To my friend on FaceBook who has been spewing anti-healthcare-reform messages for the past 6 months

Well forgive me for my arrogance but I work in the healthcare system so you’ll understand if I don’t give a shit what your opinion is of my knowledge, eh?

I didn’t say you were fantasy talking. I saw it was FANTASTIC as in SUPER DUPER! Do you really think it is helpful to your “cause” to try ye ol’ heartstrings approach or to use facts and figures for your argument?

Personally I have no issue in believing that healthcare is something that should be attainable for all Americans. What stops me from being fully on board is finding out how it will be paid for, what we will have to give up to do so, and the details on what is covered. You know, practical things.

You seem just hellbent on making ONE PERSON in this thread say what you want him to say by crafting this what-if as if that is the very solution to the problem. After reading enough of your comments to him all I want to know is what you want him to say and how we can all convince him to say it so you can move on to something else.

We heard you the first few times, so now you’re not only looking self-important but also lametard foolish. But hey, maybe if you tell us one more time, we’ll be impressed.

Your perception of tugging heartstrings is yours and yours alone, because I ain’t pulling them intentionally. Is the mere mentioning of a kid reason to disregard someone’s position? That’s even worse than disregarding something on the basis of it being a “fantastic what-if scenario” to use your charming phraseology.

Oh yeah, and you might want to lay off the all-caps and exclamation marks after accusing someone of going on like a rabid dog. The saliva is flying off your keyboard and get things sticky.

Look, if you want practical answers, go do some homework. You’re barging in on a discussion between me and someone else who made an assertion that has nothing to do with these questions. He balks at the idea of using taxes to fund healthcare because of an ethical preference. You apparently are struggling with some other concepts.

This thread can’t be all things to you.

The irony of this is beyond delicious.

Obama should totally use you to win the hearts and minds of America for this proposal. You do such a great job of it.

No offense, Sleeps, but I don’t think your contribution to the discussion is much more productive than ol’ rabid-dog-slobber there.

This is the definition of irony.

'Cause you seem to be suffering some confusion over what the term means.

Ouch, I think you know just how much this upsets me coming from you

Austria, France, Germany. Most European countries.

Statements like this make me wonder how some people ever make a principled decision. Were you initially in favor of a public option because of a nice thing that someone on the internet said?

I just really, really hate the idea of people making important decisions out of spite for some stranger who they thought was mean.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this in Finland. Everyone grumbles about the high taxes but it does make sure that medical patients don’t have to resort to begging their friends for money. Take my brother: he was born with a bilateral cleft lip and palate three months before our family moved to Texas. My father’s work in Texas had great insurance; however, reconstructive surgery would not have been covered. Not plastic surgery, not cosmetic minimization of his scars: actually constructing him an upper lip and a palate so he could eat, breathe and eventually speak semi-properly. My mother therefore stayed behind in Finland with my brother so his upper lip could be closed.

A basic cleft palate operation starts at around 5000 dollars. However, one operation is basically never enough, since in addition to closing the palate, they usually have to graft bone into the cleft in the upper jaw, rearrange and extract teeth that are growing into the roof of the patient’s mouth, detach and reattach muscles in the back of the throat to create more of a soft palate and aid in speech formation, etc. My brother has had seven operations so far, and is scheduled for another two. In addition to this, he regularly visits a speech therapist, an ear, nose and throat specialist, a specialized orthodontist and a psychologist. According to this site, the costs of treatment of a cleft lip and palate patient can accumulate up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Of this hundreds of thousands, my parents pay about 30€/hospital night, which puts the total cost of my brother’s 12 years of surgical, dental, psychological and phoniatric care at around 700€ so far. I am SO glad we all pay a bit more in taxes, because I would be pretty fucking sick of spaghetti by now.

Incidentally, public spending on health care in Finland 2006 was 13.6 billion euros, which comes to about 2,586 euros (US$ 4,031) per person.

Austria (my home country) : I never actually saw a bill there. You just walk into hospitals, doctor’s offices, pharmacies and get treated or get your medicaments. No idea how expensive the treatment really is, nobody pays (directly).

France (where I live for the last 10 years) : sometimes you need to pay directly and get reimbursed, sometimes you do not pay - when the doctor is connected electronically.

The point is… you pay your monthly health insurance fees which are, let’s say it honestly, affordable, and you are covered in case of an emergence. Which will happen to everbody at least once in a lifetime - spagethi dinners … WTF???

If if you are stubbor, and and you don’t belief in emergencies - When my son was born a year ago I saw a chart in the hospital indicating a “cost” of 3,000€ per day. Of course we didn’t pay anything, this was just pure information of the cost the hospital would charge to securité sociale.

My wife spend 2 weeks there due to some complications. No way we would have been able to spend 40,000€ = 60,000$. And I do not think that I need to beg for that money. Insurances are there for these things, they take care of it.

My father in law was Moroccan and he was in the French army for 20 years. Although he lived in Morocco between 1962 and 2004, he came to France for his cancer treatment in 2004 and France paid everything. He stayed in the hospital for 2 years, (23653000€ figure it out yourself), and you need to add lots of different forms of expensive therapy. He didn’t even have a French Nationality. His illness and subsequent death were hard enough, it is ridiculous to think that spagetti dinners are an acceptable form of funding.

Reminds me of those fuckwits who say they are going to order an extra juicy steak when someone mentions vegetarianism in a passionate way. It might have been slightly funny the first 1,000 times it was used, but it’s wearing ultra-thin now.

Oh, golly, absolutely. Always kills me to hurt your feelings, but had to be done, etc.

Never seen those in Spain, nor cases being publicized of people needing to go to some exotic location and not being able to get it covered (if you’re going to Houston because you think the doctors there will be better, good luck and it’s out of your pocket; it you’re going because the only doctors in the world who can treat your condition are there, you can get SS to pay for it). There are some NPOs which bring people into Spain to get treatment they can’t get back home, or which fly specialized doctors to those locations for a month or two per year. There are also some NPOs which will assist people with medical-related expenses not covered by SS (you can get SS to cover some of the expenses of people spending time with the patient, but not all, and in order to get coverage it’s got to be something like “one parent of a sick child,” not “the whole family”).

Oh, and there is no such thing as “unpaid sick leave,” which also helps the economy of families where one of the breadwinners happens to get sick. There are programs, currently under development, focusing on “helping the helper,” “off-hospital hospital” (for example my brother’s father in law was in “room Their Address” of the local hospital for an accumulated total of over 10 months: they had monitors which were directly connected to the hospital and twice-daily nurse visits, but in their house and with a much lower risk of hospital-borne infections; when tests were needed, the nurse took the samples), improving the conditions on their own leave for people who have to take care of a sick relative…

I got to this thread late, but perhaps we should just pit a good portion of facebook and be done with it, lol.

Seriously, the comments I see from otherwise educated people (even PhDs) on there is no better or worse than the general Youtube comment spam. Something about facebook makes people stupid.

The problem with YouTube isn’t the idiots making stupid or outrageous comments, it’s the people who put up the videos who don’t maintain their page(s). YouTube makes it very easy for the idiots to be shunned and ignored. First, you can set your video so that you have to approve all comments before they’re posted. Second, if you don’t want to do that, you can go to the Comments page and right there by the comment is a “Remove” link. Click it and poof! No more idiot comments. And you can block that user from leaving any comments on any of your videos.

People are either just too lazy or too ignorant to maintain their pages and clean up the comments section. It drives me nuts.

Only if you have stupid friends. I don’t.