Opponents of public health care.. oops, "socialized medicine"

Great Debates
41

That, and hereis another good example why overall cancer survival rates are dubious. Look at the U.S. incidence rates for prostate cancer compared to other countries. There’s your denominator for survival rates.

Which also explains this bogus stat:

Sam, all your statistical evidence for our healthcare system being any good are so lame and bogus it makes me worry things are worse than I even thought, that you can’t come up with some area where we might be actually excelling. We’re certainly spending enough.

42

As Krugman points out in The Conscience of a Liberal, this really isn’t reliably true. It’s an old argument used by the advocates of the anti-socialism merchant princes. But when the USA went to “war economy” in the 1940’s–high marginal income taxes, plus corporate income taxes, the economy grew. When taxes went even higher in the 1950’s, it grew more.

Krugman doesn’t offer a deep analysis of why this happened, but I get the impression that more redistribution–of both funds & social insurance–to the working class means more consumers for mid-priced goods.

The continued belief in the argument you espouse is plausibly explained by the desire of some–with enough money to buy influential publishing outlets–to pay lower taxes, & the self-serving self-delusion that this would be good for society.

43

Ah, but the British system is equitable & efficient both. See, we can learn from the whole world, if we’re willing.

44

You know what’s really surreal? Someone attacking my argument based on where I live, without apparently checking the facts.

The U.S. standard for light duty vehicles in 2004 was broken into three categories: TLEV, LEV, and ULEV.

Allowable NOx emissions for TLEV is .4 g/mi. For LEV and ULEV, it’s .2g/mi

In comparison, Europe’s Euro 3 standard for passenger vehicles allows .15 g/km, which would only qualify a European vehicle for TLEV status.

The really high mileage cars in Europe are diesel, and they didn’t come close - the Euro 3 standard allowed for .5 g/km.

Now, the standards have grown closer, and low-sulfer diesel fuel allows Diesel cars to pass emissions standards. But unfortunately, the relative lack of diesel cars on the road has caused the diesel infrastructure to dwindle in the U.S., so diesel fuel is expensive and it’s hard to find places to fill up.

As for other regulations - one example is headlights. A lot of European cars couldn’t pass the U.S. headlight restriction because the U.S. requires sealed beam headlamps. Another is the U.S. 5 mph bumper requirement.

In addition, crash testing is different in Europe than it is in the U.S., and some cars that have done well in European crash tests have fared miserably in U.S. tests.

There are lots of other reasons why it’s not a trivial matter to just import European cars. Exchange rates are a big one. Some of it was short-sightedness on the parts of Euro auto manufacturers, who assumed that Americans weren’t interested in tiny cars. And there’s some truth to that. Fiat went broke in the U.S. trying to sell little cars, and Alfa Romeo didn’t have luck either.

Today, more and more standards are being unified, and companies are building more ‘world cars’ designed to meet as broad a range of regulations and emissions standards as possible. That, plus the low sulfer diesel fuel now available, is causing a lot of Euro cars to be looked at in the United States. Ford is finally bringing its sweet Euro Focus to the U.S. market for example.

45

I’d love for Volvo to start sending over the S80 diesels. Gawd, those things are nice. It’s hard to believe they fall short on some US standard-or-the-other, since they are big luxurious boats.

Do you know the facts on this, Sam?

46

Or even more plausibly explained by the FACTS. Here’s a graph showing every country in the OECD, with economic growth plotted against the size of government.

There is a clear, statistically significant correlation between low government spending and economic growth.

If you do the same study with U.S. states, you find the same relationship - the states with the biggest governments have the lowest growth. If you do the same with Canadian provinces, the same relation pops out.

Is it possible to have high growth and big government? Apparently, since the scatter plot I linked to has some countries with big government and high growth. But they are outliers. The relationship is clear and strong - big government = low growth.

47

Yes, what people are willing to “learn” from the world is only the “benefits” that other countries offer.

Britain is implementing reforms and moving towards privatizing aspects of their health insurance. Does the typical American know why Britain is forced to do that? Nope, they’re ignorant. Is there anything for USA to “learn” from Britain’s health care miscalculations? Possibly but people are too blind to consider that aspect of it.

