Nonsense. You know full well that number includes illegals, those who choose not to buy insurance even though they can afford it, and those who neglect to sign up for government health care for which they qualify.
More money buys better health care. That is an inescapable fact. I just don’t understand why people like you want to voluntarily reduce your own benefits to increase those of others. I’ve got an idea…all you bleeding hearts can go into the government system to help others and don’t complain about the shitty care or lack of quality meds available to you. But don’t force me or my family to sacrifice.
Precisely. There is no meaningful distinction between healthy and unhealthy foods. The food industry dupes the public into making an artificial dichotomy so that they can sell more diet food and organics. Obesity is addiction, a disorder caused by the amount of food, not the type.
Apologies to the OP for continuing the hijack here, but I think you’re reading a lot of extra inferences into that statement. Saying that the government exists to solve problems does not necessarily imply the assumption that the government is the first place you should turn to solve any large problem.
First part yes, second part no. Certainly, saying the government exists to do X does imply that the government is capable of doing X. However, it doesn’t necessarily imply anything about the cheapest way of doing X.
As a general statement, this is of course true. However, it misses two points:
If people are staying healthier longer and working longer, then they’re paying more into the system. Somebody who works and pays taxes for 60 years and then needs five years of continuing medical care is a better deal for the system than somebody who works and pays taxes for 40 years and then needs five years of continuing medical care.
(And yes, I support raising standard retirement ages as average life expectancy and “health expectancy” values increase.)
You’re assuming that a healthy-living person in good physical shape will end up requiring just as much expensive medical care in the long run as a person with an unhealthy lifestyle; the only difference will be that the costs in the first person’s case will kick in at a later age. But how do we know that this is true?
I have not seen any data comparing the overall lifetime medical costs for people who have healthy lifestyles vs. those who have “lifestyle diseases” such as chronic morbid obesity. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that healthy-living people actually cost less overall, even if they do live longer and eventually contract a fatal disease. Is there any actual evidence confirming or contradicting this?
Please provide some evidence for your claim that this collection of illegals, those who choose not to buy, and those who fail to sign up form a significant portion of that 50 million.
The US spends three times per capita on health care as other western nations yet we lag behind in things like life expectancy and infant mortality. This makes me think we’re paying extra for “name brand” health insurance rather than spending it on actual care in an efficient manner.
After 13 years in the health insurance industry I am all too aware that most people don’t have as good of health insurance as they think they do. If the health insurance company doesn’t approve you won’t get the surgery or the drug you need or your doctor recommends - so much for free choice. Likewise, if your doctor isn’t on your health insurance company’s favored list you’re SOL - opponents of national health care say that the government will pick your doctors - nevermind that is NOT the case in the countries I have looked into like Britain, Canada, Australia, and so on - but right now corporations pick your doctor. This is better… how?
Truth is, an awful lot of insured people can really only get “shitty” healthcare, and many medications are unavailable to them. Not knowing the details of your policy I can’t say if you fall into that group, but quite a few million people do. Don’t be too sure you’re truly covered for catastrophe.
I’d rather be the spry, independent-living 99-year-old who dies after a short bout with pneuomonia rather than the invalid 79-year-old who spends ten years dying from Alzheimer’s and complications from diabetes.
Which would you rather be? And whom would you rather take care of, as a tax-payer?
Is asafetida as stinky as she claims? I’m kind of tempted to give that recipe a try (although it would involve a stop at an Indian market), I like cabbage.
As the OP, I’ll just note that I had intended this thread to be more about whether obesity was/wasn’t a significant factor of the low stats the US gets in terms of life expectancy and such. The taxation idea was more just pointing out that there is theoretically a quick and easy, and overall cheap, way to catch up with other nations that really had nothing to do with the health care system itself.
I’m actually rather boggled on this front. Looking at the average income of doctors in the US and in Canada or the UK, they all seem to come in around $150,000 per year. Then, in terms of how health spending is split up, the pie chart for the US* and that of Canada** appear to be more or less exactly the same. Mathematically speaking, if I’ve got equivalent spending per head for equivalent sections of a pie chart, then the total spending per head for the entire chart is the same; i.e. Canadian health care spending and US health care spending per capita should be the same going from those numbers. Since I know that the US spends nearly double, roughly half of all health care money seems to disappears before actually going into health care spending (i.e. not entering into one of the pie chart segments).
ITT:people who are very ignorant playing the victim card. Try being the uninsured poor when prescription drugs can run into hundreds of dollars a month then you can talk about sacrifice.
Also clinging to the current retard American system is making many many other families sacrifice. How many jobs would have been saved if American products could compete without having to support 3x the healthcare costs in their price?
“Screw the country, let the poor die needlessly but don’t you dare use the S word!”
Money spent on necessities is not “discretionary.” You have a very strange view of how the poor can get by. Apparently you have never had to make do with eating starch straight out of a box. You have never had to have cornbread instead of biscuits because cornbread is cheaper.
I think it was in a Yahoo! news scrawl yesterday that I saw that 17% of the nation’s children do not have enough to eat. That’s one in six. And then you suggest that we should let them eat shrimp.
I know of people who can’t have even the cornbread because they don’t have any electricity and they never have.
