I can close one eye and tell you that’s not true. It’s the one it wasn’t cost effective to refer me to a retinal surgeon for, and I’ve been blind in for the last decade. Still, the odds are somewhere between 60% and 85% that the other eye will stay good, so I’ve got that going for me anyway.
I have not heard a peep from that crowd since Newtown.
Now have come out of Newtown and Oklahoma contradicts the notion that teachers are selfish, money-grubbing, socialist, slackers who see our kids as a meal ticket and don’t really give a shit about their welfare.
Fucking mainstream media trying to make a teacher shielding her students from harm (either by getting shot to death or bearing the brunt of flying debris. They were obviously looking for disability benefits or trying to collect on that fat life insurance benefit.
I dare any politician to try and bad-mouth teachers right now. We have had more heroes coming out of the teachers colleges than MBA programs in recent years and despite all the job creation the MBAs have been engaging in.
I’m going to conclude at this point that you learned everything you know about Medicaid from watching General Hospital.
Who is trying to dismantle the public school system? I’ve heard of the Libertarian Party wanting to do so, but I haven’t heard of mainstream political figures at the state or federal level wanting to do that.
What conservatives do want to do is create more accountability and competition while not continually throwing ever more money at public schools with no return on that extra investment.
Plus, look closer at the ‘public’ education system. Instead of taxing everybody the same and then divvying up the dollars between the number of students, regardless of location, they keep it within the district. So rich kids go to schools with computer labs and professional quality sports programs and arts programs, and poor neighbourhood schools are so underfunded as to be tragic. Start out middle class and you really have an enormous advantage, educationally.
Poor neighborhood schools are hardly underfunded, just less funded than schools in better neighorhoods. The US spends a lot more on education per student than most countries do.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_spe_per_sec_sch_stu-spending-per-secondary-school-student
In order to determine if poor neighborhood schools are actually underfunded, I’d first want to know if they get more or less money than schools in Japan or Sweden. If they get more or about the same, the funding isn’t the issue.
Another study:
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_ifn.asp
The US spends 35% more per student than the average OECD country. So how much less funding to poorer neighborhood schools get?
Those of us of a certain age have probably seen the hospital bills from our birth, which run to about $5 and change. For most people if anything really complicated happened to you, you died. Which is cheap. Since people didn’t go broke from medical bills, even when uninsured, there was less call for it.
I learned it from people on it.
Actually in a lot of states, California and New Jersey for two, the courts require that school money go to the state and get divvied up somewhat more equally. In California the allocation is done according to a complex formula partially based on how much was being collected at the time of the decision so my district, which has gotten richer since then, gets screwed relative to another local district which gets more. It will never change since LA does well and they’ve got the votes.
Rich districts do get more money from fund raising, but they mostly do better due to having an involved population.
That they were treated by the private US healthcare system. Medicaid isn’t healthcare, it is government funded insurance for pregnant women or dependent children who live below 133% FPL or someone living in a nursing home with less than $2k to their name. This is a small, small segment of the poor. Qualifying for Medicaid (currently) is quite restrictive, ERGO access to Medicaid funding (currently) is quite restrictive. Despite your insistence in just hand waving this away, all the while repeatedly comparing Medicaid, a government run health insurance program, with the UK and Canadian healthcare systems - the two most socialized healthcare systems of all the UHC countries.
Let me spell this out again: You are comparing two different government run programs. One is a government run healthcare delivery system, accessed by virtue of citizenship, the other is government run* health insurance* for a select group of the qualified poor that enables access to the private US healthcare delivery system.
Yes what? Repeating the question: Are you saying people on Medicaid have equal access and outcomes compared to the privately insured in the US? Are you saying that people on Medicaid receive higher quality of care and have better health outcomes compared to other UHC countries? Despite the fact that the US system and population as a whole scores much lower on many measures when compared to other OECD countries.