A few weeks ago, a poster didn’t realize that Medicare was insolvent! Gee what a surprise. That’s how the public mindset works – they know the benefits but they are oblivious to the sustainability of those benefits.

Count up the soundbites on SDMB regarding UHC…
[ol]
[li]Count up the number of times someone complains, “Europe has UHC why don’t USA?”[/li][li]Count up the number times someone complains, “European country X has this funding problem with UHC, how do we implement UHC in USA in such a way to avoid that?”[/li][/ol]

The soundbite UHC advocates spout repeatedly is #1 by an overwhelming margin over #2. Why is that? Because it takes lower IQ to buy stuff (benefits) than it does to pay for it – that’s my guess. Can you offer another reason?

48

So, are you saying that only the poor people in those countries are supporting universal health care and the richer ones want to be rid of it? I highly doubt that…and my experience living in Canada for 4 years would also tend to say that it is not correct.

49

It’s not a direct correlation in that graph. Has it occurred to you that there might be other factors that tend to create both more government & less growth?

Here’s a hypothesis, off the top of my head. Wealthy countries might hit a point where they reach export market saturation, or otherwise where more growth is going to be slower than it was before. But because they’re already wealthy countries, they have the tax base to spend a lot on military &/or social expenditures.

The growth in the USA is, in this hypothesis, driven by exploitation of previously relatively empty lands in the interior & immigration of working-age persons. Whereas Europe is about as densely settled as it’s going to be & going through a population correction that gives it more aged society.

Also, France has fully subsidized post-secondary school, whereas many US college students work as well as study. This increases our productivity, but may actually decrease our educability & competitiveness. It certainly isn’t a great boon to quality of life.

50

Our health system costs double the unit cost of any other system. If we had the best health care in the world there would be a little argument but we are rated 37 th in the world. That is pathetic.
We have 50 million uncovered and many more under covered. That is shameful. It says something about how little we care about the poor.
If you get a new job opportunity ,you have to take a risk on being uncovered for a while. If someone in your family is sick or pregnant ,you can not take the risk so you have to refuse a better job. If one of your family picks that time to get sick you could go bankrupt.
The health companies are for profit. They are data collecting to find a way to deny coverage. They spend a lot of money trying to find ways to get out of paying. of course they collected the payments up to then. What kind of logic is that to deny coverage to a customer when they are at their lowest point in life.
We have a lot of fraud. Health companies double charge , pad bills and loot the system endlessly.
A few chosen people have convinced themselves that they are well covered. But they do not know if the health companies will reject them in an emergency. It is what they do.

51

But, Sam, can it really be that simple? Unless I’m much mistaken, you keep bringing up this same study like an ace of trumps whenever the conversation trends this way.

'Struth, not deep enough into economics to expertize. Nonetheless, I note that there are respected and prominent economists who offer academic support for such liberal causes.

They haven’t heard about your irrefutable evidence? Or, they have, but continue to commit fraud on the unsuspecting public. They know full well that they are spouting nonsense, but continue, like biologists in Stalinist Russia, forced to pretend to believe in socialist evolutionary science.

Now, personally, my guess is that there is an honest disagreement, with enough facts for both sides to make reasonable, if not convincing, cases. Which wouldn’t be the case if such rock-solid and irrefutable evidence existed. Which leads me to the conclusion that there is a factor missing here.

But you know much more about this than I do. Have there been any critical reactions from economists, other than gasps of astonishment? Something that undeniably and unequivocally makes the case for “small government”, well, I imagine that would foster a lot of comment, academic-wise.

52

Sure, social democracy.

Also:

53

One more tidbit: funny accounting aside, if Sweden were a U.S. state, its GDP per capita would place it near the bottom among the fifty states, on a par with Mississippi.

54

I’m sorry, I suppose I didn’t notice “per capita” on the graph.

Wait, it’s not there. How odd.

While we’re talking about the USA vs. Europe, which US states have shown real growth in the last ten years?

55

Uh, Sam? That graph needs some verbage, some explanation. I mean, I can’t tell by looking what its supposed to mean. I see rectangular blips and diamond shape blips. Are those countries?

So I went hunting, trimmed off the specific page to get back to the root page, see who these people are. (http://mol-eng.com/growthsm.png > http://mol-eng.com/…) But I must have done something wrong, because instead of leading me to an academic economics site, it leads to what appears to be a very intelligent appreciation for science fiction. Which is fine, of course, except somewhat divorced from the matter at hand.

