Rich people deserve better medical care, period. As it is, we’re working on doing more to improve the level of care that is received by lower income people; America today does substantial better in that regard than say, the America of 50 years ago.
It isn’t in America’s interests one way or another for Canada to have the same sort of health care system. If there was a situation in which we had a union, I do believe America would want it organized to be in its own benefit (as would Canada and Mexico) being the biggest player in the union, I’d expect America would have to do less compromising than Mexico and Canada. However, on matters that just simply don’t affect America’s interests (like how Canadians structure their health care system) I just don’t see any credible reason to believe what you’re saying. I know “America is the greatest bastion of evil in the world today” but even the evilest of countries have no reason to care about how another country structures their health care system.
It’s not a matter of us having to compromise one way or another. If the proposed (theoretically) North American Union took the same form as the European Union, it wouldn’t have a unified health care system, health care systems would be the responsibility of the member states (correct me if I’m wrong on that being the way the EU works; as I said, I’m not an EU expert.) We could have our system our way, and Canada could have it their way, if it was in the interests of the United States to force Canada to our way of thinking, I might agree we’d try to, but it isn’t. It’s totally irrelevant to us.
That’s the thing, your comments and Bryan Elkers wouldn’t have to have anything to do with it.
From what I understand, we’re talking about a political union between the three North American countries Canada, Mexico, and the United States that would function in a similar manner to the European Union.
The European Union is first and foremost an economic union. It functions as one market that shares an overarching trade policy. Aside from existing as a common market, it has a common agriculture/fisheries policy. The EU has some cooperation on policing and law enforcement as well as some cooperation on military defense.
Nothing I’ve seen on the net suggests they share a common health care system, nor do they share even a common military as each member state has its own independent military system (sans a few of the smaller states without military forces, such as Liechtenstein.) I do believe they developed or are developing a small, rapid response force to assist in joint-peacekeeping operations, but I believe the individual soldiers are still members of their home military.
They don’t even uniformly share a common currency, several EU member states do not use the Euro.
Adding the provinces of canada and the various states within mexico would seem to be childs play as fas as integrating them into the US governmental systems. Sure we might need a few extra chairs in congress, no biggie. The balance of power although US centric could still be seriously influenced by canada or mexico focused representation. Our senate/house often operate very close to the edge on many issues, opening up to additional representatives could seriously shift some of the more precarious issues to outcomes more friendly to the newly incorporated areas.
Mexico I would imagine would actually benefit greatly.
Immigration issues per se would evaporate overnight. Minimum wages would fairly quickly propagate through mexico as well as federal oversight of their police agencies which are famous for corruption/abuse on a scale that makes LAPD sound like a few lost girl scouts. Prisoners rights would skyrocket, big business could move into the area with far less stigma of outsourcing jobs to “foreign” labor. Rural areas of Mexico would probably end up with much better infrastructure than now in things like water, sewer, electricity, telecom, etc.
The border patrol would have about a tenth as much ground to cover even if the rest of central america didn’t jump on board.
Excuse me? Why would we integrate into your system? Wouldn’t it make more sense to take the best of all the systems and merge them into one? The two party system you have down there isn’t ideal, imho. All you end up with is two sides to the same coin.
I don’t see the benefit of it from Canada’s standpoint. We already have NAFTA, our dollar is outpacing yours by a wide margin in the last couple of years (your mileage may vary on how good a thing that actually is), and any such union would be inexorably dominated by the US, which would have about 75% of the population, throwing Mexico into the mix. The most populous nation in the EU, Germany, only has about 16% of the EU’s population.
As for a political union? Fuhgeddaboutit. I mean, the US could probably benefit from the dramatic swing to the left that Canada would push it, but that’s not worth it for me. If I wanted to be an American, I would move there.
Nah. An economic union might some day make sense. There’s no reason to ever unify our political systems to be honest. Local government tends to do things best anyway, making even larger types of national of Federal-level government is probably not a good thing.
If Canada was invaded tomorrow and peacefully surrendered things probably wouldn’t be so different day-to-day for the average Canadian. Under the U.S. system of government individual States actually do by far the most governing, Quebec would probably have more leisure to do things its own way as would Alberta than they do under the Canadian system.
Canada could even keep a lot of its national programs in tact, States routinely have compacts between one another and many of the revenue sharing agreements that go on collectively could continue in that form.