Oh, please - it is NOT “something for nothing”, it’s very explicit the British system is paid for by taxes. As is the Canadian system. And the Australian system. Yes, it IS being paid for, but without the “namebrand” to pay for and the private middle man they’re getting their healthcare at 1/3 the cost we are, and EVERYONE is covered. It’s not unworkable - it’s working in all those other countries, every day of every week of every year. I’m sorry if reality and the evidence contradicts your world view but that’s life sometimes.
Um, we’re talking about population-level effects. One premature death is a drop in the bucket. Thousands of them are not.
You are wrong. If we all live to be 100 and those 100 years are healthy ones, then we will be more productive and work longer. Social security won’t crash because people won’t jump ship from the workforce as soon as they reach 65. Medicaid won’t get overtaxed because people will be healthier and not need so many doctor’s visits. Families won’t be overburdened with nursing care costs, and in fact will be able to rely on spry, energetic old folks to help raise grandchildren and greatgrandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.
There are nothing but benefits to having a healthy elderly population. In what kind of bizarro world would it not be?
I know a BIG American company that like many companies offshored its customer service department. To Canada. Because Canada has people who speak English, share our culture (more or less). But because there is no health care overhead for the business, you can pay a decent living wage for Canadians and still save money over hiring that job in the U.S. Oh, and Canada was cheaper than India.
This is when I went from the fiscal conservative “Universal Health Care is too expensive for the government” to “the U.S. needs UHC if we are going to be able to compete for jobs in the world market.”
The cost of health care is driving businesses to move jobs overseas. Yeah, wages are cheaper in China, but its the cost of healthcare that moves the U.S. over the top.
And yes, that may mean that is a “socialized” health care system you get rationed - and if you want great health care you need to have supplemental insurance or pay out of pocket. But this is America, home of opportunistic capitalism - I’m sure plenty of businesses will spring up overnight (well, really companies like UnitedHealthGroup will change their business model - they already have the preliminary work done for when UHC gets passed - I worked on that there 12 years ago when Clinton was in office) to fill in gaps.
Do we have evidence that people who are healthy die more quickly than unhealthy people? I know of a few people who drank themselves to an early death, but never spent a day in the hospital.
If we were to institute some higher tax on unhealthy food, would these people (obviously their estate) get some sort of tax rebate since they weren’t part of the problem? Would a person who lived a clean life, but ended up getting a prolonged illness be forced to pony up some extra coin before they die? Fair is fair, right, and the taxpayers must be made whole…
Cornbread is healthier than biscuits too. Funny that right?
And I used to live in a storage unit.
No I suggested that shrimp stir fry was an expensive stir-fry and that at only $ 6 a meal, it’s pretty cheap. A value meal at McDonald’s costs that much. People as poor as you are describing aren’t fat either.
And if you live off of that for a year you will die of malnutrition. I am starting to feel like I am arguing against a straw man ‘poor person’. People who are THAT poor tend not to be fat. I’m thinking people who live in 1 bedroom apartments or trailer parks poor, not destitute shanty dwellers without working plumbing.
Where does this idea that calories = economy come from? It sounds like a perception issue as I said. You need a lot more to get by day to day than pure calories. more calories != more value. As this thread was talking about poor people being fat. So clearly they are getting too much calories but not enough nutrition. If they ate like I am describing they might get fewer calories but they’d get more nutrition, for roughly hte same price. Stir Fry loses out because it actually requires a modicum of work. 15 minutes at the grocery store and 15 minutes at the stove is more than 5 at the drive through.
Look I eat at McDonald’s but it’s not one of the cheapest meals I eat. I had Ramen noodles for lunch. Two Ramen packets, a leftover soy packet, a leaf of lettuce and two eggs. All in all my lunch cost about $ 1.25 and I shared it with my daughter. And yet it was healthier than a bottle of soda and a bag of potato chips.
I put green chili, cumin and coriander in my rice and beans, and top it with shredded cheese if I have it, bringing the price of the meal to the extravagance of about $ 1.
I am not a poster child for healthy eating, far from it, I am about 40 lbs overweight, but I know that it has nothing to do with the price of food and everything to do with what I choose to eat. Or more specifically, drink, I drink too much soda. Forget the soda and drink water, you won’t get fat, and soda is empty calories.
Yeah, the opposition to veggies in our culture is kind of strange.
McDonald’s value meal is expensive even. I live in New York and can go out and get Chinese with actual vegetables in it, or get Punjabi vegetarian for even cheaper than that. I need to cut gluten from my diet.
Soda in general is bad for us. It gives us agita and is incredibly fattening. We are opposed to drinking water. Our relationship to food in this culture is downright pathological, it’s weird.
I’d rather eat spinach, though I do like cheesypoofs from time to time.
Yeah, I can’t do that, it’s pretty hard. It’s totally an issue of education. I think a lot was lost between the 40s and t he 70s, in the 40s Betty Crocker came around and got lots of women out of the kitchen and in the 70s feminism came around and taught people that being in the kitchen was a form of oppression. So a lot of the tradition of cooking was lost in the interim.
I don’t find it stinky in the sense that it gives off a garbage odour like durian-it has a very sharp curryish smell to it. You could leave it out if you wanted/add a little bit more turmeric to compensate.
