That’s fine, be disgusted with him all you want. There are indeed many things about him that reasonable people can find disgusting.
But when it goes off the rails into accusations of fascism, Nazi-ism, and a desire to kick people out of the country because they’re outsiders and foreigners, then we’re into fantasy land, and far too many people have bought into that nonsense 100%. This is why so many celebrities are inconsolable and can’t sleep at night or go about their days feeling like someone has died, and why college kids cry and feel personally threatened because someone, anyone, on their campus might actually be a Republican and/or supporter of Trump.
It’s ridiculous, and in my opinion is largely the result of the fact that the left’s primary weapon, political correctness, has been shown to be utterly impotent in the face of someone like Trump who tells it to go pound sand. This has left the country’s liberals with a feeling of helplessness that they’re wholly unused to, and that feeling of helplessness has led to panic because “anything can happen” as a result of having someone in the White House who isn’t afraid of the consequences of running afoul of them. This is why the concerted effort to oppose him nonstop in every way possible and keep him from becoming ‘normalized’, because the last thing they want is to lose the power of political correctness to bully people into doing things their way.
And on preview I see that Mr. Miskatonic has come along to illustrate the hateful and erroneously inflammatory nature of many of the board’s left-wing posts against the right. In truth, the right hardly ‘fetishizes’ the military, and it looks that the ACA and sees that the president lied about keeping plans and doctors, and that true to expectation premiums are skyrocketing, and that millions have been saddled with insurance they can’t use because they can’t afford the co-pays and deductibles, and are therefore left to ‘die in the streets’. The fiction from the left is how wonderful it is that everyone has insurance now. The problem is that people are paying through the wazoo for it with money that otherwise would go to providing better lives for themselves and their families, while still being unable to use it for anything other than band-aid issues and wholly out of luck should they develop heart disease or cancer or anything else requiring a large financial outlay of their own.
And on further preview we now have ** iiandyiiii** coming along to pretend that the board’s widespread and frequently stated left-wing vitriol is offset by the occasional (not ‘constant’ and ‘repeated’, as iiandyiiii would have us believe) racist thread usually posted by a newcomer who doesn’t stick around long and is not representative of either the board’s conservative posters nor of most of the country’s conservative citizens. This is not remotely the case, as I’m sure everyone is aware even if they won’t admit it.
It’s pretty steady – I’ve been here 6 years, and I’ve been a part of those threads since I joined, apparently to the point that some Dopers have told me that I shouldn’t take part in them so often. Perhaps you haven’t noticed because you don’t take part in those threads.
The English health system is undoubtedly not travelling too well at the moment compared to the extremely high standards to which it has caused the English to become accustomed.. However, it has for decades delivered better healthcare outcomes overall than that of most 1st world nations including the US by a wide margin, and for about half the % of GDP compared to the US.
Try telling someone in the US who can’t afford a consultant *at all *that if he or she were in the UK they would be getting to see a consultant free of charge in six months and see which they would prefer.
Statistically speaking, of course, there are far more left-leaning (by mainstream US politics standards, at least) regular SDMB posters than right-leaning ones.
So in terms of absolute numbers, naturally one would expect to see vitriolic posts by liberals outnumbering those by conservatives, even if the proportion of “haters” in the two groups were exactly the same.
When it comes to prevalence of political vitriol in a poster’s output, though, ISTM that our right-wing Dopers on average are more “hatey” than our left-wing ones.
And don’t forget, for something that is considered urgent or non-elective (think a heart attack or injuries sustained in a MVA) you will get world-class surgical and medical treatment IMMEDIATELY and at no cost to the patient.
This is the case pretty much everywhere in the Western world except the US.
(kam…who had eye surgery last week (one week on waiting list) and her daughter who had throat surgery today (one day on waiting list). Loving the Aus medical system totally).
I was in the UK with the family a few weeks back. My son developed pain that was consistent with a condition that could have required reasonably quick treatment. We were in one of the UK’s poorer socio-economic areas.
