Well, I’ll just assume you concede defeat on all my points you could not bring yourself to discuss.
Oh god, I work in a pharmacy! Maybe we’re the same kind of evil…
OK, look. Not to belabor the point, but I think what got to me was not the “asshole”. It was the over-the-top assertion that somehow, because I had questions, I hate Broomstick and her husband, and want them to die slow, painful deaths. If that ain’t insulting (and a goddamned dishonest debating tactic), then I’m not sure what is.
Good lord. And you people are calling ME an asshole.
Just kissin’ cousins of evil, unless you work in a nuke pharmacy. 
I haven’t, but feel free to refute my assumption if you can.
Oooh…hospital and retail. We get the best of both worlds. Okay we should stop, I think we’re violating some professional ethics, here…
Hell, William McGuire made twice that much every year, all by himself. Since we won’t need him (well, we got rid of him already) nor his counterparts and their underlings any more, I’m pretty sure we can find the pittance you’re speaking of somewhere in the piles of cash we’d save by bypassing the money-printing healthcare industry.
Huh, coincidentally enough, I just ran into a DailyKos diary by an economist that illustrates nicely why health care doesn’t fit well into a deregulated “free” market, to wit:
The rest of it is worth reading as well, but I thought this bit was quite germane. We’ve really set ourselves up to fail with the whole insurance model, and competition isn’t going to fix it.
The USA already has socialized medicine, only it is not universal, for although it covers seniors, people in the military, government employees, people on welfare, and people in prison, it does not cover most taxpayers.
When comparing Canada with the USA:
Canadians live longer
Canadians have more years of good health
When looking at what is paid for health care by individuals through their combined taxes and insurance, Canadians pay less
On a per capita basis, the Canadaian government spends less on health care
The search function is down again, so if you are looking for a cite, either wait until the SDMB pops a viagra pill and then search for individual posts under my user name and the key words World Health Organization, or go dig about in the WHO reports: World Health Organization (WHO)
How the 'ell is this thread going on so long anyway?
That, and when push finally comes to shove, they end up at an ER, causing longer waits for the dumbshits that break Q-tips off in thier ears.
Frankly, I was stunned back in 1993 when Hillary Clinton pitched her plan to subsidize private insurers with federal tax dollars (which has been partly accomplished with Medicare Part D, & which “reasonable moderates” like Obama & Romney now support), & people called it “socialized medicine.” I expected socialized medicine to mean putting hospitals in state hands as in the UK. She didn’t even go for single-payer as in Canadian Medicare (which is relatively timid & prone to cost overruns, but less those things then her mad kludge).
We do “socialized medicine” in the Army. (Or we did before GWB; did he change that?) That’s what we’re advocating for; that every doctor have the capacity to treat by medical criteria as Army doctors do. That the brilliant medical care we give our armed forces be extended to the public.
That’s how you sell it, if you really want it. But we have two conservative-by-way-of-ignorant parties in this country who really don’t want it. So they try to kludge something onto the private health-insurance system–ignoring that private health insurance raises costs while lowering compensation to medical workers, & is in fact the problem not the solution.
This is the fly in the ointment. This is what worries me. The VA sucks ass. And if we tried to build a UK-style NHS, we’d have both Congress & the very people running the system trying either to sabotage it or to bleed it for their own personal gain.
The USA is not really a First-World country ethically. It’s Second World, Maybe Third World. A bunch of corrupt scammers looking to get their palms greased. One day we’ll collapse & it’ll be clear we’re really as bloody-minded as East Africans.
I don’t have health insurance and currently go to a county clinic 20 minutes from my home. I’ve been taking the bus, so it takes half a day generally, but is better than fighting traffic. I pay cash for my office visits and whatever labs i need. They let you run a tab but you do have to pay a bit every time you go in.
Office visits run $55, I get the generic Walmart prescriptions which, I am grateful for but i don’t like Walmart much. There is a women’s clinic a couple blocks away but you pay upfront and last time i went it was $100.
I also need to see a dentist and get at least one wisdom tooth removed since it is in bad shape. Luckily I’m not horribly sick or i’d be SOL
You may have to “stuff their mouths with gold” as Nye Bevan, father of the NHS, is reputed to have said about his negotiations with the medical establishment.
See, your bill’s so high because you went to the hospital with the bizarre expectation of actually seeing a doctor there. (Expecting to see a doctor! In a hospital, of all places…) Well of course it costs extra when you see one. In Dallas, the base rate for letting people just sit there and wait is $162 for 19 hours. Dallas hospital bills woman who never saw a doctor
No, you’re not an asshole for getting snippy when someone insults you. You are, however, an asshole for calling Broomstick’s explanation of what will happen to her husband without healthcare “hystrionics.” It’s not hysterical to say that a man with his medical issues will die earlier than he should and suffer more than he ought to before that–it’s just a plain old statement of fact. You didn’t actually fling any direct insults, but you certainly implied that she’s being stupid and rash and is therefor unfit to engage on an intellectual level. Which, if one is keeping score, means you started it, bucko.
Yeah, she’s emotionally invested in this. It’s her ass we’ve dumped out of the frying pan and into the fire, for fuck’s sake. But being emotionally invested doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a valid point. Her point is absolutely valid, and implying that it’s not doesn’t speak well for your intellectual honesty.
We are, after all, a nation who prides itself on how humanitarian we are, how much we do to help the downtrodden all around the world. We intervene in all sorts of situations overseas at great financial and human cost because it’s the right thing to do, and we accept that as a valid reason to spend the money and risk the lives. So how is it not a valid reason to spend a fraction of that money helping our own citizens? How does bringing up the humanitarian aspect “hysterical?” Saying that (over and over and over and over again) makes you look like a huge, throbbing donkey dick.
It doesn’t help that when you’ve not been dismissing the human aspect as hysterics, you’ve dismissed people dying because we’re not willing to come up off a little money as just one of those things that happens. You know, that whole thing about how we absolutely can put a price on a human life, it happens every day. No big deal, just one of those things that happens, nothing you can do about it. Do you really not see where people would get the idea that you just flat don’t give a shit if people like Broomstick and her husband live or die? Really?
And if you flat don’t give a shit if people without money live or die, it kind of makes you an asshole by definition.