As for the two party thing, you guys don’t really have any more than two parties. You have a left-leaning party and a right-leaning party. The NDP is an electoral oddity that has never formed a government and the PQ/BQ are regional parties not unseen in U.S. history.
As little love as I have for the current NDP, this isn’t accurate. They’ve formed numerous provincial governments (currently there are two), and they frequently act as power brokers federally, especially in the case of minority governments, which would pretty much never happen without them. It’s doubtful that we would have the same public health care system (for better or for worse) without the NDP.
It also doesn’t make a lot of sense to dismiss a third party as not really existing when it has elected members federally for over 45 years. One need not form the government to have influence in a parliamentary system. That’s a pretty dramatic difference from the the entrenched two-party system in the US. I don’t think any third party has ever had anything close to that kind of electoral success in the US House or the Senate, although I am willing to be corrected on that point.
I’ve argued for this point before. Whether my taxes went to Ottawa or Washington wouldn’t make much difference to me as it is a black hole in any case.
In many districts in Canada you only get a meaningful choice between two parties.
To really say that Canada isn’t an effective two-party country you would really have to look at what kind of meaningful choice voters have, and I don’t just mean having more than two choices at the ballot box. I’ve been voting ever since I was legally eligible to do so and there’s never just a Democratic/Republican candidate for any major office, however the third party candidates are always irrelevant.
I’ve watched a few Canadian election results on C-SPAN, and every indication seems to be that in a given riding there’s really only two competitive candidates running, ridings with three competitive candidates (as they pop up throughout the election nights) always seem to be pretty rare, practically as rare as they are in the United States.
I think this is a bit of a dodge of the issue, frankly. If there are more than two parties that consistently elect members, you are not dealing with a two party system. Pinpointing it down to individual ridings is missing the point, since there are a number of regional distinctions to make, where parties have their traditional strongholds. It’s not about each individual riding, it’s how they come together to make up the composition of Parliament. As I said previously, a party need not form the government in order to have influence. This doesn’t just come into play in minority situations - the multiple parties push and pull each other in dynamic ways.
You can’t just look at one election, either - if the Conservatives are strong in one area in a given election, it necessarily means that they take support away from Liberals and/or NDP in that area, but in another election, either of those parties might win it back. Manitoba is notorious for these kinds of swings, and routinely elects members from three different parties in each federal election, and as many as four, when there were two right-wing parties. Hell, a lot of the ridings aren’t even close between two candidates. That doesn’t mean it’s a one-party system.
This feels like a big hijack away from the subject of the OP, though.
Why ? From a moral perspective the rich are often scum. From a practical perspective the non-rich contribute far more to society. If the rich all dropped dead we’d survive just fine; if everyone but the rich dropped dead, the rich survivors would be utterly screwed. And from an economic perspective, healthy people produce more.
Assuming that’s true, so what ? We aren’t comparing America then to America now, but America to Canada. And Mexico, but even America is probably better than Mexico.
It is indeed; the last thing our medical industry wants is for Americans to have the option of easy, mass access to such things as Canadian medical care and drugs. And Americans have a rabid hatred of socialized anything, anyway; for that reason alone we’d destroy their medical system.
Cheaper drugs that cut into American pharmacuetical companies’ profits comes to mind. IIRC there’s been various disputes over that.
But if minimum wage and other standards were raised to US levels, the reason for using Mexican labor in the first place would evaporate and so would the jobs.
The idea that Quebec (or any other province) would simply shrug and move on within an American constitutional framework shows how little the Canadian federation (and Quebec’s place in it) is understood. A province (1 of only 10) with broad powers to tax, provide pensions, healthcare, immigration control and numerous MPs and Senators is not about to become some second string state with 2 senators and a mitt full of representatives.
As for the day dream that by merging Canada with the US would somehow shift the US to the left is almost not even worth discussing. Canada as a whole would exert as much power as California does now. Only Ontario (population 13 million) would make any kind of real impact on the congressional system but only on the order of Illinois.
Well, ask Hillary Clinton about that. She was the latest American politician I heard complaining about Americans losing auto jobs to Canada because our solialized health care gives us a competitive advanage because the companies don’t have to pay for health insurance here.
Uzi, I’m aware you have them in Canada. For the moment. (You’re getting a new law to make sure the music industry makes plenty of money, though.) I’m saying that, unless Canada and Mexico were to join with the US under the US constitution, which I find somewhat unlikely, the new constitution that would be written for the new nation, gives me some amount of pause, as a concept, considering the lobbying special interest groups and so on.