Help me out a bit, here.

56

Eeeeeeerr?:confused::eek::dubious:
What?

In Ireland it has been a massive issue for years, and is one of the biggest problems we have.
Britain spend alot of time discussing it too.

57

This is what Volvo says you might have to do to a Euro-spec Volvo to bring it up to standards in the U.S:

Volvo Car Corporation does not recommend the shipment of non-US specification vehicles to the USA. The specifications of those vehicles built according to US specifications differ greatly from those vehicles built to other specifications, notably those of Europe and the Middle East.

Volvo Car Corporation is unable to give a full list of the necessary specification changes needed but does, however, offer the following list as a rough guide:
Headlamps,
Turn signals,
Rear lamps,
Reflex reflectors,
Side markers,
Remove side turn signals,
Add key buzzer,
Change bumpers,
Add air bags,
Add knee bolsters,
Change seat belt warning,
Change combi instrument including, speedometer,
Possible engine changes,
Change of seat belts in the front,
Add new VIN plate and other labels.
[/quote]

Volvo doesn’t sell any diesel cars in the U.S. The same site says that if you import a Diesel into other parts of Europe, at the very least it would need to have a particulate filter added to the exhaust system. It sounds like they aren’t using a particularly clean diesel technology.

You can Mercedes-Benz diesels in the U.S. Their Bluetec diesel design meets U.S. emissions standards.

58

Again, I think a lot of American leftists see “Europe” as some monolithic entity that conveniently supports their worldview but has no change or internal disagreement. And in Sweden:

59

And yet, Sweden’s standard of living is substantially better than Mississippi’s. What does that say about comparing places using per capita GDP?

Ruminator: perhaps you could illuminate this part of your thinking. You say that countries with UHC are having/on the verge of serious growth problems, I’m assuming due to the cost of UHC. And yet you say that that isn’t true of the US, with the implication being that our private health care system is more efficient. And yet, we know that isn’t the case, because regardless of medical outcomes, our system is more expensive and covers fewer people.

How can you say that UHC costs are causing economic slowdowns in Europe and elsewhere? The only reason I can come up with is that you are comparing ALL of Europe’s social safety nets with a very rosy view of only the US’s private health care costs.

From where I’m sitting, it seems to me that the US health care costs are a much bigger drag on workers and businesses.

60

It’s not a study. It’s a simple graph of economic growth against GDP. You can get the data straight from the OECD online.

And this stuff matters. For example the OECD defines the poverty line as being 60% of a country’s median income. This article shows country median incomes in a standardized measurement of purchasing power.

In terms of PPP, the U.S’s median household income is $50,253. So the poverty line for a household in the United States is 30,151. The UK’s median income is $39,000, which means the poverty line in the U.S. is only 9,000 lower than the median income of the UK. The UK poverty line is $23,400. Remember, these measurements are in equivalent purchasing power, so they are actually a pretty good measure of actual living standards.
There was a time when the U.S. and the UK had similar standards of living, but the UK turned towards social democracy and their income growth lagged behind the U.S. The result is that people on the poverty line in the U.S. do significantly better than people on the poverty line in the UK.

As for the UK’s health system, which foolsguinea seems to think is efficient and equitable… You’d better hope you don’t get cancer there. The overall survival rate in the U.S. for all forms of cancer is 66.3%. In England it’s a miserable 44.8%, and in Scotland it’s only 40.2%. Those are horrible numbers, and anyone who looks at the outcome of their public health system and sees numbers like that should be very, very frightened. Are you willing to give up a 20% extra chance of surviving cancer for public health care? The UK’s life expectancy from age 65 on is lower than the U.S.'s, despite their population being generally healthier. That would be an indicator that the elderly aren’t getting the kind of care they get in the U.S. If you get a heart attack in the UK, you’re about 10% more likely to die than you are in the U.S. And the list goes on.

The U.S. leads the world in cancer survivability for one reason - fast access to treatment. In Canada, the average wait for cancer treatment is 8 weeks. That’s an eternity if you’re worried you might have cancer, and for many cancers, that can be the difference between life and death.