Seen by a triage nurse in maybe 15 minutes. Seen by a doctor within about another 15 minutes. Seen by a specialist within about another 5-10 minutes. Diagnosed, given relevant medication and out the door.
Thing is that SA’s position on this issue is a religious issue. It’s an article of free market faith. It’s utterly fact immune. It contains (as subtext) various implicit and IMHO highly odd value judgments. You will never get through to him. You might as usefully tell a deeply religious doper that their deity makes no sense and expect the doper to have become an atheist the next time they post.
Pretty much, but we don’t get a lot of those folks, and they don’t commonly continue to parrot demonstrably false claims long after those claims have been demonstrated to be false. The display of ideological cowardice here is just stunning.
Bullshit. I remember years ago when during an argument about government health care one of our Canadian Dopers bragged about how it took his mother had to wait eight months to begin treatment for her cancer, and how happy he was about that because otherwise she couldn’t have gotten treatment at all. He seemed totally oblivious to the fact that many other people with cancer will die long before their eight months are up.
Waits are already starting here in the U.S. because the ACA is driving specialists to quit because of both the regulatory burden the act places upon them and the fact that they can no longer determine a patient’s course of treatment but instead must abide by the dictates of what insurance companies or the government will allow.
But all of this is beside the point, which is that conservatives do not indeed ‘want’ to see people dying in the streets for lack of health care. Rather it’s that they think private enterprise delivers a higher quality of care to a larger number of people overall than does a government system that provides so-so care for everyone. And a significant part of this is the recognition that more are likely to suffer and die under the so-so government system than will under the higher quality free enterprise system.
You really are one ignorant fuckwit. But then, on the subject of health care, so are almost all American conservatives. I live in Canada and I have no idea what “government health care” is – I’ve never seen it. I have private doctors, private hospitals, private clinics, any of which I can see without limit or restriction, and the public insurance system pays for it in full. Maybe you can explain exactly what the fuck you think you’re talking about, so that someone who has lived with the benefit of single-payer his entire life – and just recently had a major health experience with it – can tell you why you’re totally full of shit.
No, that is basically what American conservatives who oppose universal healthcare policies cannot do. I believe it’s true that most of them don’t actually want worse healthcare outcomes for more people. But that keeps them from facing the fact that their preferred policies produce worse healthcare outcomes for more people. You are not going to get someone like Starving Artist to confront that cognitive dissonance.
I cite evidence, your response is an anecdote and an ad-hoc excuse. Wow, it really is like talking to a creationist. According to the available evidence, the US healthcare system does not have substantially lower wait times, and there’s no reason to believe that Obamacare did that when, for example, this survey is from less than a month after the exchanges went active in the first place. And of course, they never had the freedom to determine the patient’s course of treatment in the first place; they always had to abide by the dictates of what insurance companies would allow. Now the government is involved, but you have yet to provide any evidence that this is actually more onerous. And I fully expect none to be forthcoming.
And never mind, once again, that before Obamacare, if I needed a specialist appointment and didn’t have thousands of dollars to blow, chances are good that my wait time was “until my cadaver becomes medically useful” - which is exactly the point your friend was making. Before Obamacare, if you had a pre-existing condition and weren’t super-rich, you weren’t getting treatment. This is why you have all these people now clamoring that they’re going to die if Obamacare is repealed: because they likely will.
But of course, the free market is so much better at distributing resources than the government. I’m sure we’re all so much better off when the decision “who can get health care” is determined by “who has money” rather than “who really needs it”. Despite all the evidence to the contrary. I’m sure it’s so much better when the “death panel” rationing out health care and deciding which treatments are justifiable to pay for is beholden to his company’s profit margin above all else.
Then they are idiots, completely incapable of looking at the real world and learning any lessons from it. And when the rubber hits the road, and we’re looking at millions of people losing life-saving medical coverage because of their stupidity, it becomes increasingly implausible for intelligent people to cut them any slack for their actions, regardless of whether they’re born out of stupidity or malice. “We’re so dumb, we couldn’t figure out that our actions would kill a bunch of people despite them screaming and hollering about it” is really not a good look from our elected leaders.