So this in your mind backs up your assertion:
(Despite health insurance =/= healthcare)
The metric you use that led you to this conclusion about the ‘superiority of Medicaid’ compared UHC in other countries is the wait times for non-emergency care in the UK reported by the Guardian news service? I guess that’s a step up from your personal anecdotes. You seem pretty stuck on using the UK and Canada as examples of UHC, when they are the most socialized* healthcare systems* compared to many other UHC countries who may use socialized health insurance or public/private funded health insurance to provide UHC. News flash: UHC can be achieved without completely socializing the healthcare system. Despited the common strawman you and many others of your ilk like to trot out.
I guess I am more swayed by quality measures and outcomes reported by credible peer reviewed sources when it comes to evaluating Medicaid. Rather than wait times for non-emergency issues that don’t result in poorer health outcomes delivered by a government run healthcare system the US is highly unlikely to ever adopt. As** Adahar** pointed out Medicaid has some serious issues, even when access is increased. I won’t go as far to say healthcare access has nothing to do with health, but the evidence I’ve encountered is that access determines 15%-20% of health. Socioeconomic status (SES), where you live and lifestyle behavior determine much of the rest.
TL;DR
No one says they want to dismantle public schools, but the model is to give vouchers for private schools, let people with more money supplement them for better and more selective schools, leaving the public schools to kids who no one wants, for kids too poor to attend better private schools which cost more than vouchers cover, or for kids with uninvolved parents. Test schools and outcomes for public schools will plummet, and conservatives will proudly say that they were right, the government can’t do anything right.
We have a population covered by UHC, the elderly, and they use more healthcare than average. It must be because they are freeloaders - I can’t think of any other explanation! 
Yes, but that is not an apples and oranges comparison. A significant amount of US school funding goes towards ridiculous things like football stadia that other countries don’t fund at all.
Given that Canada was in essentially the same position as the USA, having fought in the war without suffering substantial direct damage, but embarked upon a public health insurance system anyway, there’s something missing in this answer.
I don’t believe this is true, and challenge you to prove otherwise. I’m not sure what “significant” constitutes, but I am betting that the overwhelming majority of U.S. education funding goes to things other than sports stadiums.
What conservatives support (beyond the charter schools that Obama supports and the scholarship system that we have in DC) seems poorly designed to improve educational outcomes but seems fairly well designed to dismantle the public school system.
Seriously guys, The Hamster King already gave the answer:
During WWII there was a labor shortage which was causing wages and prices to rise. Fearing inflation the federal government imposed wage and price controls, but the labour unions fought to exclude health insurance. As a result employers began offering health insurance as an incentive and it stuck.
In 2000 nearly 70% of Americans got their health insurance through their employer, so what incentive was there for change?
By 2011 that number was down to about 45% with about 25% getting it from the government.
What’s funny is that Americans don’t seem to notice/care that their premiums keep going up.
In Canada, the federal and provincial governments have to vote to increase health care funding. That usually means an increase in taxes. People don’t like paying more taxes, so the government is restricted in their funding options, so health costs are kept in check. Eventually people get pissed enough that health care sucks so they allow a tax increase.
In 2004 Ontario was having a hard time funding its health care system, so they introduced the Ontario Health Premium (ie a tax). Take a look at this chart to see how it was funded, you’ll notice it’s not ‘tax the rich.’ Everyone over $21,000 a year paid starting at $600 a year. After that it works out to about an additional 1% income tax.
There isn’t anything stopping the steady creep of premiums, so there is nothing keeping health costs in check. If the cost of an MRI goes up, the premiums go up, allowing the cost of an MRI to go up and so on and son on.
If you want to blame someone, start with FDR and the labour unions.
What’s missing is the money spent on being the world’s policeman.
Has McG ever been right about anything? Even by chance at this point you would think that after so many posts he’d be on the money about something, it almost seems like…
What’s missing is that Canada didn’t have the wage and price controls implemented with the loophole which created the incentive for companies to offer health insurance as an employment benefit.
In other words, it all comes down to an accident of history, nothing more. Just a few words on a legislative bill with totally unforeseen consequences.