat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ea5d25/32.png) [@curlcoat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/curlcoat)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2009, 2:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032/136 "2009-01-29T02:28:45Z")
> [@jackdavinci](#): > > That isn’t really relevant to the point I was making. > > But I suspect that whatever we pay in taxes will be comparable to whatever a person with insurance is already paying in premiums or reduction of pay. Why do you think that? The UHC group policy would have to cover hundreds of thousands of people who would not be able to pay a premium, so that cost would have to be made up some how… Right now we pay about $225 a month for my husband and myself, and that is the most we have ever paid due to him working for a small start up. If we were to add all of the un- and under-employed people to our group policy, do you think the insurance company could afford to cover us all for $225 a month? ---
**Author:** ![curlcoat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ea5d25/32.png) [@curlcoat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/curlcoat)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2009, 2:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032/137 "2009-01-29T02:37:22Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > You don’t understand how the system works. The federal government doesn’t exercise control over doctors or hospitals, and in fact doesn’t even really control ANYTHING directly. Our system is a health insurance system, not direct government control of medical services. The federal government gives money to the provinces only on the most basic of conditions. Provinces can incentivize doctors to move to rural areas if they want, but that doesn’t cross provincial borders. . This doesn’t contradict what I said since I never said that the Canadian government controls the doctors or hospitals, just that they provide funds. > [@](#): > > The system would, in fact, work better if Canada was geographically far smaller than it is, for the obvious reason that distance increases cost. . Sooo, then, logically a country the size of the US might cost even more. > [@](#): > > I’m also curious as to the fact that you seem to believe the United States is densely populated. You do realize it’s not, right? . The US is certainly more densely populated than Canada. > [@](#): > > In any case, the fact that northern Canada is lightly populated has very little to do with the fact that almost all of them live in a number of very big cities along the southern band of the country. Canadians are not quite as spread out as you seem to think, and Americans are more spread out than you suggest, in large part because the USA really has more _practical_ space in which to live. Canada’s a tiny bit bigger but a lot of our land, no person would ever want to live in. People in the US are spread out much more, yes, but they are not as far from big cities as some Canadians are. OTOH, I haven’t been up there past Toronto or Vancouver in years, so perhaps Prince George, Yellowknife and White Horse have grown by quite a bit? It used to be that even in the prairies there would be 100’s of miles between cities - no longer true? You all don’t have the big sweeping wheat fields anymore? ---
**Author:** ![curlcoat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ea5d25/32.png) [@curlcoat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/curlcoat)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2009, 2:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032/138 "2009-01-29T02:39:02Z")
> [@MichaelQReilly](#): > > No, as I said in my first post in this thread, and as others who have done more than talk to a receptionist have explained, unless it is a very small practice there is almost certainly one or more people who’s sole job is to do billing. I talked to the doctors - receptionists don’t make those sorts of decisions. Since you can’t seem to accept that maybe things are different outside of your personal experience, I guess there is nothing left to say. ---
**Author:** ![I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/i_love_me_vol.i/32/521_2.png) [@I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I_Love_Me_Vol.I)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2009, 3:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032/139 "2009-01-29T03:37:49Z")
> [@foolsguinea](#): > > Is this where it’s going to land? Opposition to socialized medicine is driven by contempt for the underclass? > > I mean, I sort of thought that it was going somewhere like that, & I think my OP reflects that. But is this really going to be our justification? Can we honestly say that it’s a basis for policy? Yes. Absolutely. Because… **I GOT MINE!!!111** ---
**Author:** ![I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/i_love_me_vol.i/32/521_2.png) [@I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I_Love_Me_Vol.I)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2009, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032/140 "2009-01-29T03:42:15Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Being a child of the '60s, I enjoy saying “Love it or Leave it” to right wingers. 😛 Yeah, but where could they go? Iran? Saudi Arabia? Russia? Just who is further to the right than the USA? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032.md?page=6) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/devils-advocate-saving-america-from-socialized-medicine/483032.md?page=8)